The want of even an approach to uniformity in criminal sentences is
no doubt a very serious matter, and is due, not to any defect in
the criminal law (much as I think that might be improved in many
respects), but is owing to the great diversity of opinion, and
therefore of action, which not unnaturally exists among criminal
Judges, from the highest to the humblest, numbering, as they do,
at least 5,000 personages, including Judges of the High Courts,
commissioners, recorders, police magistrates, and justices of the
peace.

When one considers the conditions under which the criminal law is
administered in England, and remembers that no fixed principles upon
which punishments should be awarded have been authoritatively laid
down, and that the law has stated only a maximum (but happily at the
present time not a minimum), and each Judge is left practically at
liberty to exercise his own unfettered discretion so long as he
confines himself within the limit so prescribed, it is no matter for
wonder that so great a diversity of punishment should follow so great
a variety of opinion.

Even in the most accurate and useful books of practice to which all
look for guidance and assistance during every stage of the criminal
proceedings, down to the conviction of the offender, no serious
attempt has been made to deal, even in the most general way, with the
mode in which the appropriate sentence should be arrived at.

The result of this state of things is extremely unsatisfactory, and
the most glaring irregularities, diversity, and variety of sentences
are daily brought to our notice, the same offence committed under
similar circumstances being visited by one Judge with a long term of
penal servitude, by another with simple imprisonment, with nothing
appreciable to account for the difference.

In one or the other of these sentences discretion must have been
erroneously exercised. I have seen such diversity even between Judges
of profound learning in the law who might not unreasonably, _prima
facie_, be pointed to as safe examples to be followed; and so they
were, so far as regarded their legal utterances. Experience, however,
has told us that the profoundest lawyers are not always the best
administrators of the criminal law.

Practically there are now no criminal offences which can be visited
with the penalty of death. Treason and murder still remain. For the
latter offence the Judge is _bound to pronounce sentence of death_,
wh