Divine will and the precepts of Christianity. It is manifestly the Creator's design, that such men, from intellectual as well as moral power, shall rise to the guidance of society; and liberty, and light, and national happiness, are in the direct ratio of their ascendancy. An enlightened and effective criminal code will emanate from them alone.

One grand error in criminal legislation has been, that the threefold distinction now drawn has never been taken into account as true in nature. There is no practical belief that it exists. We do not find it adverted to in any of the thousand and one treatises already written, and by the most talented of men, on criminal legislation. Yet we venture to predict that, till it shall be acted upon as a practical truth, speculation after speculation, code after code, and institution after institution, for the protection of society from crime, will fall to the ground. The prevalent practical belief of the million, and of the law-makers in whom they confide, is, that in power to obey the laws there is among men no difference of mental constitution; that a good man has willed to be virtuous, and a bad man has willed to be vicious, and that either might have willed equally easily the opposite character ;-that it was a mere voluntary choice that, on the one hand, filled the prisons with wretches whom a Howard visited, and that determined Howard, on the other, to visit them. Hence the indignation and resentment felt against the criminal, and the tendency to visit upon him the retribution considered due to a deliberate choice of the wrong, in spite of a clear perception and feeling of the right. Now, the truth will challenge the strictest investigation, that the great majority of criminals in this country have minds so constituted, and that independently of their own volition, as to rank them in the first class above described. They are born with a greatly preponderating animalism, which grows with their growth, and strengthens with their strength. Belonging to the lower, and often the lowest, ranks of life, having neither moral nor religious training and exercise, little or no intellectual education, no habit or practice of industry, frugality, sobriety, or self-denial; strangers to all encouragement from a higher moral society to value character; on the contrary, familiar from infancy with the example of debauchery, profligacy, and recklessness, and crime in their very parents and relations, trained often to early mendicity, and always to thieving, habituated to hear debauchery and successful villany lauded in the society with which they mix, and morality and justice ridiculed or defied, they may be said to be indeed born in iniquity, and bred in crime. Such are the beings whose acts create resentment and retributive revenge in the minds of the unreflecting, the untempted, and, in regard to a sound philosophy of man, the uninformed.

Now, minds so constituted ought not to be judged of in the same manner as those of a more moral and intellectual constitution. Justice demands a large allowance for their unfortunate constitution and not less unhappy circumstances; and, above all, observing that punishment, however severe, does NOT operate upon them as example, it would consider whether there are not means, at once more just and more effectual, of protecting society from the acts of these its dangerous and reckless members.'

That punishment has no exemplary force, even upon num

bers of this first class, is an assumption by no means warranted; and if it were true, its operation upon the second class would justify its infliction upon individuals who might be referred to the first. The classification, however, it must be recollected, is purely theoretical. The Writer contends, indeed, that those decidedly predisposed to crime' are much more of a class than is supposed; that they are a class nearly all of whom, at least in the lower ranks, come in contact with the law;' and that 'a proper penitentiary system is nearly certain of getting them all into its hands.' Were this the fact, it would surely be practicable to deal with them before they came in contact with the law, by a preventive benevolence. Of this policy, it is but justice to the Writer to say, that he is the zealous advocate; and he confidently relies upon Infant schools, conducted upon a religious basis, as the most rational and the only effectual preventive of crime. Next to Infant Schools, in efficiency, he seems to rank Prison Education.

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When, by an enlightened age, penitentiaries shall be held to be hospitals for moral patients, and not engines to protect society, by holding out the spectacle of the sufferings of perfectly free agents, either paying back that loss which their actions have occasioned, or deterring others from crimes by their example, the duration of the convict's detention will depend, not upon the mere act which brought him there, but upon the continuance of his disease. As long as penitentiary discipline shall consist of severe and degrading compulsory labour, of stripes, irons, insults, and brutality, without an attempt at improvement mental or moral, beyond being herded into a chapel on Sunday for an hour or two,--and this constituted the old idea of a house of correction,-a prescribed and short duration of such irrational usage is imperative. Nay, it was and is the prominent problem of criminal legislation, to proportion punishments to crimes,-to weigh out, to an odd scruple, the quantum of suffering which shall counterpoise the quantum of guilt in the act committed; and certainly it would be monstrous to detain the convict, on such a principle, one moment longer in the place of mere suffering, than the exact time necessary to permit society to take out, in his groans, the supposed debt ex delicto contracted by him. But no one is ever sent to an hospital for a previously prescribed period. Sixty days of the infirmary, or the madhouse, as a medical prescription, would be justly ridiculed, in and out of the faculty; and so it will come to be, when moral infirmaries, applying rational and effectual means of cure to those afflicted with that worst of diseases called a proclivity to crime, and being withal mild, benevolent, and encouraging to the patient, are substituted for the present irrational treatment. The unhappy criminal will then be regarded more in relation to his moral constitution than his conduct; or, if the latter be estimated, it will be in the way of evidence of the former. His sentence for an overt act of crime will be the restraint of the penitentiary, till an authority, beyond all question as to intelligence, and all suspicion as to uprightness and benevolence, shall deem

it safe to venture him once more in society. It is evident that, for such a process, the shortest time must be long. Ordinary education is the work of years; and a fortiori must moral training be, when working against the wind and tide and current of criminal propensity. Nay, as in lunatic asylums there may be cases of very long duration, there may be cases for life in our asylum, cases of relapse after dismissal, and return to necessary restraint on fresh conviction. These last ought to be held cases for life. If any one shall object, that this is any thing but mild treatment of criminals, and that there is more justice in inflicting a month's confinement for a first and slight offence, and then giving the criminal another chance for a good life; we would answer, that the latter course is but the first step of a series of penal inflictions, alternating with intervals of the most wretched sensualities and profligacies called freedom, which necessarily bring the sufferer back to punishment-and that, on the proportion principle, more severe than the first-to be again dismissed to greater misery than he leaves, and more resolved upon, and better fitted for, crime. He returns a third time, of course, to your bridewell, to be visited with yet increased infliction, till at last the account of proportion has so much accumulated to his debit, that a violent and ignominious death alone is held adequate expiation. What is the restraint of a few-of a number of years-of a lifetime-in a well constituted reformatory asylum, compared to the cruelty, the injustice, the irrationality of this?'"

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Would you send a boy for years to your Penitentiary, who for 'the first time steals a shilling?' To this natural question ' under the old impressions,' the Writer replies: "The theft of the shilling is the symptom of a moral disease which requires 'the boy's being put under treatment; and it is mercy to him to 'seclude him, and subject him to the education and training ' which his unfortunate case requires.' We agree with the Writer, that such a young offender is a subject for reformatory_treatment, rather than for punishment; therefore, we would not have him sent to either prison or penitentiary, but rescued by benevolent interposition from the hand of criminal justice. But justice is altogether excluded from the Writer's theory.

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We should have no right,' he says, 'on the principle of either retribution or example, to go beyond a nice apportionment of the penalty to the act; but, when the object in view is the moral cure of the individual himself, there is no variance between moral feeling and expediency, even although that cure should require a long seclusion. We never think the longest confinement to a sick bed unjust or disproportionate.' p. 28.

What does this prove, but that the moral cure of the individual is not that which justice contemplates, or which is the object of penal enactments? According to the theory, however, the very principle of justice is to be banished from legislation, and the judicial bench ought to be converted into a college of physicians. The moral desert of crime is thus virtually denied; and

the demerit of the criminal is entirely resolved into misfortune. It is but a step further, if a step, to arraign the right of even the Supreme Governor to punish, and to explode the idea of a day of Retribution.

Art. II. Remarks on the Use and Abuse of some Political Terms. By George Cornewall Lewis, Esq., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. 8vo. pp. xxxii. 264. Price 9s. London, 1832.

To such of our readers as are anxious to cultivate the Art of Thinking, and to understand either the opinions they hold or those they disavow, we strongly recommend the present work, with the confidence of obtaining their thanks for bringing it under their notice. And such readers we may invite to a perusal of the subsequent remarks;-for we cannot venture to promise to others a very entertaining article.

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"There is, perhaps,' remarks Mr. Lewis, no moral or political 'treatise of any length, certainly no considerable argumentative ' work, of which the conclusions are not in some degree affected 'by an incautious employment, or an unperceived ambiguity of 'language.' To so great an extent does this source of fallacious reasoning mingle itself with the decisions and arguments of our highest authorities, that Locke goes so far as to express a doubt, 'whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more to the improvement or to the hinderance of knowledge.' This opinion, it is impossible to regard as any thing more than an hyperbole; since language, whatever be its ambiguities, is the only means of knowledge, as well as the instrument by which we 'think and reason." But the instances cited by the present Writer, of the liability of even the most acute reasoners to impose upon themselves and mislead their readers by verbal fallacies, will surprise those persons who have not considered the powerful influence of equivocal language in deceiving the mind. The speculative parts of Blackstone's Commentaries, the most elegant production, perhaps, in our legal literature, Mr. Lewis characterizes as an epitome of popular fallacies and misconceptions on 'most of the fundamental doctrines of jurisprudence and govern'ment.' Paley, the most lucid of writers, occasionally falls into similar error. We undertook, in our last volume, to shew that Hooker's whole fabric of argument is built upon a fallacy of this description.* In noticing the recent disputes about the constitution, it was also shewn that the whole question hinged upon the ambiguity of the term. In metaphysical theology, the same cause has given rise to tedious and angry logomachy.

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* Eclectic for October, 1832, p. 285. + Eclectic for June, 1832, p. 471.

The remedy usually proposed by logicians and philosophers for this acknowledged source of misapprehension, is technical definition. When writers have precisely defined their terms, they imagine that they have secured themselves against all danger of using them fallaciously. Metaphysicians have pleased themselves with the idea of thus reducing their terms to the simplicity and unchangeable force of algebraic signs. Definitions, however, are generally little better than assumptions, implying a meaning that requires both to be explained and to be proved. Besides, as Archbishop Whately remarks, it is not the same thing to be acquainted with the ambiguity of a term, and to be 'practically aware of it, and watchful of the consequences con'nected with it.' After giving the most precise definition of a word, a writer may be found unconsciously passing from his own defined signification of the term to another, and drawing an inference from his own blunder. It is not enough to understand the meaning of terms, whether conventionally agreed upon or arbitrarily defined: unless we are careful to understand our own meaning at the moment of using them, in the precise connexion in which they occur, they will often be found to slip their meaning, and cheat us with a verbal fallacy. It is impossible,' Mr. Lewis justly remarks, to legislate in matters of language: the 'evils arising from its imperfection may be eluded, but can never 'be removed. The best way to obviate the ambiguity arising from the variable meaning of words, is, not to attempt to stereotype the forms of thought, but to keep always in recollection the essential imperfection of language as the instrument of thought, so as to rely less upon the intrinsic power of words, than upon the manner of using them.

An inquiry into the meaning of terms is, however, very different from an endeavour to define them, and far more useful. The one is an attempt to ascertain a fact; the other, to lay down a rule, or to frame an hypothesis. What words really mean, can be determined only by their actual use: they mean what the person employing them intends by them, and the meaning lies, not in the words, but in the intention. Mr. Lewis's object in this volume is, to illustrate the various uses of the principal terms belonging to political science. His inquiry aspires to occupy 'a 'middle place between a technical dictionary and a scientific 'treatise.'

Even if the definitions which I have either borrowed or suggested should be thought incorrect', he remarks, yet the investigation of the various senses of each word as occurring in popular language, must, if properly employed, furnish to others the means of detecting fallacy in political discussion . . The following researches relate, not to the truth of any particular propositions, but to the meaning of certain terms used in political reasoning: which, being often employed in