urs of such an
establishment should be conducted with stern military order. Every
inmate should feel himself under an irresistible domination, and that
obedience and submission are the only parts he has to enact. How easily
the strongest minds may be led astray when scope is given to invention
in this matter of penal discipline, may be seen in the example of Jeremy
Bentham himself. This celebrated man, whose cogitative faculty was
assuredly of the most vigorous description, but who had a mode of
developing it the most insufferably and needlessly prolix, would have
filled our prisons with inextinguishable laughter by the introduction of
certain "tragic masks," indicative of various crimes or passions, in
which the several offenders were to be occasionally paraded--a quaint
device, which would have given a carnival to our jails.

Our main purpose, in these somewhat fragmentary observations, was to
protest against the reasoning which would divest punishment of its
proper and distinctive character, which, spreading about weak and
effeminate scruples, would paralyse the arm which bears the sword of
justice. One writer would impugn the right of society to put its
arch-criminals to death; another controverts its right to inflict any
penalty whatever, which has not for its direct object the reformation of
the criminal. So, then, the offender who will not live with his
fellow-men on the only terms on which human fellowship can be
maintained, is to stand out and bandy logic with the community--with
mankind--and insist upon his individual imprescriptible rights. These _a
priori_ gentry would find it very difficult to draw any advantage from
their imprescriptible rights, except in a state of tolerable civil
government. Civil government is, at all events, the condition on which
depends the enjoyment of all individual rights; without which they are
but shadows and abstractions, if even intelligible abstractions. Let us
have no more, therefore, of an opposition between the rights of
individuals and the stern, imperative, expediencies of society. There
can be no such opposition. Is it not as if some particular wave of the
sea should assert a law of motion of its own, and think it injustice to
submit to the great tidal movements of the ocean?

* * * * *

REFERENCES:

ZSCHOKKE'S _Aehrenlese.--Part I. Pandora, Civilization, Demoralization,
and Death-punishment._

_On the Management of Transported Crimi