be used for the protection of game, I, for one, should be extremely glad to adopt such means, if they were found sufficient for that purpose; because I think it a great object that gentlemen should have a temptation to reside in the country, amongst their neighbours and tenantry, whose interests must be materially advanced by such a circumstance. The links of society are thereby better preserved, and the mutual advantage and dependence of the higher and lower classes of society, existing between each other, more beneficially maintained. We have seen, in a neighbouring country, the baneful consequences of the non-residence of the landed gentry; and in an ingenious work, lately published by a foreigner, we learn the fatal effects of a like system on the Continent. By preserving game, gentlemen are tempted to reside in the country; and considering that the diversion of the field is the only one of which they can partake on their estates, I am of opinion that, for the purpose I have stated, it is of essential importance that this species of property should be inviolably protected.

If this speech of Mr. Justice Best be correctly reported, it follows that a man may put his fellow-creatures to death for any infringement of his property-for picking the sloes and blackberries off his hedges-for breaking a few dead sticks out of them by night or by day-with resistance or without resistance-with warning or without warning;-a strange method this of keeping up the links of society, and maintaining the dependence of the lower upon the higher classes. It certainly is of importance that gentlemen should reside on their estates in the country; but not that gentlemen with such opinions as these should reside. The more they are absent from the country, the less strain will there be upon those links to which the learned Judge alludes the more firm that dependence upon which he places so just a value. In the case of Dean versus Clayton, Bart., the Court of Common Pleas were equally divided upon the lawfulness of killing a dog coursing a hare by means of a concealed dog-spear. We confess we cannot see the least difference between transfixing with a spear, or placing a spear so that it will transfix; and, therefore, if Vere versus Lord Cawdor and King is good law, the action could have been maintained in Dean versus Clayton; but the solemn consideration concerning the life of the pointer is highly creditable to all the judges. They none of them say that it is lawful to put a trespassing pointer to death under any circumstances, or that they themselves would be glad to do it; they only seem duly impressed with the recollection that they are deciding the fate of an animal faithfully ministerial to the pleasures of the upper classes of society! there is an awful desire to do their duty, and a dread of any rash and intemperate decision. Seriously speaking, we can hardly believe this report of Mr. Justice Best's speech to be correct; yet we take it from a book which guides the practice of nine-tenths of all the magistrates of England. Does a judge-a cool, calm man, in whose hands are the issues of life and death-from whom so many miserable trembling human beings await their destiny-does he tell us, and tell us in a court of justice, that he places such little value on the life of man, that he himself would plot the destruction of his fellow-creatures for the preservation of a few hares and partridges? "Nothing which falls from me" (says Mr. Justice Bailey) "shall have a tendency to encourage the practice.""I consider them" (says Mr. Justice Best) as lawfully applicable to the protection of every species of property; but even if they might not lawfully be used for the protection of game, I for one should be extremely glad to adopt them, if they were found sufficient for that purpose." Can any man doubt to which of these two magistrates he would rather entrust a decision on his life, his liberty, and his possessions? We should be very sorry to misrepresent Mr. Justice Best, and will give to his disavowal of such sentiments, if he do disavow them, all the publicity in our power; but we have cited his very words conscientiously and correctly, as they are given in the law report. We have no doubt he meant to do his duty; we blame not his motives, but his feelings and his reasoning.

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Let it be observed that in the whole of this case we have put every circumstance in favour of the murderer. We have supposed it to be in the nighttime; but a man may be shot in the day* by a spring gun. We have supposed the deceased to be a poacher; but he may be a very innocent man, who has missed his way-an unfortunate botanist, or a lover. We have supposed notice; but it is a very possible event that the dead man may have been utterly ignorant of the notice. This instrument, so highly approved of by Mr. Justice Best-this knitter together of the different orders of society-is levelled promiscuously against the guilty or the innocent, the ignorant and the informed. No man who sets such an infernal machine, believes that it can reason or discriminate; it is made to murder all alike, and it does murder all alike.

Blackstone says that the law of England, like that of every other wellregulated community, is tender of the public peace, and careful of the lives of the subjects; "that it will not suffer with impunity any crime to be prevented by death, unless the same, if committed, would also be punished by death. (Vol. iv. Commentaries, p. 182.) "The law sets so high a value upon the life of a man, that it always intends some misbehaviour in the person who takes it away, unless by the command, or express permission of the law."-" And as to the necessity which excuses a man who kills another se defendendo, Lord Bacon calls even that necessitas culpabilis." (Vol. iv. Commentaries, p. 187.) So far this luminary of the law. But the very amusements of the rich are, in the estimation of Mr. Justice Best, of so great importance, that the poor are to be exposed to sudden death who interfere with them. There are other persons of the same opinion with this magistrate respecting the pleasures of the rich. In the last session of Parliament a bill was passed entitled, "An Act for the summary Punishment, in certain Cases, of Persons wilfully or maliciously damaging, or committing Trespasses on public or private Property. Anno primo-(a bad specimen of what is to happen)-Georgii IV. Regis, cap. 56. In this act it is provided, that "if any person shall wilfully, or maliciously, commit any damage, injury, or spoil, upon any building, fence, hedge, gate, stile, guide-post, milestone, tree, wood, underwood, orchard, garden, nursery-ground, crops, vegetables, plants, land, or other matter or thing growing or being therein, or to or upon real or personal property of any nature or kind soever, he may be immediately seized by anybody, without a warrant, taken before a magistrate, and fined (according to the mischief he has done) to the extent of £5; or, in default of payment, may be committed to the gaol for three months." And at the end comes a clause, exempting from the operation of this act all mischief done in hunting, and by shooters who are qualified. This is surely the most impudent piece of legislation that ever crept into the statute-book; and coupled with Mr. Justice Best's declaration, constitutes the following affectionate relation between the different orders of society. Says the higher link to the lower, "If you meddle with my game, I will immediately murder you; if you commit the slightest injury upon my real or personal property, I will take you before a magistrate, and fine you five pounds. I am in Parliament, and you are not; and I have just brought in an act of Parliament for that purpose. But so important is it to you that my pleasures should not be interrupted that I have exempted myself and friends from the operation of this act; and we claim the right (without allowing you any such summary remedy) of riding over your fences, hedges, gates, stiles, guide-posts, milestones, woods, underwoods, orchards, gardens, nursery grounds, crops, vegetables, plants, lands, or other

Large damages have been given for wounds inflicted by spring guns set in a garden in the day-time where the party wounded had no notice.

matters or things growing or being thereupon-including your children and yourselves, if you do not get out of the way." Is there upon earth such a mockery of justice as an act of Parliament, pretending to protect property, sending a poor hedge-breaker to gaol, and specially exempting from its operation the accusing and the judging squire, who, at the tail of the hounds, have that morning, perhaps, ruined as much wheat and seeds as would purchase fuel a whole year for a whole village?

It cannot be urged, in extenuation of such a murder as we have described, that the artificer of death had no particular malice against the deceased; that his object was general, and his indignation levelled against offenders in the aggregate. Everybody knows that there is a malice by implication of law.

"In general, any formal design of doing mischief may be called malice; and therefore, not such killing only as proceeds from premeditated hatred and revenge against the person killed, but also, in many other cases, such as is accompanied with those circumstances that show the heart to be perversely wicked, is adjudged to be of malice prepense."-2 Haw. c. 31. 'For, where the law makes use of the term malice aforethought, as descriptive of the crime of murder, it is not to be understood in that narrow restrained sense in which the modern use of the word malice is apt to lead one, a principle of malevolence to particulars; for the law, by the term malice, malitia, in this instance, meaneth that the fact hath been attended with such circumstances as are the ordinary symptoms of a wicked heart regardless of social duty, and fatally bent upon mischief."—Fost. 256, 257.

Ferocity is the natural weapon of the common people. If gentlemen of education and property contend with them at this sort of warfare, they will probably be defeated in the end. If spring guns are generally set-if the common people are murdered by them, and the Legislature does not interfere, the posts of gamekeeper and lord of the manor will soon be posts of honour and danger. The greatest curse under heaven (witness Ireland) is a peasantry demoralised by the barbarity and injustice of their rulers.

It is expected by some persons that the severe operation of these engines will put an end to the trade of a poacher. This has always been predicated of every fresh operation of severity, that it was to put an end to poaching. But if this argument is good for one thing, it is good for another. Let the first pickpocket who is taken be hung alive by the ribs, and let him be a fortnight in wasting to death. Let us seize a little grammar boy, who is robbing orchards, tie his arms and legs, throw over him a delicate puffpaste, and bake him in a bunpan in an oven. If poaching can be extirpated by intensity of punishment, why not all other crimes? If racks and gibbets and tenterhooks are the best method of bringing back the golden age, why do we refrain from so easy a receipt for abolishing every species of wickedness? The best way of answering a bad argument is not to stop it, but to let it go on in its course till it leaps over the boundaries of common sense. There is a little book called Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments, which we strongly recommend to the attention of Mr. Justice Best. He who has not read it is neither fit to make laws, nor to administer them when made.

As to the idea of abolishing poaching altogether, we will believe that poaching is abolished when it is found impossible to buy game; or when they have risen so greatly in price, that none but people of fortune can buy them. But we are convinced this never can and never will happen. All the traps and guns in the world will never prevent the wealth of the merchant and manufacturer from commanding the game of the landed gentleman. You may, in the pursuit of this visionary purpose, render the common people savage, ferocious, and vindictive; you may disgrace your laws by enormous punishments, and the national character by these new secret assassinations; but you will never separate the wealthy glutton from his pheasant. The best way is, to take what you want, and to sell the rest fairly and openly. This is

the real spring gun and steel trap which will annihilate, not the unlawful trader, but the unlawful trade.

There is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death-machinations against human life under every green tree -traps and guns in every dusky dell and bosky bourn-the fera naturâ, the lords of manors eyeing their peasantry as so many butts and marks, and panting to hear the click of the trap and to see the flash of the gun. How any human being, educated in liberal knowledge and Christian feeling, can doom to certain destruction a poor wretch, tempted by the sight of animals that naturally appear to him to belong to one person as well as another, we are at a loss to conceive. We cannot imagine how he could live in the same village, and see the widow and orphans of the man whose blood he had shed for such a trifle. We consider a person who could do this to be deficient in the very elements of morals-to want that sacred regard to human life which is one of the corner stones of civil society. If he sacrifice the life of man for his mere pleasures, he would do so, if he dared, for the lowest and least of his passions. He may be defended, perhaps, by the abominable injustice of the Game Laws-though we think and hope he is not. But there rests upon his head, and there is marked in his account, the deep and indelible sin of blood-guiltiness.

PRISONS. (E. REVIEW, July, 1821.)

1. Thoughts on the Criminal Prisons of this Country, occasioned by the Bill now in the House of Commons, for Consolidating and Amending the Laws relating to Prisons: with some Remarks on the Practice of looking to the Task-master of the Prison rather than to the Chaplain for the Reformation of Offenders; and of purchasing the Work of those whom the Law has condemned to hard Labour as a Punishment, by allowing them to spend a Portion of their Earnings during their Imprisonment. By GEORGE HOLFORD, Esq., M.P. Rivington. 1821.

2. Gurney on Prisons. Constable and Co. 1819.

3. Report of Society for bettering the Condition of Prisons. Bensley. 1820.

THERE are, in every county in England, large public schools maintained at the expense of the county, for the encouragement of profligacy and vice, and for providing a proper succession of housebreakers, profligates, and thieves. They are schools, too, conducted without the smallest degree of partiality or favour; there being no man (however mean his birth, or obscure his situation) who may not easily procure admission to them. The moment any young person evinces the slightest propensity for these pursuits, he is provided with food, clothing, and lodging, and put to his studies under the most accomplished thieves and cut-throats the county can supply. There is not, to be sure, a formal arrangement of lectures, after the manner of our Universities; but the petty larcenous stripling, being left destitute of every species of employment, and locked up with accomplished villains as idle as himself, listens to their pleasant narrative of successful crimes, and pants for the hour of freedom, that he may begin the same bold and interesting career. This is a perfectly true picture of the prison establishments of many counties in England, and was so, till very lately, of almost all; and the effects so completely answered the design, that, in the year 1818, there were committed to the jails of the United Kingdom more than one hundred and seven thousand persons ! * a number supposed to be greater than that of all the commitments in the other kingdoms of Europe put together.

The bodily treatment of prisoners has been greatly improved since the

Report of Prison Society, xiv.

time of Howard. There is still, however, much to do; and the attention of good and humane people has been lately called to their state of moral discipline.

It is inconceivable to what a spirit of party this has given birth ;-all the fat and sleek people-the enjoyers-the mumpsimus, and "well as we are " people, are perfectly outrageous at being compelled to do their duty, and to sacrifice time and money to the lower orders of mankind. Their first resource was to deny all the facts which were brought forward for the purposes of amendment; and the Alderman's sarcasm of the Turkey carpet in jails, was bandied from one hard-hearted and fat-witted gentleman to another. But the advocates of prison-improvement are men in earnest-not playing at religion, but of deep feeling, and of indefatigable industry in charitable pursuits. Mr. Buxton went in company with men of the most irreproachable veracity; and found, in the heart of the metropolis, and in a prison of which the very Turkey carpet Alderman was an official visitor, scenes of horror, filth, and cruelty which would have disgraced even the interior of a slave-ship.

This dislike of innovation proceeds sometimes from the disgust excited by false humanity, canting hypocrisy, and silly enthusiasm. It proceeds also from a stupid and indiscriminate horror of change, whether of evil for good, or good for evil. There is also much party spirit in these matters. A good deal of these humane projects and institutions originate from Dissenters. The plunderers of the public, the jobbers, and those who sell themselves to some great man, who sells himself to a greater, all scent, from afar, the danger of political change,-are sensible that the correction of one abuse may lead to that of another-feel uneasy at any visible operation of public spirit and justice-hate and tremble at a man who exposes and rectifies abuses from a sense of duty-and think, if such things are suffered to be, that their candle-ends and cheese-parings are no longer safe. And these sagacious persons, it must be said for them, are not very wrong in this feeling. Providence, which has denied to them all that is great and good, has given them a fine tact for the preservation of their plunder. Their real enemy is the spirit of inquiry-the dislike of wrong-the love of right -and the courage and diligence which are the concomitants of these virtues. When once this spirit is up, it may be as well directed to one abuse as another. To say you must not torture a prisoner with bad air and bad food, and to say you must not tax me without my consent, or that of my representative, are both emanations of the same principle, occurring to the same sort of understanding, congenial to the same disposition, published, protected, and enforced by the same qualities. This it is that really excites the horror against Mrs. Fry, Mr. Gurney, Mr. Bennet, and Mr. Buxton. Alarmists such as we have described have no particular wish that prisons should be dirty, jailers cruel, or prisoners wretched; they care little about such matters either way; but all their malice and meanness is called up into action when they see secrets brought to light, and abuses giving way before the diffusion of intelligence, and the aroused feelings of justice and compassion. As for us, we have neither love of change, nor fear of it; but love of what is just and wise, as far as we are able to find it out. In this spirit we shall offer a few observations upon Prisons, and upon the Publications before us.

The new law should keep up the distinction between Jails and Houses of Correction. One of each should exist in every county, either at a distance from each other, or in such a state of juxtaposition that they might be under the same governor. To the jail should be committed all persons accused of capital offences, whose trials would come on at the Assizes;-to the house of correction, all offenders whose cases would be cognizable at the Quarter