that when the laws were so severe, persons injured would not prosecute, and juries would not declare culprits guilty, even when the evidence was perfectly clear. The laws could not therefore be enforced, and their own objects were defeated.

prove the

Mr. Shelton, who has been near forty years clerk of arraigns 412. Testiat the Old Bailey, states that juries are anxious to reduce the mony to value of property below its real amount, in those larcenies penal laws where the capital punishment depends on value; that they ineffective are desirous of omitting those circumstances on which the capital punishment depends in constructive burglaries; and that a reluctance to convict is perceptible in forgery.

Sir Archibald MacDonald bears testimony to the reluctance of prosecutors, witnesses, and juries, in forgeries, in shoplifting, and offenses of a like nature. He believes that the chances of escape are greatly increased by the severity of the punishments.

T. W. Carr, Esq., solicitor of excise, a very intelligent public officer, gave an important testimony, directly applicable indeed only to offenses against the revenue, but throwing great light on the general tendency of severity in penal laws to defeat its own purpose. From his extensive experience it appears that severe punishment has rendered the law on that subject inefficacious. Prosecutions and convictions were easy when breaches of the law were subject to moderate pecuniary penalties; even a great pecuniary penalty has been found so favorable to impunity that fraudulent traders prefer it to a moderate penalty. The act of counterfeiting a stamp in certain cases, within the laws of excise, was, before the year 1806, subject only to a penalty of £500, but in that year it was made a transportable offense, of which the consequence was that the convictions, which from 1794 to 1806 had been nineteen out of twentyone prosecutions, were reduced in the succeeding years, from 1806 to 1818, to three out of nine prosecutions.

Mr. Newman, solicitor for the city of London, speaking from thirty years' experience of the course of criminal prosecutions in that city, informed the committee that he had frequently

413. Macaulay on the

Roman Catholic Church

observed a reluctance to prosecute and convict in capital offenses not directed against the lives, persons, or dwellings of men.

Dr. Lushington declared that he knew that in the minds of many persons there is a strong indisposition to prosecute, on account of the severity of the punishment; and that he had heard from the mouths of prosecutors themselves, who have prosecuted for capital offenses, where there was danger of the person's being executed, the greatest regret that they had so done; and many times they have expressed a wish that, had they been able to have foreseen the consequences, they would never have resorted to the laws of their country. He also related the case of a servant who committed a robbery upon him; the man was apprehended and his guilt was clear, but Dr. Lushington "refused to prosecute, for no other reason but that he could not induce himself to run the risk of taking away the life of a man."

A famous passage from Macaulay, in which he eloquently describes the extent, the power, the age, and the strength of organization of the Roman Catholic Church may be introduced here, in connection with the claims of the Roman Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland to be put upon an equality with Protestants in the right of voting and holding office.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that church joins together two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheater. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the supreme pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the

august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the papacy remains.

The papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn,- countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions.

Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshiped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Sydney Smith, the author of the following extract, which is one of a series of short articles on public subjects that he published under the name Peter Plymley's Letters, was an Anglican clergyman, though an Irishman by birth and residence. He was one of the most

outspoken advocates of giving to the Roman Catholics a right to vote and sit in parliament, and one of the few churchmen who did not oppose this reform. This letter was written before the close of the wars with Napoleon. 414. Sydney As I have before said, the moment the very name of IreSmith on the land is mentioned the English seem to bid adieu to common desirability feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.

of Roman Catholic emancipation

Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and intelligence, who, if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and, if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible. You speak of danger to the establishment: I request to know when the establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits, were half so terrible? Mr. Perceval and his parsons forgot all this in their horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense. They never see that while they are saving these venerable ladies from perdition, Ireland may be lost, England broken down, and the Protestant church, with all its deans, prebendaries, Percevals, and Rennels, be swept into the vortex of oblivion.

Do not, I beseech you, ever mention to me again the name of Dr. Duigenan. I have been in every corner of Ireland, and have studied its present strength and condition with no common labor. Be assured Ireland does not contain at this moment less than five millions of people. There were returned in the year 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000 houses, and there is no kind of question that there were about 50,000 houses omitted in that return. Taking, however, only the number returned for the tax, and allowing the average of six to a house (a very small average for a potato-fed people), this brings the population to 4,200,000 people in the year 1791;

and it can be shown from the clearest evidence (and Mr. Newenham in his book shows it) that Ireland for the last fifty years has increased in its population at the rate of 50,000 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present population of Ireland at about five millions, after every possible deduction for existing circumstances, just and necessary wars, monstrous and unnatural rebellions, and all other sources of human destruction.

Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and the half of the Protestant population are Dissenters, and as inimical to the church as the Catholics themselves. In this state of things thumbscrews and whipping - admirable engines of policy as they must be considered to be-will not ultimately avail. The Catholics will hang over you; they will watch for the moment, and compel you hereafter to give them ten times as much against your will, as they would now be contented with, if it were voluntarily surrendered. Remember what happened in the American war, when Ireland compelled you to give her everything she asked for, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner, your claim of sovereignty over her. God Almighty grant the folly of these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public affairs!

Catholic

What are your dangers which threaten the establishment? Imaginary Reduce this declamation to a point, and let us understand dangers of what you mean. The most ample allowance does not calcu- emancipation late that there would be more than twenty members who were Roman Catholics in one house, and ten in the other, if the Catholic emancipation were carried into effect. Do you mean that these thirty members would bring in a bill to take away the tithes from the Protestant and to pay them to the Catholic clergy?

Do you mean that a Catholic general would march his army into the House of Commons and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr. Duigenan? or that the theological writers would become all of a sudden more acute or more learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed? Do you fear for your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the English constitution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd