evils of this are so generally perceived, that it is very common, partly for this reason, and partly from a feeling that allowance should be made for the transgressions of children, for magistrates to dismiss them with impunity in consideration of their youth. But I cannot conceive a more pernicious practice than this of holding out to children the encouragement of impunity. If there is no proper place or mode provided for the punishment of young offenders, that is a reason for earnestly calling on the legislature to lose no time in providing one; not for leaving them unpunished,

"If, indeed, the infliction of suffering on the guilty were in itself a desirable object, we might console ourselves with the thought that the young culprit would be pretty sure not to escape ultimately. The fisherman who throws back the small fish into the water, in expectation that when they are grown large he shall catch them again, has seldom better ground for being confident of this, than we have for expecting that he who in childhood has been encouraged, by the prospect of impunity, to commence a career of crime, will persevere in it, as he grows up, will have formed early habits, too strong to be subsequently eradicated by the denunciation of punishment against the man, and will probably end his days on the gallows, or in the hulks. But if our object be, as that of every penal-legislator ought to be, the prevention of crime, no opportunity should be lost of checking its first beginnings. I should say that the denunciation of punishment to young, and, consequently, as yet less hardened offenders, is even the more important, as the more likely to be effectual. If you had punished instead of applauding me,' said the man in the well-known tale, to his mother, when I first pilfered from my school-fellows, you would not now have to witness my disgraceful death.'

"And it should be remembered, that it is not to the children alone, but also to those proficients in crime who act as their tutors and employers, that this procedure offers encouragement. The youthful depredator is generally the tool of a more experienced offender; who so contrives matters that, in case of detection, nothing shall be brought home to himself, and that thus both shall escape,-the one on account of his youth, the other through his caution in acting through the instrumentality of his young associate.

"But even independently of this consideration, I should still say, that to repress, or nip in the bud, evil habits, is so incomparably a more hopeful task than to attempt eradicating or repressing them when fully formed, that, even for the sake of the juvenile offenders themselves, impunity ought never to be held out to them.

“On a similar principle (if I may be allowed what cannot, I trust, be thought an impertinent digression), I should deprecate the common practice of passing over 'first offences.' That a scale of punishment, indeed, rising in severity on each repetition of an offence, should (not at the discretion of the magistrates, but by the laws) be provided, is reasonable and desirable; but that absolute impunity, or such a mitigation of punishment as nearly amounts to this, should be held out to 'first offences,' tends, I am convinced, very greatly to increase the

number of second and third offences, and the amount of punishments we are ultimately obliged to inflict. In fact, next to the abolition of all penal law, I can hardly conceive any system better calculated to train boys and men gradually to crime. Every one, it should be remembered, hopes, when he violates the laws, to escape conviction; if, in addition to this, we back the temptations to crime by a prospect of impunity on the first conviction, we have every reason to expect that, by the time this first conviction has taken place, he will have become too much hardened in iniquity to be subsequently affected by the fear of punishment, except in using all the artifice and caution his experience will have taught him, in contriving to escape detection. For this, also, should be kept in mind; that the plea of a 'first offence' is generally urged and admitted without any ground. It is urged on the occasion of a first conviction, which, we may be assured, by no means implies a first offence. The mischief would be immensely diminished, if the plea were then only admitted when the culprit was able to prove a negative; and to establish satisfactorily that he really never had offended before. But, even in that case, I should appeal to the proverb, C'est le premier pas qui coute." A man is much more easily deterred by fear of punishment, or by any other motive, from the first offence, than from any subsequent one: and, next to this, his best chance is, to have the association established in his mind between crime and suffering, by his having been so fortunate as to have been convicted and punished for his very first transgression."

No difference of opinion can exist respecting the truth of these sentiments. But perhaps they do not completely solve the problem, how to treat a juvenile offender. The practical question is not between youth and age, but between habitual crime and a first fault; and in the present state of laws, gaols, and public opinion, a prosecutor, if not a magistrate, may be fully justified in forgiving a young thief rather than in sending him to prison. When a criminal lives by thieving, or belongs to a gang of depredators, the archbishop's reasoning is strictly applicable; but we suspect that more harm is done by proclaiming a man a thief, taking away his character, and leaving him with the least possible prospect of recovering his credit, than by passing over a first offence. If punishments existed which were dreaded, and were not corrupting, the case would be different. We were rather surprised to meet with the following observations upon criminal lunatics.

"Obvious as these principles are, they are frequently overlooked, not only in such cases as I have already alluded to, but also in those which relate to persons suspected of insanity. Strangely-confused notions seem often to occupy the mind both of judges who give directions, and of juries who endeavour to act on them, as to the question, how far a person labouring under any degree of derangement is a proper subject of punishment. I have known judges enter into most perplexed and unintelligible metaphysical disquisitions, on the question

how far such and such a person was capable or not of distinguishing right from wrong,' or was in a sound state of mind' at the time of his doing a certain act, &c. And the decisions of juries accordingly have been, in such cases, as inconsistent with each other, as might have been expected, considering that they were not formed on any clear and intelligible principle. No man can be, properly speaking, in a sound state of mind when he commits a crime. He whose passions so prevail over his reason as to induce him to commit murder, for instance; or who coolly and deliberately commits it, fully aware of his own wickedness in so doing; or again who has persuaded himself that it is not a wicked but a meritorious action,-like the persecutors of the first Christians, who thought that whosoever killed them, did God service;' -all these persons are, in some sense, in a disordered state of mind, whether that disorder proceed from any bodily disease or not. But the principle on which we are to proceed in awarding punishment, is very simple, if we do but steadily keep in mind the end of human punishment, prevention. If a man intends to do what he does, and not otherwise, he is a proper subject for punishment; because a person so circumstanced may be deterred (as it is well known persons confessedly insane often are) by the fear of punishment. If it is clear that he did not intend the act, whether the absence of intention be referable to insanity, or to any other cause, his punishment would answer no good purpose. If a man, for instance, who raises a fire, can be proved to have laboured under such a kind of insanity as not to know that fire would consume, he is properly exempted from punishment, on the very same ground that another would be who should throw a spark on gunpowder, which he believed to be dust; because no punishment denounced against incendiaries could operate on persons so circumstanced, viz. who have no design of the kind. But if a man designs to burn a house, or to do any other act, we have nothing to do with the causes which led to his entertaining such a design. We know on the one hand, that no one can be, strictly speaking, in a sound state of mind, who designs any crime; and we know, on the other hand, that many, who have been impelled to such designs by the strongest and most evidently morbid aberrations of intellect, have yet shown, by the precautions they have taken for accomplishing their purpose undetected, that they were fully aware of the particular act they were engaged in, and consequently that they, and others similarly circumstanced, might be checked by the apprehension of punishment.

"In fact, although no one considers the brute animals as móral agents, every one is well aware that it is possible to operate on them through the fear of punishment. It is not reckoned a useless cruelty, or an absurdity, to attempt to teach a dog, by beating, to abstain from worrying sheep. Any one, therefore, who, well knowing that irrational animals can be trained, by fear of punishment, to check their impulses, yet would proclaim impunity to any man who may be, partially or wholly, reduced to the state of an irrational animal-such a one plainly shows that he is allowing his views to be influenced by irrelevant considerations."

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This passage smacks somewhat of those perplexed and unintelligible metaphysical disquisitions which the archbishop has occasionally heard from the judges of the land. No end can be answered by confounding two things so clearly distinguishable as the unsoundness of mind which arises from vice, and the unsoundness of mind which arises from disease. And the remark, that if a man intends to do what he does, and not otherwise, he is a proper subject of punishment," is not applicable to lunatics. Persons labouring under a bodily disease, which destroys or perverts their reason, are not punishable for crimes otherwise than by confinement. Because although they may have used their wits, such as they are, in planning, and even in concealing a crime, no man can say that they have not been induced to commit the crime by madness. The defence is sometimes abused, and is unavoidably liable to abuse. But that arises from the imperfection of all human tribunals. Wherever there is reason to think that a person slightly or doubtfully insane, has committed a crime, reckoning upon acquittal on the score of insanity, the law will take its course, Yet to hang a bonâ fide madman, would be not less brutal than absurd. He may have "intended" to commit a murder,—but how does it follow that therefore he may be deterred by fear of punishment? We admit that some madmen, on some occasions, may be influenced by fear of punishment, and therefore coercion and threats are justifiable and proper modes of treatment in such cases. But if these are found insufficient, as is the case at times with almost all lunatics, the practise is not to proceed to other and to more severe punishments, but to have recourse to prevention, A dangerous lunatic is handcuffed or otherwise prevented from doing mischief. Would the archbishop advise that he should be set at liberty, and hanged for the first murder he may commit, provided he evidently intended it? If not, why hang the lunatic whose disposition to murder manifested itself for the first time before he was placed under restraint? A madman, under delusion, will intend and contrive and execute; and yet because he is mad, will be inaccessible to all the reasons which should deter him from what he is about. Suicide, the crime most frequently committed by the insane, arises chiefly from this. They feel a desire to quit life-and they cannot be deterred from the gratification of it, by the motives which influence men in their senses.

In the same way a madman, who is angry with another person instead of with himself, rushes to the gratification of his passion, without that power of self-restraint, which other murderers possess, whether they use it or not. The archbishop, therefore, when he asserts, that whosoever intends a thing may be deterred by fear of punishment, must limit his proposition to the sane.

The very essence of insanity consists in not being influenced by the same motives, or convinced by the same arguments as persons of sound mind. The existence of insanity in any particular case is a question of fact; and if it appear to a judge or jury that a man's mind is unsound, that is to say, that owing to bodily disease he is not able to distinguish between right and wrong, or not able to adhere to the one and reject the other, or that he does not possess the power over his passions usually possessed by his fellow-creatures, then the law which spares his life is a wise and righteous provision.

The suggestions of his Grace, respecting the employment of convicts and the appointment of a commission for penitentiary purposes, are worthy of special attention :

In respect of the kind of labour in which it may be thought advisable that convicts should be employed, I would suggest, that, though it is in itself very desirable that it should be profitable enough to go some considerable way in defraying the expense of their maintenance, this is by no means a point of so much importance as many others, to which accordingly we should be always ready to sacrifice it. The best conducted of the American penitentiaries are said to defray fully all their own expenses, from the proceeds of the prisoners' labour. This, I conceive, cannot be expected in any country which does not combine, to such an extraordinary degree as America, the advantages of a very high value of labour and cheapness of provisions. But even if this, or something nearly approaching to it, could be attained, I should still say that it is an object of far less consequence than the moral improvement of the offenders, or, still more, the prevention of crime by the apprehension of punishment. That a penalty should be formidable is, as I have said, decidedly the first point to be looked to: that it should be corrective is another point of great, though far inferior, consequence: that it should be economical, is (though by no means insignificant) a matter of only a third-rate importance.

"There are several different descriptions of labour which have each some circumstances to recommend them. And it would be, besides, absolutely necessary to resort to more than one; inasmuch as the kind of labour that might be found most suitable for able-bodied adult males, would not be adapted to infirm persons, women, and children. I should be disposed to give a preference, other points being equal, to such kinds of labour as the convict might resort to after his discharge, as a means of maintenance; and, with this view, to such as may be carried on without the aid of much machinery. In this respect, the labour of the tread-mill is less eligible than many others. It has, however, many great advantages to counterbalance that defect. In many instances, recourse might be had to some of the less artificial and more laborious operations of husbandry, such as trenching, stone-picking, &c. This would require a larger number of such overseers as could be relied on for vigilance and firmness, to prevent the escape of convicts; but I think there are sufficient advantages on the other side, to make this plan well deserving of a