seded by the exaltados and swindlers; fraudulent bankers and adulterators of food will find themselves, for the first time, in the company of honest men, swept away in the general deluge. These people are either to be punished or not to be punished. If they have done nothing worthy of death or bonds, but only contracted a kind of moral measles which will give way to kind treatment and easy remedies, why put them in the close air of a prison at all? The virtue of a close sick-room is entirely exploded in the medical world, and only lingers in the opinions of superannuated monthly nurses. Why not put money in their purses, and pay their passages to some country where their antecedents are not known, and they will have a chance of living by honest means, which they have not here, even if they were to wish it? Why condemn them, if they do not wish to punish them, to the moral disease in perpetuity, inoculating others at the same time? Is it that they wish to keep them as interesting specimens, too valuable to the moral physiologist to be let go? If so, it is really time to interfere with the tastes of these pseudo-philanthropists, and to tell them that society has the same objection to their museums of abomination under its nose, as it has to tanyards and slaughter-houses near the public thoroughfares, or the putrefaction of the body of the great rivergod who dwells in the Thames. As Gulliver recoiled from the embrace of the philosophers of Laputa, so will society recoil from the contact of those humanitarians who are engaged in a task of reconstruction or regeneration, equally hopeless, and equally offensive to the public senses. But and if these persons deserve punishment condign-if there is such a thing, and I am old-fashioned enough to believe it, as justice, human and divine -if impunity in crime inevitably reacts to the deterioration of human society, and pagan Nemesis has a living existence even for those who have discarded the divine authority of the Old Testament, I do think that nearly all the punishments enacted by law for offences, at least as administered by our magistrates, are most silly and inadequate; powerless, both for prevention and cure,

and only calculated to reproduce the evil they profess to abate. A system which would be comparatively harmless in a country of sparse population like Norway or Canada, becomes multifariously pernicious in a bee-hive of human beings like that in which it is our destiny to breathe or try to breathe. It was a great principle with that famous schoolmaster Dr. Arnold, who was withal a most humane and charitable man, in his conduct of a public school, to get rid as soon as possible of all pupils who, from his knowledge of human nature, he saw to be doing more harm than good to their companions and themselves by remaining, even before they were convicted of any overt infraction of law. Not that such cases are necessarily irreclaimable, but that in such a crowded place, the worst chance of reformation is given them, and the evil they do to others is indefinitely multiplied. With private tutors, or under the eye of parents, they might do better. He judged very much from physiognomy and physiology, nor was he often wrong. The consequence of his judicious system of weeding was, that he sent out into the world, as the rule, a class of high-minded and virtuous students, though,in the innocence of their hearts, generally Whigs and something more, being led to believe that the world in general was as much to be trusted as themselves, and their friends, and their beloved master. What is the population of London at the present day? How much above two millions, which is about the whole population of Norway? The drainage of the vast metropolis is a difficult problem in these days, but how much more difficult the problem of keeping the great Babylon sweet with such a cesspool of moral miasma festering in its vitals? Even a simple alien act, giving the executive the power of dismissing them from the focus of centralization, would be better than the present system, as they would be easier to deal with when scattered abroad, and not living in a compact phalanx of opposition to all good government, shoulder to shoulder, as at present. It is perfectly frightful to think that the worst criminals are now often rescued from the officers of justice by

a mob of bystanders, which implies that every individual in it is either a contemptible coward, or sympathises to the full extent with the crime they are committing. I should think, in charity to human nature, the former supposition the more probable, the metropolitan population having been panic-stricken by the long-continued impunity of those who set the law at defiance. Some time ago one Italian stabbed another in Rupert Street, and no one dared, although many persons witnessed the attempt at murder, to assist the police in arresting the offender. This is nearly as bad as the state of things said to exist at Rome, where the witnesses of an assassination run away as fast as they can, because it is the rule to arrest the nearest person on suspicion. British freedom is no doubt a fine thing, but like other fine things it has its drawbacks. It is one thing to leave the press unfettered and suppress the press-gang, and another to leave a university of convicted malefactors chartered and privileged to educate the young, and grant degrees to the old, in the heart of our metropolis; a Stinkomalee of rascaldom acting quite as much under the sanction of Government as Lord Brougham's creation in Gower Street. This unquestionably diabolical university has more colleges than Oxford and Cambridge put together. It has its St. Giles' college, which answers to Christ Church or Trinity; its Bethnal Green college its Tooley Street college; its City of London college; its slow colleges and fast colleges; its aristocratic Belgravian college, and its ecclesiastical Westminster college, a truly close foundation; its suburban colleges, situated half-pleasantly in the country, like St. John's, and Worcester, and Wadham at Oxford. It has its professors, who are better paid than ours at Oxford-professors of burglary, professors of highway robbery, professors of the gentler art of picking pockets, professors of stealing and receiving stolen goods, many of them on a more liberal principle than that adopted by our old universities dissenters from the Church of England, and even of the Hebrew persuasion-and it has its realisation of the dreams of Mrs. Colonel Bloomer

in a strong staff of rights-of-women female professors, abominable shedevils who, having passed through and outlived every phase of infamy themselves, make it the last business of their lives to indoctrinate innocent freshwomen from the English counties, and if they cannot succeed in tempting them to moral suicide at home, do not scruple to use force and pack them off to Hamburg or Paris to be drugged and terrified into children of hell. Surely, if such an university must exist, it is strange that it is not thought advisable to put it under Government superintendence, and appoint regius professorships of Desmoterian History and Pastoral Demonology; Readerships in the "Mysteries of London," the "Newgate Calendar," and the "Memoirs of Harriet Wilson;" fellowships of felons, vacated like an Oxford fellowship by matrimony, but by no means by any of its imitations; chairs of Theoretical Toxicology and Clinical practice, combined with the whole art of child-murder. We cannot help wondering at the disinterestedness of a ministry, and that a Whig ministry, which overlooks such an abundantly fertile field of patronage, and so splendid an opportunity of providing outlying relatives and dependents at the expense of the nation. And what a fatal mistake it was to hang Paliner! He was just the man for the Chancellor of this liberal university of Alsatia, for that must be its most unchristian name. But to speak more seriously, if British freedom is not competent to put down such a state of things, and is for ever condemned to halt on one side, going about like the goddess Pœna of Horace, with a club-foot, would it be so very strong a measure to perform Tiefenbach's operation on British freedom, and cut the shrunken sinew, or to put it on horseback and give it free action for a limited period? The Romans used to appoint a dictator in times of emergency whenever there was a Gallicus tumultus (which we might translate a French émeute), or even for the purpose of driving a nail into some door, and yet Roman freedom emerged from the temporary eclipse as bright as ever, perhaps even clearer and brighter. Might we not appoint a dictator for

the purpose of knocking the nail on the head once for all, a strong responsible Hercules, who would turn the New River into the Augean stable of our social nuisances, and sweep them away once and for ever? Such men are to be found; at all events we might find a brook which would do the work of Hercules's river, even Rajah Brooke of Borneo, the man who destroyed by one blast, like that of the destroying angel, some thousands of pestilent pirates. Such a man would, I take it, make short work with the "characters known to the police." He might proceed either by secret fraud or open force. I should think he would prefer the latter. He might either, as Lord Shaftesbury did, call a public meeting of thieves, say in St. Martin's Hall, surround them with soldiers, and destroy them, as the Corcyræan democratical party in Thucydides did their political opponents; or he might lay all the heavy lighters in the Thames, which are so much in the way of its navigation, under an embargo, and have such a noyade at the river's mouth as would turn the Goodwin Sands into corn and pasture-land, superseding from thenceforth all necessity for lighthousesan immense saving to the nation, and rendering the destruction of the villains of one generation a blessing to posterity, and a source of permanent security to mariners of all nations! And he would surely make short work of the tumbling down of all those streets, alleys, and courts of the metropolis known to be inhabited only by two-legged, four-legged, and six-legged vermin, scorching their sites with fire, and sowing the contaminated ground with salt; and he would burn with fire the ginpalaces, or Persian Jin-temples

(what a glorious illumination they would make, far better than that we had for the Peace!)-and feed the flames of their burning with all the poisoned products concocted by our adulterators of food, till all are consumed, the usual consumers standing by and applauding their great deliverance; and he would break down all the altars of Mormonism, Socialism, and hideous Infidelity, and burn Holywell Street with fire, and scatter to the winds the ashes of all ungodly and immoral

publications, both letter-press and pictorial; and purify with the waters of lustration, so as to make them available for honest purposes, the Circumlocution offices, the Stock Exchange, the sanctimonious Banks, &c. &c.; in short, he would do all desirable good, and do away with all undesirable evil. And then, after his London season was over, during the continuance of which we would put the town in a state of siege, we would send him to star it in the provinces, and, to the tune of solemn music, perform the same offie of lustration by all the other great towns of the British empire. I fear that were such a proposition mooted in the Imperial Parliament, it would be pooh-pooh'd by the Ministry, and received with derisive cheers by the Opposition, and voted unconstitutional by all, the consideration of it being perpetually adjourned to this day six months; and yet it is difficult to see how it can be any use to entertain the question of what we shall do with our criminals, without some such preliminary expurgation and purification.

Just as all measures for the diminution of the burden of our taxation are frustrated by the incubus of the national debt, so must all measures for the disposition of our rascals be rendered abortive by the enormous stock of them in hand becoming more morally putrescent and offensive the longer they endure, and effectually stopping the way of all sanitary and salutary improvement. It would seem, indeed, somewhat desirable that all questions of the day, now that the Russians have given us a little breathing time, should be postponed to this, that our lay Legislature should turn away their attention from Committees of Supply, and our bench of Bishops from deciding on Liddell and Westerton, Ditcher and Denison cases, questions about more or less candles on the altar, boughs or flowers in the church, presence or absence of a cross, until this awful Frankensteinghost of our social condition is effectually exorcised and sent back to the place whence it came. But grant, for supposition's sake, that it be done, that we have thus had one thorough sweeping and cleaning, painting and whitewashing, so as to be able to keep