least likely to be awed by a dread of the consequences, even if the consequences are ever thought of at all. To give potency to any deterrent influence it should be present in the hour of temptation.

'So far as we are able to manipulate the cases of murder, I submit that this view is borne out. In one class of crimes we find that the murderers have laid their plans with much care and circumspection, and with the expectation that detection was a very improbable if not impossible consequence. This was the case with Thurtell, Palmer, Rush, the Mannings, and many others. In other cases the murderer has acted with deliberation, but without making any effort at concealment or escape. Such was the case with Townley, with Hall, and the two men recently executed at Maidstone for the murders of unoffending children, and who had declared openly that they wished to be hanged. Other cases will at once occur to those who have watched the records of our criminal courts.'

It is difficult to resist the force of this reasoning, and having read over the evidence with much attention, we hold that the bulk of it goes to sustain the argument so earnestly urged by the opponents of death punishment. We may doubt. whether public opinion is sufficiently advanced to require the total abolition, but we believe with the minority of the Commission that capital punishment might with safety and with advantage be at once abolished.

There are other grave matters in the report relating to private executions, and the conduct of criminal courts, and the powers of the Home Office in difficult cases. As a bill is before the House of Lords, based upon recommendations of the Commission, it might be premature to enter upon a discussion, even if we had space to do so; and we must reserve our observations on the present state of the criminal law until a future opportunity. The whole question now before us may be briefly summed up in one sentence: That while the argument in favour of the deterrent influence of death punishment can only be speculative, every instance of a man suffering the punishment is an evidence of the failure of the penalty in affecting its purpose, which is to deter.

ART. IV. DIFFICULTIES OF THE PHILAN

'IT

THROPIST.

* I see in part

That all, as in some piece of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end.'

T is the hardest thing in the world to do the least bit of good,' exclaimed Parson Dale, in the agony of his compassion for the sufferings of the tinker's donkey-agony intensified and complicated by the conviction forced irresistibly on his mind by Dr. Riccabocca's very pertinent and pithy story

of

of the Emperor Hadrian and the Old Soldier at the Public Baths. In some respects Parson Dale, in this matter, at least, is not far wrong. Taking his words as a motto, we purpose to bring together in this paper some illustrations of this factone of the perennial facts of human existence, familiar enough to all who have served even a short apprenticeship to action; unrecognised, perhaps, by here and there a mild, benevolent dreamer, and most distinctly apprehended by the men of noblest temper, who are at once the least dismayed by difficulties, and the most fitted to cope with and vanquish them by daring to attempt it.

It is obvious that, besides the practical difficulty asserted in our motto, there are antecedent and very serious hindrances to the accomplishment of benevolent and philanthropic designs. Considering the might, the all but omnipotence of custom and familiarity over the human mind, and its ways of thinking and regarding, how commonly and effectually it dims, or even blinds the eye to the real nature and meaning of facts; considering the inter-dependence of our perceptions and judgments of good and our perceptions and judgments of evil, and how the former attain to clearness and vividness only by means of the latter; and considering the force of human indolence, which makes possible the long-continued co-existence of the recognition of an evil with complete passivity and absence of endeavour to remove or mitigate it, it is plain that a large advance is already made towards success in any benevolent endeavour, when there is an eye that sees the evil and the good, discriminating the one from the other a heart that aspires to the good, and a hand ready to act for its realisation. That then fresh and huge barriers should rise in the way; that clear vision, noble aspiration, and brave endeavour should so frequently fail as they have done, and still do; this is surely one of the facts of human experience most fit to excite grave and even sorrowful reflections in a wise

man.

What especially fretted the soul of Parson Dale was the sense that the good or kind act we do not seldom turns out quite otherwise than we expected; that it has results not purely and wholly good, but occasions and brings harm in its train, and this, in some instances, to such an extent as to make our good look very much like evil, and even to prove that it is evil.

Illustrations of this, on the small scale, may be had in any number from the sphere of domestic life, and its various relations and experiences. In the management of children and servants, who does not find out the existence of some

mysterious

mysterious and malevolent power at work to convert or pervert schemes, or single acts of good or kindness, so meant, into results which are their opposites? One act of 'indulgence,' for instance, such as letting off a dependent from the discharge of some daily recurring duty; one timid concession for the sake of peace to an undutiful resistance; one kindly interference to save trouble; each of such acts is a seed with life in it; you drop it, and it grows. The rapidity of the growth and the kind of fruit astonish you. Where you meant a single action, you find presently a habit and a claim. What you thought a mere reed turns out an oak tree. The vitality and productive energy of a deed is a fact worth pondering, so much more is there in it than seems. Let the little child have

its own way, and lay aside and leave the crust which it objects to eat; give it the sweeter morsel it demands and cries for; allow it to hold in its own hands that delicate photograph; let a morning lesson be omitted; or save the busy maid-of-allwork the cleaning of your shoes; answer the postman's knock for her; or take the trouble to get up in the morning and 'call' her in good time, and you may make up your mind to a future series of battles, not without cries of the wounded, over other crusts, pictures, lessons, shoes, knocks at the door, calls, and the like. You may count yourself happy if, at the close of a surprising campaign, victory remains with the right and you.

Turn to the wider fields of social and political life. Society would fain secure the lives of the hardy workers in its coal mines from the destructive force of the explosive foul gases stored up there, and invents the safety-lamp, beautifully contrived to give outward passage to the light, and at the same time cut off from access to the flame the fatal fluid diffused all round it. And the miner, reckless or thoughtless, opens his safety-lamp on the slightest pretext, the fire-damp meets the flame, and in a moment the good intention of society is crossed and cruelly defeated; and where there should have been busy, happy human lives for years to come, are left only dead bodies prostrate in those solid deeps.

Farmers and gardeners reasonably desire to save their seedcorn, harvests, and crops of fruit from destruction or waste by hungry foes. They conclude that it will be all right if only they can be rid of the small birds, and they shoot them and net them, and season after season reduce them in number as much as they can. Have we not heard some rather loud chuckling over singularly successful raids, days or seasons of bird-slaying? Yet a loud cry has been heard in opposition, and earnest and eloquent protests have been made, and we

have left off wishing our birds dead; for we are now persuaded that flies, grubs, and caterpillars are the real foes to be dreaded, and that we have no armies to send against them but only these very birds. We are not first nor alone in such an attempt and such a failure. Frederick the Great, who had a great liking for cherries and little for the birds that liked them too, ordered, it is said, a crusade against sparrows, and set a price on their pretty heads. In two or three years, instead of the richly laden trees which he looked for, there were no cherries at all, scarcely any other fruit in his kingdom. Frederick could do strange things; impose a fine on every soldier whose hat should blow off on parade, and no hat ever after dared blow off; but he could not save his cherries by his crusade against the sparrows.

To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to shelter the homeless, is surely good, approved of God and praised of men. To devise such social arrangements, were that possible, that in the whole community there should not be one member in want of food, clothing, or a decent home, would be better. But while we may respect the sentiment which leads many to look for and to aim hopefully at such a consummation, it is impossible to hide from ourselves the fact that hitherto all experiments in that direction have ended in miserable failure, and have only served to make more plain the immense and formidable obstacles that lie in the way-obstacles which in some cases are of no accidental or occasional kind, but which have their root in human nature, and must be counted on as permanent. The pitiful woman puts a coin into the hand of the whining beggar at the door, or at the corner of the street, she sees nothing in the act but a righteous ministering to human wretchedness, and goes her way with a quiet selfapproving heart, and the beggar goes his way content to be a beggar still. His benefactress has helped him one more step downwards; has made his return to a way of life worthy of a man harder than before, by giving him an additional reason for thinking it worth while to be a beggar, and has thus darkened and not brightened his future.

This is a type of what happened on a vast scale in the middle ages. The pictures presented to us, by early chronicler or modern artist, of jolly monks at the gates of picturesque monasteries, surrounded by a crowd of ragged, needy, dependent men, women, and children, kneeling there to receive their accustomed alms, and blessing their benefactors, may fascinate our imagination; and admiration of the skill of writer and painter may rise to a high pitch, and then may easily and unconsciously pass over from the book or

the

the picture to their theme. To break the spell a very brief course of reflection is enough, and will disclose to us the moral and social evils which lie close at hand and are inevitably let loose upon society by such treatment of its brood of beggars.

The dissolution of the monasteries threw the problem of provision for the poor into the hands of the State, and the first Poor Law speedily followed. The history of legislation for the poor, from that period down to our own time, has been one continuous illustration of our theme. We have come, perhaps, nearer than ever to a solution of the problem; perhaps a perfect solution is not to be looked for.

By the outbreak of the civil war in North America, and the consequent suspension of the cotton manufacture in our own country, we were compelled to face the old difficulty suddenly presented, on a vast scale and in a new form. The great heart of the world is kind,' and no sooner was the calamity known, and the extent and pressure of it generally apprehended, than money poured in by ten thousand channels, from north, south, east, and west, so that very soon no fear was felt as to the sufficient supply of the wants of the two hundred thousand hard-working poor suddenly deprived of their day labour and its wages. That was the first part of the problem. There is reasonable ground for believing that the second and far more delicate and difficult part received fair practical solution too; and that, by the wisdom and sagacity of those who were intrusted with the administration of the relief, the manly spirit, independence, and energy of the victims of the calamity was, to a considerable extent, preserved for better days. The startling paragraph which appeared one morning in the Times, respecting an advertisement at Manchester for hands in a silk mill, and an alleged refusal of girls to accept the work offered, on the ground that they were. better off at the sewing-class, was explained by subsequent information; and nothing worse was left to be believed about the matter, than that a case of imposture might here and there be found. But the proposal made, during that trying time, by one correspondent of the Times, that the care of separate families should be undertaken by individual donors, led to a curious and instructive disclosure of the moral difficulties which opposed themselves to the carrying out of such a suggestion. One clergyman felt them so deeply that he almost entreated to be excused from assisting in the scheme.

We have another illustration at hand in the discussion which has gone on for some time past concerning the treatment of the criminal class. To reform them; to rescue them from