240 PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 



acts opposed to the welfare of society, and not as directed against 

 the laws of the Almighty/' 



Nor on the social compact into which men enter, or are supposed 

 to enter, when they quit their state of native independence for that 

 of society. Although the lecturer deemed this compact as little 

 more than a legal fiction, yet, admitting it, he contended that it 

 afforded no basis on which to found the right capitally to punish 

 — that we could not reason from individual relationship to those 

 of society; that it by no means followed, if it were the duty of a 

 man, when assailed, to preserve his own life by the sacrifice of 

 that of the assailant, that society possessed the right to put the 

 murderer to death, since such preservation would not thereby be 

 effected . 



Nor on the ground of political expediency. 



The lecturer here enquired whether the punishment of death 

 did afford the most effectual means of preventing atrocious 

 crimes: — whether penal codes, whose prominent feature should 

 be severity, furnished the best safeguard to life and property. 

 He maintained they did not, and offered several reasons to prove 

 the correctness of the position, which he summed up in the 

 following terms: — "We here venture to ask, and with some 

 degree of confidence, are penal codes, teeming with capital 

 penalties, the remedy of crime? To us they seem rather to 

 resemble the nostrum of the empiric, beneficial, possibly, in a few 

 cases, from the extreme violence of its operation ; but, from that 

 very circumstance, injurious in the greater number. If to 

 confound in one heterogeneous mass nearly all varieties of crime 

 — if to create great uncertainty relative to punishment — if to 

 stimulate unnaturally the sympathies of the virtuous, and raise 

 the indiscriminate fury of the ignorant and misguided — if to 

 destroy the living epistles of testimony, be well adapted to restrain 

 the commission of crime, then do sanguinary codes, and capital 

 punishments, admirably answer their end, for these are the 

 legitimate results of their infliction, and then we say, let the 

 blessing of humanity descend on Draco*s head ; then let the friends 

 of truth and social order hail the scafibid as the school of virtue, 

 and the halter as the cordon of public morals." The lecturer 

 further objected against the punishment of death — that where 

 judicial authorities designed it as the severest penalty, it was 

 usually tlien least Telt — that just in proportion to the degree of 

 virtue a criminal retained, would the weight of the punishment 

 be felt — that it prevented his repentance — and that it was often, 

 from defects in circumstantial evidence, inflicted on guiltless 

 victims. 



To be concluded in the next. 



FRINTrD BY G. P. MEARDER, ri.YMOUTU. 



