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Mr. Francis Clarke, of Birmingham, has pointed out another source of error. An increase in the criminal returns may prove, not an increase in crime, but in the vigilance of the police. Many offences are winked at in one state of society, which are strictly repressed in another. Faction-fighting, at Irish fairs, was, until very recently, permitted, or at least connived at by the magistrates, and the number of persons now punished for the offence swells the criminal calendar, but adds nothing to the real amount of crime in the country. There is an old saw applied to sportsmen,

What is hit is history,

But what is mist is mystery.

It is no less applicable to criminal returns; it is a very conceivable state of things, to have the gaols most empty when crime is most abundant. At the last meeting of the British Association, a document was read, tending to shew that the mining districts are the most moral in England; but before admitting the inference, it was proposed that it be referred to the geological section, to determine at what distance beneath the surface of the earth the Queen's writ ceased to run.

The number of offences against law must necessarily be modified by the number of offences created by law. Now, there is a tendency in human nature to multiply these offences beyond what the necessity of the case requires. Whatever people have a right to do they will do, especially if it involves some privilege. Luther, enumerating" the nine qualities and virtues of a good preacher," gives as the sixth, "that he should know when to stop." In the same way as preachers, lawyers and parliamentary orators speak too much, legislators

are found to legislate a little too much. "I could never obtain a grant of sixpence," said a celebrated statesman, "but I could always carry a felony without benefit of clergy." In almost all acts of police, there is more or less of vexatious and interfering legislation, because those who undertake to direct the morals of the poor, are generally ignorant of the habits of the poor, and consequently frame enactments that provoke their own violation.

It is with morality as with vitality; the forms of vice and the forms of death are multiplied, but criminality and mortality are not increased. We may look on our criminal statutes as on the boxes and bottles of an apothecary's shop; remedies are provided for diseases of which our ancestors never heard, or to which they submitted as trifling inconveniences unworthy of notice. On the first appearance of a cough we hasten to gargles, pills, mixtures, and all the combinations of drugs that can be expressed in bad writing and worse Latin. With them, the cough often continued to the coffin. In spite however of the multitudinous diseases, and in spite or in consequence of the still more multitudinous drugs, there is no statistical fact better ascertained, than that the average duration of human life has been increased by the progress of civilization.

Let the tables of criminality be examined like the tables of mortality-look not to the numerical amount of diseases or of crimes, but to the absolute amount of guilt and of death. Thus viewed, the official returns which have been published, and which seem to prove an increase in the number and variety of crimes, are far from being discouraging: they do not justify the

feelings of apprehension, with which the progress of humanity is so often viewed, nor the cry of alarm that is so often raised;* they do indeed hold out motives for continued exertion and increased energy-for measures of prevention and vigilance-not to stop the progress of degradation, but to accelerate the advance of amelioration.

It has been necessary to depart a little from the usual order of viewing the social relations of the state to its members, and to consider protection of property before protection of person, because the two most common errors respecting civilization are connected with property: the first, that property is the creature of society; and the second, that violations of property are produced by civilization. Though few hold these. opinions in their extremes, they are found very commonly mixed up with most speculations and reasonings on the subject, and it was therefore necessary to remove difficulties which lay at the very threshold of our inquiries.

* "Alarm," says Dr. Dewey, "appears to be one of the epidemic diseases of the age. Every religious association, every little spiritual coterie, every school of sect, speculation, and philanthopy, is trembling for the fate of the world. Now, the philosophy of the world is going to ruin it; then, its extravagance, intemperance, licentiousness, is to do the work; then popery, heresy, infidelity, is elevated to this bad eminence in mischief. The danger from some of these quarters I freely admit; but is it really worth while to observe through how many prophecies of ruin, through how many critical and doomed periods, the world has lived. Truly, one is sometimes tempted to say to these alarmists-Good sirs, have a little patience, the world is likely to last our time; the purposes of Providence will stand, though you be disappointed in some of your favourite theories and projects." Moral Views of Commerce, etc., p. 215.

CHAPTER V.

SOCIAL RELATIONS-PERSONAL SECURITY.

We have shewn that the State is natural to man, and exists of necessity; but there remain two points to be examined, which are very commonly misrepresented. It is often said, that "every man, coming into society, abandons a portion of his natural rights to protect the remainder." No man ever did any such thing; the state exists, not to absorb individuality, but to enable each individual to obtain the true ends of his existence. It takes away no natural right, it only requires that each right should be advantageously exercised. It does not necessarily deprive a man of freedom, it only prevents each from injuring the other. A man is not robbed of his gun when he is forbidden to shoot his neighbour, nor is he deprived of the use of his limbs when prevented from committing an assault. The dream of a social compact, that is of individual men agreeing to form a society, has perplexed a very simple subject, and led to the sophism, that the prohibition of the abuse is a restriction on the use. But the laws of nature would be as great restraints as the laws of society were this the case: a man may walk as he pleases, but if he throw the centre of gravity backward or forward too much, he will get a severe fall; he may exercise his hands as he pleases, but if he

cut the carotid artery he will die; he may eat what he likes, but he will not find arsenic safe food, nor Prussic acid wholesome drink. The state, in directing the use and preventing the abuse of the human faculties and powers, does no more than what nature itself has done. Hence the eminent Selden, in his notes to Fortescue, truly says, "But in truth, and to speak without perverse affectation, all laws in general are originally equally ancient. All were grounded upon nature, and no nation was, that out of it took not their grounds; and nature being the same in all, the beginning of all must be the same." Victor Cousin, in his History of Philosophy, takes a more extensive view. "That which men have been pleased to call society, in a state of nature is nothing more than a state of war, where the right of the strongest reigns, and the idea of justice comes not at all, or comes only to be trodden under foot by passion. . . . . Justice established, constitutes the state. The use of the state is to cause justice to be respected by means of force; and it acts in conformity with an idea which is inherent in that of justice, to wit, that injustice ought not only to be repressed but punished. The state takes no notice of the infinite variety of human elements which were conflicting amidst the chaos and confusion of natural society; it does not embrace the whole man; it considers him only in the relations of the just and the unjust that is to say, as capable of committing or receiving an injury-that is to say again, as capable of impeding or being impeded by others, by fraud or violence, in the exercise of that agency which, so far as it is inoffensive, ought to be voluntary and free. Hence

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