virtuous woman, the callous arrogant lady of modern western civilisation. The false modest creature who, under the cloak of a promise of marriage, will not hesitate to hale a recalcitrant lover through the mire of a breach of promise court, and bare all the most sacred feelings of nature before a jury for a consideration of damages; who even under marriage will not scruple to sell herself to the highest bidder; who will even violently repress her maternal instincts, and deny her own love for love, which all the while is yearning in her secret heart; while she gathers up her skirts and points the finger of scorn at her own sister woman who has allowed feeling to weigh more with her than calculation.

In her secret heart of hearts every woman knows that she has as much right to a lover and a child, if she desire them, as she has to her natural food and her "sleep o' nights."

Now that women are learning to recognise their right to earn their own living, and to be no longer dependent upon the charity of man, perhaps they will begin to realise that "False Modesty' is the great bane for their sex, the great blight which retards the essential nobility of their natures and makes "cowards of them all."

Until false modesty be thrown by the board social life must remain what Sir John Vesey describes it in Money: ·

"Humbug: all humbug, upon my soul."

ALLAN LAIDLAW.

L

THE ENGLISH CRIMINAL

CODE.

(Continued from Vol. X., page 411.)

THE conspicuous injustices and irrationalities, which still adhere to English Criminal Law, have so well been summarised in the pamphlet, to which reference has been made, that we cannot do better than to transfer the concise synopsis to these pages-taking the liberty to vary the order of statement according to the relative importance, as it seems to us, of the many urgent reforms demanded. We shall add a few comments to enforce or to supplement the writer's contentions. These contentions,

which amount, in fact, to demand for re-formation of the Code, are thus formularised:

1. "That offences against Property be more lightly dealt with than offences against the Person."

This proposition we place first, inasmuch as it points at the most conspicuous and the most characteristic principle of traditional English legislation; and add the obvious comment, that, after all, it is petty theft and petty robbery, rather than commercial robbery or swindling, on the grand scale, which has always met with the severest vengeance from English law. That a principle of jurisprudence, which has descended from wholly barbarous ages, when life was held to be of no account at all, has been essentially conserved-however modified within the last hundred years-so sacredly down to the present moment will, with much else, be matter equally for infinite surprise and infinite satire with future times. Nor will the surprise and satire be lessened because so barbarous a principle of legislation has always received the assent or, at all events, the acquiescence even of the party or parties which inscribe Reform and Progress on their banners. Besides abstract considerations of reason and right, to give the public sanction to the traditional comparative estimate of the two values-what is it but indirectly to depreciate the enor( 162 )

mous evils of violence and brutality of all sorts, and so to encourage them? Future reconstruction, or even mere amendment, of the Criminal Code, which should reserve this essential inequity and unreason, will "sin at the base."

2. A reduction all round in the severity of the Penal Code, especially in the length of sentences of penal servitude."

And, even yet more urgent, some accompanying recognition of the principle of relativity-the establishing of some proportion between the penalty and the offence. No heavier charge can be brought against criminal codes in general, and against our own in particular, than the monstrous inequality which always has so conspicuously and shamefully characterised them. The admonition of the Latin satirist (of the first century B.C.) is still to be repeated:

Adsit

Regula, peccatis quæ pœnas irroget æquas,

Ne scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.*

3. "A further reduction in the number of imprisonments, on the lines of the Summary Jurisdiction Amendment Acts and the Probation of First Offenders Act."

By the passing of these Acts, as stated in the pamphlet under review, a large amount of injustice and evil has been removed. But much more rapid advance, under this head, than is perceptible is urgently demanded alike by justice and by common

sense.

That a vast number of petty offenders, who not alone themselves but, also, their starving families, undeservedly have suffered the life-long stigma of the prison or the jail, would never have been, and would not be, incarcerated under any rational legal system there is not the least possible doubt. Equally certain is it that this phylacomania, this mania for indiscriminate imprisoning, has

Not so often cited as they deserve to be. The conclusion of the admonition is too applicable to the subject to be omitted in this place:"Nam, ut ferulâ cædas meritum majora subire Verbera non vereor cùm dicas esse pares res Furta latrociniis, et magnis parva mineris Falce recisurum simili te."--Horat., Sat., I., 3.

But still more deserving of commemoration are the sentiments of the first morallist of all times--Seneca. See, in particular, his De C'ementiâ, I., 16, 24. The ethics of that admirable humanitarian and eclectic teacher, generally ignored though they are by modern logomachists in their so-called moral treatises, are, it is safe to affirm, much in advance of the moral standard of Christendom even of to-day. In less degree, the same may be asserted of "The Moral Obligations" (De Officiis) of Cicero. But the Hellenic Plutarch and the Latin Seneca-the teachers of Montaigne and other later ethical writers of the better kind together form an unique body of the higher morality. A fact of which the ordinary Christian religionists and ethicists cannot too often be reminded.

always been the most successful method of manufacturing real criminals,

66
"Whom the vile blows and buffets of the Law
Have so incensed, that they are reckless what
They do to spite the world,”*

and who avenge themselves, in frightful fashion, upon Society which has manufactured them. Some glimmer of this truth, so constantly confirmed by experience, and so plain to ordinary (unofficial) intelligence, seems at last to have penetrated even into the legislative mind; and, in the debate on the Prisons Bill in the Commons in the beginning of last year, protests were heard against the continued sanction of the Legislature to so fruitful a source of injustice and crime. To the humanitarian Recorder of Liverpool, Mr. C. H. Hopwood, is due the credit of having, during a period of several years, set a good example to his fellow-magistrates and administrators, pronouncing short sentences for petty offences-an example tardily and grudgingly followed.

"The vast bulk of what is called crime," affirms that experienced authority, "consists of pilferings and stealings, which are induced by the pressure of extreme want and misery; and yet it is to these that the dreadful remedy of long sentences has been ruthlessly applied. I have found instances of men who, for trifling offences have spent thirty or more years in jail. There surely can be no more effective way of the turning of an offender into a ruffian, desperate and determined. . . . The Howard Association has collected a number of these terrible sentences, inflicted in obedience to some hard theory which actuated the judge. One man sentenced to ten years' penal servitude for stealing a garden-fork. Another, for stealing a cup, for five years. Another, for stealing some watercresses, to eight years. Another, for stealing some herrings and provisions, to five years. These instances will suffice. This system has gone on in practice for a number of years with the precision and regularity of a machine-causing desperation, misery, and lower and lower degradation. It was devised by men-mere pedants-to whom flesh and blood were nought compared with an expected reduction in the calendar of theft. We have had enough of such crude opinion and such inhuman experiment. The nation ought to reproach itself for thoughtlessly allowing it to proceed as a matter of course, by its silence encouraging those who have a belief in violent repression, and disheartening those who are more inclined to mercy [justice].

"The fact is, the virtuous, the religious, those who are timid for them

The language of the hired "bravo" in Macbeth (with change of pronoun); to which may be added the reflections of Shakspere upon Law which not only has inflicted the most outrageous punishment upon the petty offender, but which, also, has so generally entrusted the infliction to much greater offenders in foro conscientiae. See K. Lear, iv., 6. Dat veniam corvis, vexat Censura columbas.

So that the fate of the hero of that master-piece of fiction--Les Misérables-is no mere fiction--as far, at all events, as the trifling cause and the length of his penal servitude are concerned. In fact, it has been repeated over and over again under English Law.

selves, are hard in insisting upon punishment. What we have to teach them is that the diminution of crime is not effected in proportion to the employment of torture. For surely we may rank as torture all punishment which is excessive or unnecessary. I have for forty years had large experience of the administration of the criminal law, and have seen the action of judges of every sort and description. Now (1894) for eight years and a-half the opportunity has been afforded me of applying to my action, as judge, the teaching of years of observation. I have seen Courts of Quarter Sessions, near neighbours to one another, in districts where the life and habits of the people were similar, and the amount of property liable to pillage was in amount and quality the same. In the one, a Recorder presided, who dealt out penal servitude mechanically, according to rule of accumulation for offences. His calendars showed an almost fated level of offences never reduced. The neighbouring Court was presided over by a Chairman of Justices, a lawyer of equal reputation, who prescribed punishment proportioned to each offence. His sentences were for months, where the other's were for years. Yet the calendar here equally preserved its level from session to session, did not rise, nor was crime more rife in the district. It was my first object-lesson nearly forty years ago, lasting over seven or eight years of comparison. Its impression has never faded.”*

4. "That as many persons are sent to prison, who, from weakness of mind or body or both, are unfit for prison discipline, a milder system of detention be devised. This would apply, among other cases, to those of the numerous dipsomaniacs, who are now sent to jail to no purpose."

A self-evident proposition.

5. "That prisoners should not be kept waiting in jail for months before trial, and that if proved innocent, they should, in cases of hardship, be compensated."

As to the former part of this proposition, it is to be remarked that this gross inequity of infliction of such a stigma, as well as acute suffering, upon mere suspected or presumptive guilt, was denounced ninety years ago by Phillips, the humanitarian High Sheriff of Middlesex, in his admirable Letter to the Livery of London, and, also, in a Letter addressed to Romilly, who lately had introduced his measure for some amendment of the Draconian Penal Code, as it was at that day. It is superfluous to add, in vain was the protest made to the public conscience. As to the second part of the proposition, what can be pleasanter (in the Voltairian meaning) than the "free pardon" vouchsafed by the

A Plea for Mercy to Offenders. By C. H. Hopwood, Q.C., M.P. Wm. Reeves, Fleet Street. (Humanitarian League's Publications). To the same effect is the evidence of the late Chaplain to the Wandsworth Prison, Mr. W. D. Morrison. See Humanity.

It is in this later public protest that Phillips records the fact of his having seen nineteen persons on the gallows, the eldest of whom was not twenty-two years of age: the larger part of them sentenced for petty thefts. He insists, in his Letter to Romilly, that no prisoner should be placed in irons before trial. This rara avis among magistrates was the author, among other meritorious writings, of A Treatise on the Powers and Duties of Juries, and on the Criminal Laws of England.