THE remaining proceedings of parliament may be classed under three heads,-1. the Alteration of Existing Laws; 2. the Reform of Existing Abuses; and 3. Projects of General Utility.

A bill was brought into the Upper House, by Earl Moira, March 11. for amending the law of Debtor and Creditor.He explained its object as relating to arrest on mesne process, and imprisonment in execution, in both which the intention was to shorten the duration of imprisonment; in the former, by compelling the plaintiff, where the writ was issued in one term and returnable in the next, to declare in the term of the return, and proceed to trial in the succeeding term; and, in the latter, by releasing the debtors at certain specified times, at the quarter-sessions, on assigning over their property in possession and reversion, and also rendering their future property liable, according to the principle of the cessio bonorum introduced into the Roman law by Cæsar, and adopted by Justinian. A similar law had long pre

vailed in Holland and in Denmark, where experience had proved its ef ficacy.-Lord Ellenborough said, in reply, that the creditor was more frequently an object of compassion than the debtor-that arrest was, generally speaking, the best means of producing payment or composi tion of the debt, and did produce that effect in five cases out of six:

that the bill was drawn up with great ignorance of the law, and was wholly inadequate to its object: and he condemned any attempt to innovate upon a long established law. This was ably answered by Lord Holland. "If the objection to innovation were to hold good," he said, "no change whatever, either in law or practice, ought to take place; and in fact their Lordships, and the other House, ought not to meet for the purposes of legislation. It was needless to specify the evils of the present system, they were so many, so apparent, and so notorious. Why were those frequent acts of insolven cy passed, if the legislature were not aware that there was something pe culiarly offensive in continued impri

sonment for debt? As for the inadequacy of the bill, and the ignorance with which it had been drawn up, he could only express his regret that those noble and learned persons, whose peculiar province it was to endeavour to render the law of the land as unexceptionable as possible, did not take the subject into their own hands."-Lord Ellenborough's condemnation of the bill was fatal to it; his objections to its form and inadequacy must fairly be supposed to have been valid, but the practice of imprisonment for debt, as prescribed by the existing laws, is a grievance and a disgrace which ought to be removed from England.

It had hitherto been the practice to make a distinction between an indictment found by a Grand Jury, and an information filed by order of the Court of King's Bench, or by the Attorney-General ex officio. A bill was now brought in, enacting, "That on informations, as well as upon indictments, the parties were to be held to bail." It passed unopposed, and indeed altogether unnoticed, through the House May 19. of Commons. In the Upper House it was opposed by Earl Stanhope, Lord Holland, and Lord Erskine. They May 24. argued that it was a mischievous, unnecessary, and dangerous innovation, to require bail

equally upon an indictment presented by 12 sworn men, and upon the mere filing of an information by the Attorney-General, (which might or might not be founded upon affidavit,) thereby giving to the AttorneyGeneral the power of a Grand Jury. It was nothing to the point, that the present Attorney-General would not abuse his power. They were to consider what future ones might do, and to remember how, in former times, the foulest legal murders, which the Crown required, were sanctioned by its great law officers. The King might be deceived, and a worthless person appointed Attorney-General; or an Attorney-General might be deceived, and informations ex officio might be filed for expressing opinions which every man had a right to express; and persons might, under the operation of this bill, by being held to bail, be grievously oppressed. The bill tended to fetter the freedom of opinion, by placing those who uttered opinions disagreeable to Government, in the power * of an officer of the Crown.-It was replied by Lord Ellenborough and the Lord Chancellor, that the innovation was not so great as had been represented, for, as the law at present stood, persons might be held to bail by any justice of the peace upon a charge of misdemeanour. That the bill was humanely adapted to

give relief to the prisoner; for it would prevent a person sent to prison for want of bail, from remaining there for years (as it might happen) without the means of bringing on his trial; and the Judge who tried him, though not a Judge of the King's Bench, might discharge him if acquitted. The bill passed. Its good parts might have been retained, and its objectionable ones omitted, for assuredly in this country, and in this state of society, it is highly objectionable to arm the servants of the Crown with new powers against freedom of opinion in the subject.

Á more extensive subject of discussion was brought forMay 18. ward by Sir Samuel Romilly. "His intention," he said, "had long been to propose some measures for reforming the criminal law of this country, in which it was a very great defect, that capital punishments were so frequent; and were appointed, he could not say inflicted, for so many crimes.No principle could be more clear, than that it is the certainty, much more than the severity of punishments, which renders them efficacious but if one were to take the very reverse of the principle, that would be a faithful description of the criminal law of England; in which punishments are most severe, and most uncertain in their application. If we deduct the number of those who receive sentence of death for crimes for which pardon is never, or very rarely, granted, and take the number of those who are convicted of felonies, which have been made capital for some circumstances, which are not in truth circumstances of aggravation, perhaps it will be found that of 20 persons condemned to die,

only one suffers death. The question is, whether the administration of justice should be suffered to continue in such a state, where the execution of the law is not the rule that is observed, but an exception to it, and where it has been lately said in language, which one would expect to hear rather from the lips of a satirist than from the seat of judgment, that the "law exists indeed in theory, but has been almost abrogated in practice, by the astuteness of judges, the humanity of juries, and the clemency of the Crown."His present purpose was to call the attention of the House to one class only of these severe statutes that had, from the change of circumstances, acquired a severity which was not originally intended: those in which the capital part of the charge depends on the amount of the property stolen; such as the statute of Elizabeth, which punishes with death the stealing privately, from the person of another, property to the value of 12 pence; the act of William and Mary, which makes privately stealing in a shop, to the amount of 5 shillings, a capital felony; and many other statutes of the same kind. Such an alteration had taken place in the value of money since those statutes passed, that it was astonishing that the law should have been suffered to remain in words the same to the present day; the offences, in the mean time, having become altogether different. Perhaps there was no case which could render more striking the truth of Lord Bacon's observation, that time was the greatest of all innovators; for in proportion as every thing which contributed to the support, the comført, and the luxuries of life had grown dearer, the life of man had become

cheaper and of less account.-Such laws cannot be executed. Juries are reduced to the alternative of violating their oath, or, what they are sometimes mistakenly induced to think more binding on them, the dictates of humanity. Often against the plainest evidence, they find the property not to be of the value of which they and every body else know it to be; and this comes to be considered, as Blackstone somewhere expresses it, as a "pious perjury," words which one is sorry to see ever put together: for nothing can lead to more immoral consequences, than that men should familiarize themselves with the violation of a judicial oath. The law ought not to remain so. Offenders are often acquitted against the clearest evidence; and the very severity of those laws, by a necessary consequence, holds out an encouragement to crimes. While there are thus two laws, one upon the statute book, and another in practice, a total change has taken place in the nature of that which is considered as the most valuable prerogative of the Crown; the prerogative of shewing mercy. The true state of the case is, that, in exchange for that prerogative, the Crown has the painful duty imposed on it, of selecting those upon whom the judgment of the law shall be executed. In London and Middlesex this is done by the Privy Council, but upon all the circuits this duty devolves upon the different judges of assize; and it is felt by them to be the most painful of their duties. No rules are laid down to govern them in the discharge of it; but they are left to their own discretion, which must necessarily be as various as are their different habits and sentiments and modes of thinking. It

may be the opinion of one judge, that punishments ought to be inflicted most strictly when crimes are most frequent; another, with the same anxiety for the discharge of his duty, thinks that it is most useful to be rigorous when crimes make their first appearance. One judge is more influenced by humanity; another more swayed by a sense of what is due to the sense of the community. And thus their discretion is apt to be exercised under motives not only different, but often quite contrary. The question was, what should be the remedy?-He had at first intended only to move to repeal the statutes, and to propose others in the same words, only with sums equivalent to the value of what was originally fixed by the legislature; but when he found that he would thus be enacting capital punishments for offences, in which there are no circumstances of aggravation, he could not bring his mind to do it, and he determined to propose the simple repeal of all those statutes. As, however, they will require different considerations, he judged it most expedient to bring them one by one under the review of the House; and he proposed, therefore, to begin with the most objectionable, the 8th of Elizabeth, chap. 4., which made stealing privately from the person a capital offence: declaring it at the same time to be his intention, and wishing it to be understood, that he will at proper times bring forward a repeal of the others. The unnecessary severity of the 8th Elizabeth, its absurdity and want of logic, made it a disgrace to the statute book. Reciting that the offence was sometimes committed under circumstances which were an aggravation, therefore it enacts that

in all cases, and although there was no aggravation, clergy should be taken away. In his time, he never had heard but of one single instance in which an offender, convicted under this statute, suffered death; it was a case upon the northern circuit, where a pick-pocket detected in court was immediately tried and left for execution. It was a solitary case as far back as he could remember, and even if that had been omitted, it would have been no great misfortune. Under this statute, from the strict construction which the judges observed of the word "privily," that very violence which would be an aggravation of the offence, if it is not such as to amount to robbery, saves the offender. There was another subject which, he thought, required the interposition of the legislature; it was to provide, in certain cases, a compensation to persons tried and acquitted, after having been long detained in prison. At present they have no compensation, except by an action for a malicious prosecution, where the judge is satisfied there was no probable cause. If suspicion of having committed a crime falls upon an individual in the labouring class of the people, whose family depends upon his daily wages for subsistence, he may lie eight months in gaol; for that is sometimes the interval between the summer and Lent assizes; and in the four northern counties, he may be imprisoned above a year. His family in the mean time is, probably, consigned to the workhouse, and when he returns home after an acquittal which completely establishes his innocence, he finds them ruined in their health or corrupted in their morals. If, for the convenience or utility of the public, private proper

ty is ever interfered with by the authority of parliament, full compensation is carefully made to the owner; but what is that loss which is thus compensated to the opulent, compared with the injury suffered by the poor man in the case he had mentioned? The discretion of saying in what cases compensation should be given, could only be reposed in the jury or in the court; and he thought that there could be no hesitation between those two. The jury ought not to have their attention diverted from the single point of ascertaining the fact, of guilty or not. Fortunately there was already in our statute book, an act which he should take as a model. Till the year 1752, no compensation was made by law to prosecutors for their expence and trouble in bringing offenders to justice. Before such compensation was allowed, it often happened that the prosecution was by much a greater evil to the person, whose property had been taken from him, than that loss of property by the offence. The 25th Geo. II. chap. 36. § 11. placed it in the power of the court, upon consideration of the prosecutor's circumstances, to grant him an order upon the treasurer of the county for his expences, and a reasonable allowance for his time. He meant to make this the model of the bill he proposed to move for leave to bring in, following the principle of the act of Geo. II., and giving compensation to persons acquitted only in the same cases where it was already by law given to the prosecutor. He moved, in the first place, for leave to bring in a bill to repeal so much of an act made in the 8th year of Queen Elizabeth, as takes away the benefit of clergy from persons convicted of stealing privily from the