consequence of the change in the law, would be to increase the number of commitments in the first instance, until the knowledge of the certainty of punishment would have its natural influence in diminishing the cases of crime.

So much for forgery.-Now, as to other offences from which the capital punishment has been removed, we may refer to the statements on criminal law recently prepared by direction of the Home Secretary. In those statements is a table of the commitments for three years preceding, and of those for three years following, the repeal of capital punishment. By a strange omission, however, two columns of the table are not brought into totals. Had this been done, it would have shown the commitments for the former period to be 4,156, while those for the latter period were only 3,729, showing a diminution of 427, or more than ten per cent. So much for the frightful "increase of crime," as falsely alleged by one or two ignorant or malevolent persons, in anonymous communications in a daily journal. It may not be unimportant to observe, that the greatest diminution has been in the case of an offence of the most formidable character of any in the whole catalogue that of house-breaking.

Before quitting this subject, we can hardly avoid noticing another effort at opposing the reform of sanguinary legislation -on the part of a country gentleman. It appears that he is anxious to preserve the capital penalty for rick-burning, as if it had ever been effective, and as if, from its overseverity, it did not continually lead to the escape of offenders who, under a law that demanded not the blood of the criminal, would have been convicted and punished! To distinguish, in arson, between the different degrees of the offence, is what reason teaches and justice approves; and the efforts of Mr. will not prevent so necessary a reform. Does that gentleman know, that out of 277 commitments for arson, in three years, there were but 28 convictions—a result mainly attributable to the existence of that punishment which he wishes to preserve, and which, instead of protecting property, serves, in a multitude of instances, to afford impunity to crime? It [t For the commitments during ten years, see the note at p. 175. — ED.]

is worth remarking, that during the three years in which the aggregate of crimes from which the capital penalty was removed, has diminished-the aggregate of crimes to which the capital penalty is still attached, has increased.

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"Young FRANCE"-Her political liberty.-Nov. 10, 1836.

FOR "Young France," ages of national history have been acted and written in vain.-At this day the real liberty which France enjoys is certainly not more, if it be not less, than she possessed before her last revolution. The ordinances of CHARLES X. were undoubtedly gross violations of the charter: but the laws which the doctrinaire Ministers of Louis PHILIP passed, under pretext of the Fieschi plot, were as indefensible infringements of the public liberty, which the charter had guaranteed; yet Young France" continued, with truly juvenile ardour, to celebrate the anniversary of the "three glorious days," of which the Fieschi laws were the fruit-and to worship the outward form of that liberty, from which, in the moment of gaining it, life had departed.

The French revolution of 1830, may now be described as the anarchy of three days, and the absolutism of six years. The people who had courage to achieve a great victory, had not the wisdom to make a right use of it. The State is in that condition in which a corrupt executive, is surpassed in corruption by the legislative body. When the people were clamouring for the abolition of the hereditary Peerage, they would have been more wisely employed in endeavouring to obtain an enlargement of the representative system; indeed, they ought to have made that a condition of the new settlement of the Crown. Less than half the number of electors which returned the British House of Commons before the Reform Bill, return the French Chamber of Deputies; and that for a nation which contains about thirty-six millions of people. The hereditary House of Peers has been abolished-and what has the nation gained by it? The Peers are now more corruptly subservient to the Crown than ever, and naturally enough. All independence

was destroyed by the law which confiscated the inheritance of their honours; and they were compelled to become the servile tools of the Minister of the day, that the titles which perish with them, might be revived in their children. Thus, honours are to be purchased for the children, only by the father's corrupt submission to the Minister-and this was clamoured for, and obtained, by the thoughtless people, as a reform and purification of the Peerage!

In England, what would be thought of the administration of justice, if commoners accused of high treason could be arraigned at the bar of a Criminal Court, of which the Judges and the Jury were one and the same body-both being Peers, but not the peers of the accused-mongrel Nobles, entirely dependent on the Crown for the reversion of their honours to their descendants and consequently identified in feeling and interest with the prosecutor, who demanded at their hands the lives of the accused? Well might such a mode of trial be called the It shows that France procès monstre! * is some centuries behind England in the practice and perception of constitutional law.

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In England, although the House of Lords is happily independent of the Crown, yet none but Peers can be tried before it, except in the instance of the presentment of a commoner by the Grand Inquest of the nation-in other words, by parliamentary impeachment; and even then, in the case of a commoner, life cannot be put in peril, because he is not triable, even upon impeachment, for a higher offence than misdemeanour. Even so long ago as the reign of Edward IV., this principle not yet understood in France, was understood and proclaimed by the British House of Peers; who, though they were induced, on account of the popular, or rather national, hatred that pursued the crimes of Simon de HEREFORD, (an accomplice in the treasons of Roger, Earl of MORTIMER,) to pass judgment upon him-yet they entered a protest upon the parliament-roll to the effect that the Peers who were then, or who should be in time to come, ought not to be bound or charged to render judgment upon others than their Peers; and that the judgment then rendered be not drawn into example or consequence

in time to come, whereby the said Peers might be charged thereafter to judge others than their peers, contrary to the law of the land which, they added, "may God forbid." Thus, four centuries ago, the principles which ought to govern the administration of justice, and the distinctions of constitutional law, were better understood in England, and by the English House of Lords, than they are understood by "Young France," her "Citizen-KING," and her doctrinaire Ministers-in the nineteenth century!

The centralised system of government in France is a bad substitute for those constitutional regulations, which in this country control licentious passions and popular impulses, while they allow its full and free expression of opinion to the national mind, and the unrestrained exercise of its legitimate energies to public liberty. Where a people are not sunk into the satisfied debasement of habitual slavery, the centralised system must ever cause the State, as it does in France, to be disturbed with plots and the rumours of plots, and shaken by sudden explosions. It is to our regulated liberty, intimately interwoven as it is with the privileges and powers of local government, that we owe the want of a word in our language to exactly express what is meant by the French word, emeute. Government in "Young France," since the three glorious days, has been almost series of emeutes, intermixed with some more terrible commotions-such as, for instance, the barricade slaughter of the 5th and 6th of June, in Paris, and the revolt and horrible carnage of Lyons.

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Many of the plots-by the explosion of which the French nation, during the last six years, has been made dreadfully familiar with such occurrences-afforded in themselves pretty strong circumstantial evidence of having been concocted by the agents of the central-police system, or fomented by its spies; for of such a system espionnage in its worst features, is a necessary concomitant. We need not enter into particulars here, nor should we have space for them if we wished; but to show that the French Government-as well as the police which it employs-is capable of contriving mock plots for political purposes, and of following out such plots with Machievellian

contempt for morality, we need not look farther than the case of the spy, Conseil, which has made such a noise in Switzerland; and which ought to hand down the memory of the Administration of M. THIERS to any thing but everlasting honour.

The result of these and other considerations, is to make us more than ever prefer the free Constitution of Old England, to the "Liberties of July" and the Centralised Government of "Young France."

Renewed fraudulent Uses of the French Telegraph.

Nov. 12, 1836.

Ir is now quite certain that the French telegraphic despatch, which officially announced the razing of the siege of Bilboa on the 29th ult., was, like many other telegraphic despatches and Spanish expresses, with which the public of France and England have been favoured during the progress of the war in Spain, a mere fiction. It is equally certain that our correspondent at Ainhoa was correct in stating the continuance of the siege, at the time when the morning and evening organs of the French Government announced that it was razed. Whatever may be the final result of the Spanish contest, there can be but one opinion as to the use that has been made of the French telegraph, from the time that the standard of Don CARLOS Was first planted on the mountains of Biscay, to the present hour. It is eminently disgraceful to the French Government, that the exclusive means which it has in its hands of acquiring and communicating intelligence from Spain, almost with the rapidity of thought, should be grossly abused to purposes of public deception.

It is not by communicating false intelligence alone that the French Government deceives the people; accounts which are not directly falsified are often suppressed, while false rumours are put in circulation that are only dissipated by the truth reaching the public ear, through some ordinary channel of conveyance. Nothing can be more unworthy the Government of a great nation than thus tampering with public news, more