the doors of parliament against their complaints and supplications. The country must be tranquillized before its condition can be improved; but that can be more effectually done by a humane and judicious firmness, than by an avenging severity. Our opinion of the sanguinary character of our Criminal Laws is well known; our aversion to the multiplicity of capital punishments which disgrace our civilization will never cease to be proclaimed, until the punishments which the law awards to offences, are made more consistent with the dictates of considerate justice, and the moral distinctions of guilt. The public have been told that the present Ministers contemplate a humane modification of the Criminal Laws:-such a statement has gone forth to the world, through the press, and it has not received any contradiction. Whether Government really intend to originate such a plan, we cannot take upon ourselves to affirm; but we can state, with confidence, that they are disposed to give any measure of the sort the most favourable consideration. Indeed, if the principles of politicians, when out of power, be any pledge of their conduct when in office, they stand pledged to such a measure, by their opposition to the Forgery Bill of Sir Robert PEEL, in the last session, when the eloquence of Lord BROUGHAM, Sir James MACKINTOSH, and other advocates of enlightened principles, gained one of the greatest moral victories that had ever been achieved in the House of Commons. It is true, Lord LYNDHURST led on the majority in the House of Lords, and recovered for legal barbarism the ground which it had lost. But when public opinion gets in advance of the legislature, it is impossible to roll it back by any triumph which obstinate prejudice, sophistry, or corrupt influence can obtain. It is not on the eve of a proposed amelioration of the Criminal Law we should expect that Government would think it either just or salutary to gratify those who delight in acts of vengeance, by a ruthless exhibition of sanguinary examples. The Earl of FARNHAM said, the other night, in the House of Lords, that the best way that Government could take to put down disturbances, was by correcting the grievances, and relieving the distresses that gave rise to them.' -That is certainly the only way to re-establish order on a firm foundation, and to produce permanent tranquillity. Any immediate quiet effected by the terror of the law alone, if not followed up by remedial measures, can only be of a delusive and temporary nature. Our Judges are upright and impartial in the administration of the laws; but they have been educated in a system which makes them too familiar with the infliction of deathand we know what a tyrannical power habit exercises over human nature. We call upon them and the Government to consider most attentively the mitigating circumstance, in all the cases of breaking machinery of which we have heardof a people driven by want to desperation, and shedding no blood! We entreat those who sit in judgment on them, not to teach them lessons of cruelty by examples of extermination. We entreat them, in the name of that holy, that compassionate religion, whose advent we are now about to celebrate, to administer justice in mercy!-Morning Herald, Friday, December 24, 1830. The consideration of the punishment of the Machine-breakers continued. "Where the axe falls, it shall assuredly smite." We regret to observe that the labours of the Special Commission appointed to try the rioters at Winchester, are not likely to have as bloodless a result as those of the tribunal that sat in judgment, about the same time, on the crimes of the authors of the treasonable massacres of Paris. The tumultuous assembling of large bodies of the people, to raise, by compulsory means, the rate of wages-the riot ous breaking of machines which supersede human labourand other acts of popular disturbance, are, no doubt, serious and grave offences, not to be allowed to go unpunished, even when they have their origin, as in the present case, in severe and unexampled distress, without incurring the risk of the subversion of all law and order; but still it must be admitted that those offences are far inferior in danger and enormity to that crime which is properly called high treason, and which is a deliberate attempt, not merely to get rid of some local grievance by a demonstration of force, but to overturn the Government and Constitution of the State, by sacrificing the life of the supreme Magistrate, or the liberties of the people. The ex-Ministers of France were convicted of high treason against the State, committed under circumstances the most revolting and atrocious that can be well conceived. They had all solemnly sworn to the observance of that Charter, which, from the moment of taking the oath, they conspired to destroy. They had all had experience of the calamities which despotism had brought upon their country, and the almost total ruin which lawless power had occasioned; and yet they prepared, by every means within their reach, to restore that arbitrary form of Government which produced, by its intolerable oppression, the revolution of 1789. They began their crime in perjury, and they ended it in massacre; and yet, in the midst of a triumphant and justly exasperated people, thousands of whom had lost their relatives and friends by the sabres and grape-shot which, under the orders of those remorseless conspirators, strewed the streets of Paris with carnage, their miserable lives were spared: -justice accepted of a secondary punishment-the grave into which their victims fell, was not opened to receive them -they were not hurried into the presence of their Creator with all the weight of unrepented blood upon their souls: the doom that withdraws them from the execrations of the world, gives them the opportunity of endeavouring to make their peace with Heaven before they appear at that tribunal where earthly JUDGES, as well as those who have trembled at their bar, shall one day receive judgment. The sentence which spared the lives of those criminals, was received with approbation in this country.—* Shall we, who approve of the sentence which spares the lives of the French ex-Ministers, convicted of the greatest crime known to civil society, send rioters to the scaffold, who have acted under delusion, ignorance, and distress, and who, however great their offences, have not, under the influence of revenge or excitement, sacrificed a single life? We see it stated that six men, who were the most active among the rioters in Hampshire, are ordered for execution. None of these, except one,* we believe, offered any serious personal violence. Why then take the lives of so many? The very circumstance which made their offences most dangerous, and most necessary to be speedily suppressed, constituted their palliation—the general excitement and the distress which made disturbance contagious. Most of the members of the present Government, when in Opposition, admitted our criminal code to be vindictive and inhuman, by its multiplicity of capital punishments. We did not therefore expect such severe examples would be made in the very commencement of their Administration. We did believe they would not allow the French nation to leave us behind in the race of humanity and civilization. We hoped they would put down disturbance without sacrificing life, and prove that it is the privilege of Statesmen of superior intelligence, to make moderation a more effective auxiliary in the restoration of order, than that destroying vengeance, in which men of weaker understanding place all their trust. We thought they were aware that the reign of terror is short, and passes away; but that judicious mercy, particularly in the case of crimes of sudden excitement, appeals to the reason, and subdues the heart.-Morning Herald, Monday, January 3, 1831. * The convict Cooke, who had aimed a blow at Mr. Bingham BARING. Nine Machine-breakers in two Counties left for execution— The fate of the six unfortunate men left for execution at Winchester,* and three at Reading,† under the Special SEVERITY OF SENTENCES IN HAMPSHIRE. (From the Hampshire Telegraph.) • WINCHESTER, JAN. 1.-The Special Assizes terminated on Thursday evening, far more severely for the prisoners than was ever • contemplated by themselves or the public. Six unfortunate men are ❝ to expiate their offences with their blood; numbers are to be banished, • some for ever, and some for terms of years; and the remainder of 'those convicted are doomed to various periods of imprisonment and • hard labour. A great number were discharged on their own recog• nizances, and others without being put on their trial. Many of them • were tried several times on different indictments for offences committed ' on the same day, in the same society, and under the same excitement. ‹ The public feeling is decidedly against the wholesale sacrifice of life • denounced in the cases above alluded to; and a petition is now in 'course of signature, praying the six men now under sentence of death, may be reprieved, and transported for life.—The whole of them ex• press the utmost contrition for their conduct; and the example would • surely be equally effective, as regards the only legitimate object of • all punishment, and far less revolting, if their sentences were com• muted to perpetual banishment, instead of offering them up a bloody ⚫ sacrifice to laws scarcely known, and ill understood, for offences com*mitted under circumstances of unheard-of excitement—in the majority 6 ' of cases, without deliberation, motive, or malice, and in total igno'rance of the dreadful consequences, immediate or remote, of the acts ⚫ committed. The petition will, no doubt, be numerously signed; and 'it is hoped His Majesty's servants will lend a favourable ear to such ⚫ an appeal from the sympathy and humanity of the public, for whom they officiate.'-[See note *, p. 93.] +On Thursday the death-warrant of the three unhappy convicts • was received at the gaol at Reading. The day appointed for the • execution is Tuesday next. The most intense anxiety to save the • lives of the unfortunate men has been shewn throughout the county. • Petitions from Henley, Newbury, &c. have been forwarded to the Secretary of State. Upwards of ten thousand inhabitants of Reading |