tingent to punishment. If the law, for its own good reasons, separate man and wife for seven years, is it not bound to go farther, and pronounce a legal divorce? We cannot here enlarge on the topic: but it is certain that Protestant England will have to reconsider fundamentally her laws of marriage, as Protestant Germany and North America have done. Up to a recent date, we have blindly followed the "Canon Law" of Rome, and justify it by the slavish and unintelligent interpretation of a single text.

It is vain to talk of the evil of "degrading" a criminal by flogging him, if we degrade him by penal labour, subjecting him to a very ignominious and tedious slavery. It is vain to say that whipping demoralizes, until we have a system of effective and severe punishment, clearly free from this danger. When a man has committed an act, which cannot without fatal result be left in impunity, the first grave question is, whether the act is such as to make us hopeless of his recovering the normal condition of a trusted freeman in society. If we are hopeless of this, then, in a prima facie aspect, the natural inference is, that the sooner he is put out of this world the better for him and for us and for those nearest to him. There may be reasons on the other side ; but this, we say, is the natural and primâ facie inference. If, on the other hand, his offence, however grave, does not suggest imminent danger of its repetition, nor any inveteracy of crime, a short and sharp chastisement may suffice, and is alone suitable. Nothing can be short and sharp but inflictions on the skin; and nothing is better suited to repress crimes of insolence or animal passion. Lastly, when the causes of crime are inveterate, and the restoration of the criminal, though not hopeless, requires the lapse of years and long patient training, which must not be made other than irksome and highly disagreeable, his entire status is changed, he is totally disabled from fulfilling any of his relative duties, and he forfeits all the rights over persons which he holds only by virtue of those duties. A felon destined to long penal servitude cannot fulfil a father's duties, and no one is so weak as to imagine that his commands concerning his children deserve respect. If strangers maintain his children for seven years, he cannot with any reason expect at the end of the period to stand towards the children in the same relation as if all that time he had been their supporter and friend. And why is not the same thing to be said of his relation to a wife? Legislation must deliberately study this problem, and not wink at it. Let honour be warmly paid to the philanthropy which is studying the refor

mation of criminals by tedious and elaborate supervision; but let us not shut our eyes to the terrible revelation made concerning society, if criminals by the thousands have to be held in servitude for long years, and artificially nursed into some tolerable honesty. To mend a broken jar is far easier than to re-establish damaged morality. With enormous effort, expense, and patient management, one may recover a few fallen women and (say) a respectable fraction of male felons: but incurables will remain, and will accumulate upon us in new, as in old, systems. Evidently the great work of philanthropy is to prevent crime; and if it be so busied with schemes of reformation as to forget and obscure this primary certainty, it may even do pure harm. So far from desiring to extend to the utmost the limits of this artificial reformatory scheme, surely the effort of law ought to be to restrict it to exceptional cases. If possible, the open field of life should afford means of self recovery. If that cannot be, then the desperate nature of the disease makes prevention of so paramount importance, that it is not too much to demand large changes in the relations of society,-such changes as might be called revolutionary or despotic when not strictly necessary,-if without them prevention cannot be attained. The principle has been illustrated in many ways. What argument has made public lotteries, gambling tables, and systems of public-house betting on races, illegal? By far the most powerful of arguments was, that they offer too strong a temptation to clerks and other poor persons to gamble with the money of their employers. Of the same nature is the argument by which for many hundred years the traffic in intoxicating liquors has been kept under jealous restrictions; because a free trade tempts weak persons to an indulgence that leads to crime. By the very same argument it is now powerfully urged that the existing number of licensed houses is nothing short of a manufactory of crime; since the judges agree that three-quarters of the violent crime comes directly from the drinkshops. If we insist on overlooking the duty of prevention, our success in reformation will be like that of a man, who, when his boat is leaky, neglects to plug the hole, but uses great activity to bale away the water which rushes in.

A punishment which either removes a criminal from the world, or quickly restores him to the world after a sharp momentary suffering, may be called barbaric in its simplicity; yet simple it is: it is suited to barbaric offences, and avoids certain chronic evils. But here it is wonderful to meet the objection (very current as

against capital punishment), that it is essentially wrong, because irreversible. It is said: "We cannot bring a dead man to life; hence we must put no criminal to death, lest through error we have sentenced the innocent." No week passes without this argument being pressed on the public: and those who use it appear unconscious that it is an objection against all ignominious punishment whatsoever. It is a misfortune for a respectable man to be accused in court of indecent conduct to a female in a railway carriage; a still graver misfortune to be unjustly believed guilty is therefore no man to be sentenced? If after the lapse of months innocence is established, this cannot undo the mental distress which has meanwhile been endured from an unjust verdict. What if a man have been severely flogged for outrages against a woman, of which he is afterwards proved to have been innocent? Can the later discovery undo the physical pain and galling sense of degradation? Of course it will be replied: "conscious innocence must sustain him in the trial as it best

may: "-which is true alike in every case. In recent legal history we have had some marvellous instances of unjust sentence. The most signal is that of Mr Barber, a solicitor, who endured an unjust penal servitude for years, with total loss of property; and could at last only obtain pardon from the crown, without any restitution, and without even recovering his right of practice as an attorney. If these cruel and unjust aggravations of iniquity had been removed, still the mistake was at the least a very terrible one. When it is argued, that in delicate cases of balanced evidence juries are unwilling to sentence a man to death, because they have misgivings as to the certainty of his guilt, and hence that criminals now meet impunity; the reasoner must intend to say, that juries will become comparatively unscrupulous, and will convict without decisive grounds, if the death punishment be exchanged into long penal servitude or into a series of fierce whippings. Were this true (which may be doubted), it would be no gain to justice or morality. Whatever the punishment, the verdict needs to be in all cases equally scrupulous and conscientious: it is, in fact, seldom reversible. On occasion of Müller's recent trial for the murder of Mr Briggs, evidence was scraped up of erroneous verdicts where the punishment was short of death, as a decisive argument against death-punishment; whereas the facts, if they prove anything, prove the very opposite ;-since, first, they suggest that juries are careless when punishments are smaller; or secondly, they

show that human error is sometimes unavoidable, and that its contingency in extreme cases is no reason for shrinking from doing our best. On the other hand, we believe that the execution of an innocent man by the mistake of a jury, is of all errors, out and out, by far the rarest.

The general conclusions to which these considerations point, are: 1. That the word "murder" is now applied to crimes essentially diverse; just as when "manslaughter" was confounded with murder. It may well be considered whether the deathpenalty is not still inflicted too widely; although forgery, horsestealing, and swan-stealing are no longer visited with it. 2. That corporal chastisement for many crimes of violence, or crimes of passion or recklessness which easily entail a calamity, is a natural and healthy remedy. Dastardly offences against the weak and the weaker sex eminently call for this punishment; and in such offences may be included the seduction of a woman. We drop the remark here for the meditation of others, barely adding that rich and respectable parents would look with very different eyes on such an offence in a son, if it were visited with the ignominy of public stripes, however limited in number. The placing of such a law on the statute book would purify public opinion and deter from the offence. 3. That if capital punishment for the worst class of murders is to be reasoned down, it must be shown, first, that the punishment is not dreaded and has no tendency to deter; secondly, that some other punishment will deter; and thirdly, that there is some feasible mode of reformation by which such criminals can be restored to free citizenship and moral life in society. A state of hopeless servitude is a detestable demoralization. 4. That although efforts for the reformation of criminals are by all means praiseworthy, yet they are vastly less important than prevention; and cannot be carried out with full energy, except in proportion as hope is given that we are not engaged in the proverbial toil of mopping up the ocean. 5. That in order to prevent crime, the institutions which generate crime must be remodelled; the institutions which undertake to instruct the nation in religion and morality be popularized, so as to bring to its minimum the chasm between the National Church and the people; lastly, while the haste to get rich tempts so many to crime, let every facility be opened to the industrious to improve their external position by ways of honesty. To that which we have named last, our foremost statesmen are thoroughly alive : would that we could say the same concerning the other topics of prevention!

ON THE NATIONAL CHURCH.

From "Fraser's Magazine," May 1863.

THE great religious Reformation of the sixteenth century was at once scientific, spiritual, and political; hence it was carried forward by minds widely different, and on different grounds. The purely religious minds, ardent for truth, engage our warmest interest; yet, as we know they prematurely identified truth with their own perceptions, and had not learned to check their private errors by a due estimate of the equal powers of other minds, we cannot regret that they were balanced and often restrained by those who thought less of truth than of policy. Invidious as this phrase sounds, it has its honourable interpretation. The better class of those who approached Church reformation from its political side, seldom trusted to their own spiritual insight, or desired to impose their own views; but they regarded the Church as a common possession, a great organ of national unity and national education; and they could not endure that any forward, keen-witted man or men, whatever their real spiritual discernment, should hurry the Church faster than the myriad individuals of the nation could follow. Hence their question was not so much, or so directly, what is true? as, what is the great mass of the more intelligent ready to accept as true? and, what is the maximum of truth which can be admitted into the new regimen, without disgusting too many, and running a risk of dangerous reaction?

If, as the sect of Independents first alleged, the very idea of a National Church is unchristian and essentially unjustifiable, nothing remains but quickly to obey the Anti-State Church Association, and extinguish the existing hierarchy. Our readers will probably expect, and even claim, that we shall give no weight to such a doctrine. We write strictly from what we conceive to have been the Anglican theory, as distinguished from that of other Protestant churches. Whether Anglicans are right or wrong, their distinctive peculiarity was this,-that nationalism was in any case to be preserved, as something absolute; that truth