REVIEW OF SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY'S OBSERVATIONS ON THE CRIMINAL LAW OF ENGLAND: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE QUARTERLY REVIEW FOR MARCH 1812. OBSERVATIONS ON THE CRIMINAL LAW OF ENGLAND. THIS able and luminous pamphlet, which was published two years ago, was intended to convey to the public the substance of a speech delivered by the author in the House of Commons, (9th February, 1810,) on moving for leave to bring in a series of bills to repeal the acts of 10 and 11 William III. 12 Anne, and 24 George II. which make the crimes. of "privately stealing in a shop, goods of the value "of five shillings; or in a dwelling house, or on "board a vessel in a navigable river, property of the value of forty shillings, capital felonies." The publication took place while the fate of the bills was still depending in parliament. On the 2d of May, the motion for a repeal of the capital punishment for the larceny in a dwelling-house was rejected by a small majority. Soon after, the second bill, relating to larceny in a shop, was carried in the House of Commons without a division; but its progress was stopped in the House of Lords by a majority of three to one. At the end of the same session, the third bill, from the pressure of business, was given up without having come to a final hearing. The legislative question having been thus disposed of, for a time, the pamphlet itself remains as a memorial of the Author's views and reasonings upon one branch of the criminal law of our land. An argument which submits to competent authority, does not immediately forfeit, as a matter of course, all esteem either with the author of it, or with many of his reflecting readers, who, although they delegate their public voice, reserve their judgment to themselves. In the present instance, if the learned Author still holds the same unshaken confidence in the justness of his principles, he probably will not consent to abandon, on the first failure, this attempt to humanize the laws of his country, in the few cases where they appear to have departed from their usual spirit of a judicious and temperate severity. But were all expectation gone, of seeing his proposed improvement carried into effect, we should only be the more inclined to bear our humble testimony to the principle of it, and pay a few literary obsequies to a fallen speculation. By the law as it now stands, the offences which we have already described are punishable with death. But the statutes which enjoin that punishment are not put in execution, except in a very few rare examples. From the records of the criminal courts, (Observ. p. 11,) we find that, in a period of seven years, from 1802 to 1809, inclusive, out of 508 persons, capitally convicted in London and Middlesex, 67 suffered the sentence of the law; these convictions including, it must be observed, every species of capital offence. By other tables of information it appears that, within the same period, there were committed to Newgate for trial, charged with the crime of stealing in dwellinghouses, 1013 persons; of shoplifting 859. The number of capital convictions obtained upon these charges is not easy to be ascertained: but of the persons so charged, one only was executed. Such are some of the phenomena of the criminal courts at a recent time; and from them it is plain that the letter of the penal law, and the administration of it, as to the statutes already cited, are as widely at variance with each other as life and death can be. The documents that have been published are not so complete as could be wished in some other points, but particularly in that which respects the comparison of the actual convictions under each statute, with the instances in which the penalty has been enforced. But by arguing from the two general statements which we have just now given, and assuming, as a probable conjecture, that some proportion between a fourth and an eighth of the 1872 charged with those larcenies may have been found guilty of the capital part, the result will be that the |