laws can never be thoroughly executed, unless we can always have, to use the words of Lord BYRON, twelve butchers for a Jury, and a JEFFRIES for a Judge.'*-Morn. Herald, Saturday, September 17, 1831. Attempt to legalize again the barbarous practice of setting When Viscount MELBOURNE stated, in the House of Lords, that Government were devising means for the more effectual protection of agricultural produce, and other farming property, from the acts of secret incendiaries, we supposed that Government were, at length, about to try what effect the improvement of the wretched condition of the labouring classes would have in restoring to property of this description, that security which was not broken down until the actual cultivators of the soil were reduced from a state of comfort and comparative independence, to degrading destitution. The causes which destroyed the moral pride and self-respect of an honest and manly peasantry, rendered the property of the owners and occupiers of the soil insecure; for its true protection was gone, when abject distress banished the comforts and decencies of life from the poor man's cottage, and drove the rural virtues from the land. There is no moral truth more certain than that good Government never demoralized an honest people, nor drove a well-ordered population into acts of madness and despair. And where does there exist a country which, until of late years, possessed a better-ordered, a more virtuous, decent, * These words are extracted from an admirable speech delivered by Lord BYRON, in the House of Peers, on the 27th of February, 1812, in opposing the Nottingham Frame Bill. It is creditable to the memory of a young nobleman so distinguished for his genius, that the first effort of his parliamentary eloquence was to resist a motion for adding a new capital statute to our sanguinary code. and manly peasantry than England did? What a deplorable change has taken place!-and what a deplorable series of errors and vices in Government have led to it! The riots and burnings of last year were the acts of a population who had lost all affection for their superiors, though they did not shed their blood; and who had lost all confidence in their rulers, though they entered into no plan of political insurrection. Was it because their labours were adequately paid, that they lost their affection for their employers? Was it because their petitions of distress were listened to, and means taken by a paternal Government to alleviate it, that they lost all confidence in their rulers? The parish-books will furnish an answer to the one question, and the records of a deceased parliament the other. But, instead of attempting to remove the causes of the crimes against property, which have of late prevailed among the peasantry of England, Lord MELBOURNE Contents himself with trying experiments of legislative quackery upon their effects. England has been already afflicted with too many of those statesmen who have no idea of preventing any crime which happens to be prevalent, but by adding new terrors to vindictive law, or by reinforcing with new enactments of blood a Criminal Code already disgustingly profuse of sanguinary punishments. It never occurred to his Lordship that, if Government think it too difficult and laborious a task to set about bettering the condition of the peasantry, there was one mode of rendering the law, which punishes crimes against property, more effective than it is at present, and that is, by rendering it less barbarous, so that the common feelings of mankind would be less shocked by seeing it carried into effect; and there would not be among a civilized and Christian community the repugnance which now exists to be accessory to its enforcement, and which so often prevents the injured party from prosecuting, makes witnesses reluctant to give evidence, and renders Juries averse to convict. At present the highest punishment that man can inflict on man is the sentence of our law for burning wilfully houses or other property. From the castellated mansion to the heap of straw in a lonely field, no distinction is made; and outrages differing widely from each other, both in moral guilt and social danger, are visited with one exterminating doom. Yet so ineffectual has the merciless law been found to be, that the crime of arson, or wilful burning, has increased under it to a degree which, we admit, has become alarming to society. So much for the efficacy of exterminating law! So much for the results of that sort of penal legislation, which sets up in the temple of august and godlike Justice, the grim idol of Revenge; and, satisfied with performing the rites of blood which it demands, cares nothing for the moral prevention of crime ! Lord MELBOURNE, not being able to raise the penalty for arson, committed under any aggravations, higher than it is at present, proposes to allow magistrates to have a power to grant licences to set spring-guns about premises where there are stacks of corn, and other agricultural produce, which it is possible to destroy by fire. The spring-gun is a barbarous invention, which only a few years ago had been put down by the force of public opinion. The practice of secreting upon premises this and other deadly inventions, had been productive of more injury to innocent persons than to guilty ones; and even the individuals that set them, sometimes perished by their own contrivances. We gave our assistance in procuring the abolition of a mode of preventing crime, clumsy and inhuman enough to be a disgrace to New Zealand; and can we in silence see a Bill brought into parliament to revive what is nothing more nor less than the practice of assassination by machinery? We have full as great an abhorrence of the crime of arson as Lord MELBOURNE has; but it is not by endangering the lives of the innocent, and covering the land with engines which resemble our Criminal Laws in being snares for human life, that we would strike at the offences of the guilty.—Morning Herald, Monday, September 26, 1831. Lord MELBOURNE's Spring-Gun Bill opposed by The caustic observations which Sir Robert PEEL indulged in the other evening on that splendid specimen of penal legislation, the Spring-Gun Bill, were not too severe for the subject that called them forth. If any thing could make Ministers in general, and Lord MELBOURNE in particular, ashamed of adding to a Statute-book, that breathes in all its pages the spirit of barbarism, a new law founded on a principle equally absurd and inhuman, it would be the taunting remarks with which it supplied Sir Robert PEEL, at the expence of the consistency of the Whig Statesmen, who, when out of office, had so long professed a most virtuous and uncompromising zeal in the cause of rational and enlightened Criminal Jurisprudence. It is melancholy to think that the possession of power should have such a fatal influence upon the understandings of men, that the politicians, who had made it a point of duty, as it were, to assail the legislation of Sir Robert PEEL, should have furnished the legislator, whose capacity they impugned, and whose reputation they attacked, with the best apology for all that was objectionable in his works, by surpassing, in their first effort of penal legislation, his least rational examples. It was, if we mistake not, upon principle, that the Whigs a few years ago advocated the abolition of spring-guns, as a barbarous and atrocious invention, unfit to have the sanction of law in any age, or in any country; and yet the Whigs have not been a year in office, when we find the national character is again to be disgraced, and the name of preventive justice desecrated, by a revival of this most treacherous and cowardly contrivance to shed the blood of man, by a process of assassination which cannot make any distinction between the innocent and the guilty. Well might Sir Robert PEEL say that— 'When the present Government was formed, he certainly expected that some very enlightened system of jurisprudence would 'have been adopted; but what was his astonishment to find that 'the only measure which Ministers had proposed, relative to the 'Criminal Laws, was a revival of the law which allowed the setting of spring-guns! It was cruel that the monument which ' had been erected to the Honourable Member for Stamford, in 'honour of his exertions for the abolition of spring-guns, should 'thus be undermined by his own friends.' Never was there a bitter sneer more richly deserved. If Lord MELBOURNE do not feel it, he must, indeed, be gifted with a moral constitution invulnerable to the force of cutting reproof. We have said that this assassination by machinery is equally absurd and inhuman. It is absurd, notwithstanding the solemn dictum of the Courier on that subject, as a protection to property against fire; for, without taking into account what a Morning Contemporary has observed, as to the discharge of a spring-gun itself being a probable cause of setting the stack on fire which it was set to guard, we would remind our readers that the burnings in general, which took place last year in farmer's stack-yards, occurred under circumstances which induced the belief of something having been projected from a distance into the stacks and other agricultural property so consumed, which made it unnecessary for the guilty party to enter the premises, in order to effect the work of destruction. But under all circumstances, and whether the incendiaries find it necessary to enter the premises, or not, we contend that the diabolical contrivance of the spring-gun is more likely to destroy the lives of the innocent than the guilty. The man who has guilty intentions, will be wary and circumspect; where the man who meditates no harm, |