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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



difficulty is rather from the enormous wealth of 

 tlio materials than from any poverty in them*. 

 Now, I know no better mode of testing the matter 

 than to take the House of Lords as an assembly 

 clearly of the wealthy, and clearly of the edu- 

 cated, and more or less of the intelligent classes ; 

 the unreformed House of Commons as an assem- 

 bly of educated men in more or less intimate ties 

 with large classes of the people ; the reformed 

 House of Commons as such an assembly fully im- 

 bued with the wishes of the middle classes ; and 

 the doubly reformed House as such an assembly 

 bound to carry out the wishes of the great ma- 

 jority of the lower middle class and of the work- 

 ing-men of our great cities. And I maintain that, 

 in relation to the sort of issues I have referred to, 

 the judgment of the House of Lords has been the 

 most reluctant and slowest to arrive at the truth, 

 of any constitutional assembly of this century; 

 the judgment of the unreformed House of Com- 

 mons (before 1832) the next in order; that the 

 judgment of the reformed House of Commons 

 (between 1832 and 18C7) stands high above either 

 of these ; and that the judgment of the doubly 

 reformed House of Commons (between 1807 and 

 1S78) has been the best which any such assembly 

 lias given us any means of estimating. And if 

 this be true, can any one in his senses doubt to 

 what this has been due — namely, to the deficiency 

 or efficiency of the popular " propelling force," 

 to use Mr. Gladstone's expression, behind these 

 assemblies ? 



Of course a book might be written on such a 

 subject, and I must limit myself to a few illustra- 

 tions. Take first the case of the reform of the 

 criminal law. In the early part of the century 

 Sir Samuel Romiily represented the directing 

 power of the reform movement, Lord Eldon and 

 most of his colleagues on the bench the directing 

 power of those who resisted it. Well, where ilid 

 Sir Samuel Romiily gain his first (very mild) suc- 

 cesses? Of course in the House of Commons; 

 the House of Lords almost always refusing their 

 assent to even such very slight improvements as 

 the House of Commons was willing to pass. In 

 her history of the peace Miss Martincau says : 



" In 1810 Sir Samuel Romiily brought in three 

 bills to repeal the acts which punished with death 

 the crime of Stealing privately in a shop goods of 

 the value of live shillings, and of stealing to the 

 amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house or on 

 board vessels or in navigable rivers. The first 

 Mil passed the House of Commons, but was re- 

 jected by the House of Lords. The other two 

 were rejected. In 1S11 the rejected bills were 



again introduced, with a fourth bill abolishing 

 the capital punishment for stealing in bleaehing- 

 grounds. The four bills were carried through the 

 House of Commons, but only that on the subject 

 of bleaching-grounds was sanctioned by the House 

 of Lords. . . . In 1813 Sir Samuel Romilly's bill 

 for the abolition of capital punishment in cases of 

 shoplifting was carried by the Commons in the 

 new Parliament, but it was again rejected in the 

 House of Lords. In 1810, on the 16th of February, 

 Sir Samuel Romiily obtained leave to bring in a 

 bill repealing the Act of William III. which made 

 it a capital offense to steal privately in a shop to 

 the value of five shillings. . . . The bill passed 

 the Commons, but was thrown out in the Lords on 

 the 22d of May." 



At length in 1820, after Sir Samuel Romilly's 

 death, Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in abso- 

 lutely carrying three bills out of six brought for- 

 ward for diminishing the number of capital 

 crimes. But even then the House of Lords passed 

 the bill abolishing death for shoplifting to the 

 value of five shillings with avowed trepidation, 

 the Lord Chancellor expressing the deepest anxi- 

 ety as to the result ; while the proposal to abolish 

 the punishment of death for men who blackened 

 their faces in the commission of theft by night 

 was thrown out by the combined efforts of Lord 

 Redcsdale and the Lord Chancellor ! Again, 

 when in 1830 Sir Robert Peel brought in and 

 carried through the Commons a bill abolishing 

 (in most cases) capital punishment for forgery, 

 and Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in carrying 

 an amendment abolishing capital punishment in 

 all cases except the forgery of wills, the Lords 

 restored the bill to its original state. I need not 

 insist on the great improvements in the criminal 

 law made by the reformed Parliament. It was 

 not till 1830 that even the bill was passed allow- 

 ing the assistance of counsel to prisoners in crimi- 

 nal cases, nor till 1837 that the penalty of death 

 was commuted to a milder punishment in the case 

 of twenty-one secondary crimes, and even then it 

 appeared that the House of Lords, though it had 

 to a great extent understood the new spirit ani- 

 mating the country, was far less anxious for re- 

 form than the House of Commons which wished 

 to go beyond the Government. In the House of 

 Commons the more radical reformers were beaten 

 only by a majority of one. The Lords of course 

 did not attempt to improve on the measure of 

 the Government. In this case I have nothing to 

 say as to the still further improvement in the 

 spirit of the doubly reformed Parliament since 

 1867, perhaps because, in the direction of mere 

 mercy to criminals, little remained to be done. 



