expense in printing. We know not what is or was the amount of the salary of the King's printer, but the additional business of promulgating laws would have much increased it, and the judges and executioner, between them, notify new capital punishments at a wonderfully small cost, and the rule of law is set forth with the impressiveness of a deadly illustration. On the score of economy no objection is to be made to the present mode of promulgation. By the aid of the press (and without it how would the law be known, even in its punishments?) the act, 7th of Geo. IV. will be made known throughout the united kingdoms at the expense of the trials, and—some human lives. To publish a law in every part of the country might save lives, but it would cost a larger sum of money than the trials; and while we have a pension list for panders, demireps, and sycophants; a large army, and costly embassies to maintain, for Lords Johns and Thomases; there will be of necessity economy in some place in which it is a scandal to humanity. Supposing that the saving of money is of more consequence than the prevention of crime and saving of life, it cannot be denied that the mode of promulgation of law by the cheap and easy punishment of death is defensible; but if on the other hand, while a Government is profligate in its extravagancies, it may be expected to be just in its jurisprudential system, ours-typified, as old Fuller says, politic revenge is, "by gunpowder, which

bites before it barks"-is the most atrocious that disgraces any nation pretending to civilization or humanity. Is it possible, that when the AttorneyGeneral uttered the words we have quoted, with the six trembling wretches at the bar before him, for the first time hearing the terrible punishment allotted to their actions, by a law, the common knowledge of which was emphatically pronounced of the last importance, is it conceivable that he could have pronounced the reproach to our system of jurisprudence without horror and disgust, at its enormous and barbarous impolicy? Surely his mind must have recoiled at the import of his own words

"If damned custom have not brazed it so,

That it be proof and bulwark against sense."

Here was the first law officer of the Crown declaring the vast importance of making known a recent enactment, for the promulgation of which no steps of any sort had been, or ever are in such cases, taken by the State, and which only could come into notice by this very course of a prosecution of men, in all human probability as ignorant of it as our Legislators are of every principle of juridical science. But "damned custom," as Shakspeare well calls evil habits, admits of no shame, of no penetration,-and we can too easily imagine Sir Thomas Denman uttering that enormous reproach to our brutally careless system, at once blind and bloody, improvident and ferocious

without a sense of the bearing of his words, or a touch of remorse at finding himself prime instrument of so barbarous a policy. This time last year the peasantry were taught that rick burning was a capital crime, how? by hanging them. This year, the townspeople are taught that demolishing buildings is a capital crime,-how? by hanging simply. Such is the course of State instruction!

Are we yearly to have a Special Commission to hang men for ignorance?

The apprehended consequences of actions are men's rules of conduct; but if the consequences are unknown to them, the rule is wanting; and yet law is defined as a rule of command or prohibition. The State takes no trouble to promulgate laws,— nay, it does not couch them in a language commonly understood, they are wrapped up in a technical jargon-and to the parties affected, how do unknown laws differ in cruelty from ex post facto laws, the atrocity of which all will agree in condemning. The punishment when it falls is clearhanging is intelligible to every understanding—all else is obscure and uncertain, and the duty of making it other than obscure and uncertain has never yet occurred to the State. The Legislature is content to dig the pitfalls, and to leave the unlucky to discover them by their misfortunes. The Statute-book is one great collection of steeltraps and spring-guns, without notice.

Wisely Bentham observes-and what he says of

the common law is as applicable, in respect of practical operation, to the statute law

"As with other parts of the law by which the "fate of every man is disposed of, so it is with this. They tell him he ought to know it; they give "him no means of knowing it; they see he does "not know it; they do nothing to make him know "it; they do everything to keep him from knowing it; they have brought it into a state in "which it is impossible for him to know it; they

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say it is: they insist that it is; they say his ignorance of it is no excuse; and, in all imaginable ways, they punish him for not knowing it.

Legislation, genuine legislation, has her trumpet: instead of a trumpet, the law of jurisprudence employs a sword. A sword, or a rod: such, and "such alone, are the instruments of promulgation "that ever are or can be employed by what is "called common law. Punishment instead of in"struction; punishment without instruction, with"out warning; such is the form in which the law of jurisprudence gives all its lessons. When a man "has a dog to teach, he falls upon him and beats "him: the animal takes note in his own mind of the "circumstances in which he has been beaten, and "the intimation thus received becomes, in the mind " of the dog, a rule of common law. Such is the "law; such the unpunishable, and even inevitable, yet not the less grievous and deplorable, tyranny, to which, through the whole extent of the law of

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"jurisprudence, the legislator abandons the com"munity entrusted to his charge. Men are treated "like dogs; they are beaten without respite, and "without mercy; and out of one man's beating, "another man is left to derive instruction as he "can."-Rationale of Evidence.

SEVERITY OF PUNISHMENT.

WE earnestly hope that his Majesty's advisers, in their view of the cases of the poor creatures lying under sentence of death at Bristol, will not allow their minds to be biased by the apprehension of any construction which an unprincipled faction may choose to put upon their conduct. It would be shocking, indeed, should government be induced to strangle those five men merely to please a party, or rather to avoid its clamour; for, in truth, ministers could not please the opposition more, than by giving it this subject for complaint. Such a point of attack would, however, only make the enemy more odious, for the country abhors the punishment of death (except for murder), more than it abhors the crimes to which it is awarded. Even in cases of destruction of human life, circumstances of excitement are taken into account; premeditation, or