peated in several of the newspapers, when we say, that it was the Council's special duty to have examined the weapon. If such had been the course adopted, surely Sir James Graham's official account of the matter, which he communicated to the daily press, would not have been-"That the Council had most fully investigated all the circumstances of the case, and that the pistol was loaded only with a small portion of coarse powder and paper wadding." Here, there is not a syllable about the piece of tobacco-pipe, which, every one must be aware, might do greater harm than a compact bullet; while the modifying little word only carries with it to our ears a significancy that bears immediately upon the view which we are taking of the state of public feeling, and the confused ideas that prevailed concerning what the law was or should be. To overlook, or be ignorant of the fact, that there was a piece of tobacco-pipe in the pistol, was surely censurable in a high degree. But what we are now chiefly aiming at is to show that, from some cause or another, the disposition of the people and the officers of state had come to regard mere attempts on the Queen's person in a diminishing and trifling light,that they were ready to ridicule, to disbelieve, and to extenuate all stories of such treasonable practices.

One would naturally have thought that the tendency of public feeling would have been to aggravate and exaggerate the heinousness of Bean's attempt. This is the ordinary way in which reports are conveyed and received; and surely there never was a sovereign, nay, nor a human being, who could be supposed to have been surrounded with such a guardianship of sentiment as her Majesty. But stranger still;-after two attempts had recently before been made upon her sacred life, people were ready to talk of, and laugh at, a third offence of a similar nature with the preceding instances; policemen to refuse listening to the charge; and even Ministers of State to employ the symphonious adverb only, when publishing to the nation that a young gentleman had been about to have a pop at the Queen.

How was all this apathy and sort of pleasantry concerning her Majesty's personal safety and peace of mind to be accounted for? Not surely by saying that there was any general disloyalty or want of respect and love towards her; not that the million would refuse to defend her with their lives; not that there was any party feeling to quench that which was natural and true. We must seek for a solution of the phenomenon in other circumstances than any that would traduce the manliness, the nationality, or the loyalty of the British

character.

We cannot but think that a good deal of the apathy and levity to which we refer was (we are keeping to the past tense) to be ascribed to the fact, that fools and idiots were the only persons who had thought of injuring or frightening the sovereign,-despicable beings

that had not the pluck to offer one of their own sex an insult or a mischief; and therefore utterly beneath notice. Oxford appeared to have indulged a whim, and got off with flying colours, in the estimation of another such idle and worthless creature as Francis. And lastly, an abortion,-a hump-back, who knew not how to handle a pistol, tries their sort of game, at a moment too when a person would have been in son e measure excusable for thinking that the miscreant must be fatuous.

But an arrant fool may not long play harmlessly with fire-arms in his hand; and therefore we must go farther in seeking for a solution of difficulty,-viz. that of accounting for the public disposition manifested in regard to the recent treasonable attempts.

The lawyers and the law, we believe, had no slight hand in mystifying and levelling the public mind, so as at first to treat Bean's case with apathy and a degree of light-heartedness. The chief justice on the trial of Oxford, at least, in his charge, taught the nation that it was necessary to find the bullet before a verdict of a capital nature could be brought in; and this was accompanied with a general persuasion that there was really no such lethal loading in the pistol. ́ In Francis's case there was also not only a general opinion that he was desirous merely to be made the wonder of the day, and to obtain a comfortable provision for life at the public expense, and again that he was only a mock traitor, having no purpose to take the Queen's life by bullet or by steel. But it strangely appeared to have escaped Lord Denman's mind, as well as the consideration of the people at large, that a pistol might be loaded with pieces of tobacco-pipe, quantities of gravel, or some such wide-scattering substances, that would, if they did not lodge in the body of some living thing, be sure ever after to clude the search of seekers who only probed for lead. But the public feeling has gone beyond this measure of light; for there is now a conviction that the practice of shooting at any person, even without ball or any missile, is a wanton, cruel, and atrocious fancy; and that you may almost with as much tenderness take the life of that person at once, as to kill by the slow method. What a condition to live in!-that of a constant sense of want of security, that you can never step beyond the threshold of your door without having a pistol flashed at you! This is to destroy all peace, comfort, and sweets of existence. It is none other than to live in continual dread of assassination, which has broken down the courage of the bravest warriors, and rendered the hourly experience of the noblest minds that of devouring pain. It was time therefore that a stop should be put, if possible, to the misconceptions as to the range of offences as well as to the compass of the law in relation to such treasonable attempts. And this was done to some extent in Francis's trial; for there the counts of the indictment were so shaped, and the absurdity of requiring the finding or traces of bullets, so well avoided, that his

life was legally forfeited, and a dreadful sentence most impressively pronounced upon him.

After all, however, the law of the land, with regard to treason, and attempts which had the appearance of intended treason, was incomplete as well as without a due discrimination; so as to cease, in certain supposable and practical cases, to be wholesomely operative and sufficiently comprehensive. Accordingly the bill which has lately. passed for the protection of the Queen's person, even from all semblance of intended injury, was a measure imperatively called for, at the same time that its purpose met with universal approval. Its provisions, which have so often appeared in the newspapers, need not be particularized by us. We rather go on to offer some observations concerning the course of punishment that was adopted, and that which is to be inflicted in accordance with the new bill, in reference to treasonable attempts.

The law of treason was found to be impracticable, in the cases referred to, from its too great severity; and, indeed, the infliction of capital punishment, in terms of any other branch of our criminal jurisprudence, for the treasonable attempts mentioned, was staggering to her Majesty and her advisers, as well as to juries and to the public at large.

The objects of punishment are undoubtedly these,-to arrest the criminal in his course, to protect those who are or may be the subjects of his attempts, and to defend society generally from the spread of crime. But the assaults of three vagabonds, in rapid succession, show that the law as it stood was so inoperative that the sovereign was but little screened by it.

The climax of our code of punishments is strangulation on a gallows. But sovereigns, ministers, judges, and juries have begun to feel, that often when the law appoints death, the punishment is so inapposite, that it must not be inflicted; and hence the clemency of the Queen, and the leniency of Secretaries of State; hence also the anxiety of juries to find a loop-hole for avoiding a capital conviction. In what other way can one account for Oxford being made a state prisoner; and as to Francis, that after being threatened with the last punishment of the law, the infliction does not take place, but a milder is the doom? Now, among the evils resulting from this practical administration, a person criminally disposed feels that for a capital crime he may be hanged, but that most likely he will be acquitted, or subjected to a secondary punishment only; secondary punishment being also in almost every case, such as few or none of the class know its real severity.

It is not with the view of founding blame upon any one concerned in the administration or the execution of the law, that we offer these remarks, and state these facts. Far be it from us to say, that as the law stood, the act of mercy extended to Francis is censurable. If

not due to him, it was worthy of the Sovereign; and her Ministers, in undertaking the responsibility of commuting the sentence, might reasonably have supposed that enough had been done to show the law really bore on such attempts as his, and that the mercy which came so late in his instance might not come at all in another. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that in the appearance of leniency there lurks great mischief, arising from the generally impracticable severity of the treason law; for the fact still returns to stare us in the face, that the example is one of comparative impurity, the escape from the terrible penalty threatened being the only thing thought of,-the secondary punishment inflicted being either overlooked altogether, or losing all its awe in comparison with the greater one escaped.

It has been well said that "secondary punishments, which might be sufficient to deter from crime, if they were known to be the highest, may not have that effect when it is known that there is a higher. If perpetual imprisonment with privation of every comfort not necessary to support life were the highest punishment, such a prospect viewed by itself might be sufficiently forbidding; but its power to create fear is diminished so long as it is regarded as an escape from a more dreaded evil. A man might be deterred from renewing the attempt made by Oxford by the knowledge of the hopeless imprisonment to which he had been doomed, if that imprisonment were contemplated in its own terrors, who remains undismayed by it from having been led to look at it merely as an escape from death."

According to this view, it is necessary that the human imagination be recognized as an agent to be consulted by legislators when enacting penalties for crimes, and ordaining the mode in which they should be imposed. Francis is transported to a penal settlement. Now, had this been his sentence at first, for life, and with hard labour, the severity of the punishment would have stood prominently out to view; "but as it is," as we find it remarked by a writer in the Examiner, "what is escaped strikes the mind, instead of what is to be undergone; and the thought is, that Francis is not hanged, not that he has to suffer a life of toil and misery in perpetual exile. This is, however, an evil belonging to the law for which those charged with the superintendence of justice are not to be blamed, as they can only deal with the law as they find it, and of the two evils they must rather take those of the commutation of punishment than of a severity shocking to the feelings of society. The purpose of the law of treason is the desirable one of throwing the greatest degree of protection around the person of the Sovereign; but just in proportion as the law of treason is increased in severity for this end, it fails to serve to it, and then, with the mitigation of it there comes in an appearance of leniency most inconsistent with the policy of justice, and liable to very dangerous interpretations."

Again, Francis is transported to a penal settlement. But to a person who has never been deprived of liberty, nor witnessed the sufferings endured in transportation, the punishment of the man does not furnish a sufficiently strong motive power to make such a person, as is supposed, abstain from treason. Hundreds of thousands have read of the hardships of the chartist Frost in his banishment, but how few can conjure up any sensation from these accounts that would scare from imitating his crime, if strongly disposed to venture upon it. It is to be hoped that there is not one individual in the British empire who does not feel other and all-sufficient motives to urge him from committing treason; but the question at present with us is, has the punishment of transportation of itself sufficient effect on the imagination of hundreds of thousands in this conntry, to make them shudder at the idea of committing Francis's crime?

This brings us to the subject of secondary punishment, and indeed to the consideration of the principle to be observed in the scale, with regard to every effective punishment for great offences, up to the highest.

It will hardly be maintained that it is proper to allot the same measure of punishment to attempts against the life of the Sovereign, as against the completion of the crime. Indeed, were no distinction to be observed, there could be no motive from fear of incurring the last penalty, when in the very act of violence; whereas there is a locus penitentiæ, a point of time for feeling compunction, as well as entertaining dread of death, if the law establishes a distinction, so as may stay the hand, or turn it from its deadly aim. But the law of treason refused to entertain this discrimination, and therefore ceased to be applicable and operative in such cases as have recently occurred. Therefore it was that ministers, legislators, and politicians became utterly baffled, when they heard that on the very eve of the time at which Francis had been condemned to die, a third vagabond had made another attempt of a treasonable nature; and the question put by every person was, what is to be done in order to protect the Queen's person from pistols and lethal weapons, and to afford her that sense of security which the meanest of her subjects experience when they emerge from their dwellings?

The punishment of death, it cannot be doubted, has restrained numbers from committing crimes, merely because it is inflicted publicly; whilst multitudes who have witnessed a public execution have been impressed with pain and horror at the visible agonies with which hanging is accompanied. But, on the other hand, death punishments have done harm in this particular, not to mention others, in that it has prevented the imagination from estimating the intensity of inferior or secondary punishments. The question therefore has been put," Is there no punishment short of those which produce death and madness, (viz. hanging and the silent system) which could