THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMINALS. 549 



amendment in both particulars. Two years can be awarded for 

 stealing a pocket-handkerchief, and only three years for an aggra- 

 vated assault without a weapon, but which may cripple the man 

 or woman assaulted for the remainder of his or her days. 



With all his humanitarian tendencies, Beccaria took a very 

 determined stand on this point. He writes : — " It is against 

 crimes affecting the person that punishments are most desirable 

 and their vindictive character most justly displayed. Personal 

 violence calls for personal detention or personal chastisement, and 

 the principle of analogy in punishment is most appropriate in the 

 case of a man who maltreats his wife or abuses his strength 

 against any weakness greater than his own." 



The satirical remarks of Max O'Kell in " John Bull and his 

 Womankind" show what foreigners think of the absurdly light 

 sentences upon brutal English wife-beaters, and it is a matter 

 well worthy of consideration whether such, and all offenders guilty 

 of ruffianly violence to others, ought not to be made liable to 

 corporal punishment in some form. 



Many of the assaults now dealt with by magistrates, and in 

 which sometimes mere nominal money fines are inflicted, ought to 

 be punished by imprisonment, with power for the Bench to also 

 fine, and order the fine, or such portion of it as they may deem 

 just, to be paid to the injured person, ami thus save the necessity 

 of recourse to a civil court for compensation in damages. It has 

 been well said that the law condescends to and considers human 

 frailty, but it ought not to tolerate human ferocity. To my mind 

 the offence of purloining some trifling article, it may be from a 

 clothes-line, is not to be compared, for the suffering it entails, to 

 many of those so-called common assaults and batteries, frequently 

 on women and on delicate or aged men ; and yet the latter offences 

 are altogether too often, both in England and in Australia, visited 

 with a few shillings' fine, whilst the oft'ence of stealing a trifling- 

 article is sometimes punished with several months' imprisonment 

 with hard labor. The greatest care and strictest investigation 

 should precede corporal punishment, but when inhuman brutality 

 is clearly established it seems difficult to contend that it is not 

 justifiable. 



As an instance of how the fixing of a minimum punishment in 

 an Act of Parliament may bring about injustice I may mention 

 that for the crime of burglary three years is the lowest that can be 

 awarded in South Australia. Judges have no option but to 

 sentence prisoners to that term for entering a publican's cellar 

 through the trapdoor in the street and taking a bottle or two of 

 spirits or ale. 



PUNISHMENT OF HABITUAL OFFENDERS. 

 The next subject to which reference will be made is one of the 

 most diflRcult with which those who administer the Criminal Law 



