For the next few years the history of the kingdom is one of progressive correction of abuses or defects. The King paid visits to Ireland and Scotland, parts of his dominions which his father had never once visited, and in both was received with the most exultant and apparently sincere acclamations. And, though one great calamity fell on the ministry in the loss of Lord Castlereagh-who, in a fit of derangement, brought on by the excitement of overwork, unhappily laid violent hands on himself-his death, sad as it was, could not be said to weaken or to affect the general policy of the cabinet. Indeed, as he was replaced at the Foreign Office by his old colleague and rival, Mr. Canning, in one point of view the administration may be said to have been strengthened by the change, since, as an orator, Canning had confessedly no equal in either House of Parliament. Another change was productive of still more practical advantage. Lord Sidmouth retired from the Home Office, and was succeeded by Mr. Peel, previously Secretary for Ireland; and the transfer of that statesman to an English office facilitated reforms, some of which were as yet little anticipated even by the new Secretary himself. The earliest of them, and one not the least important in its bearing on the well-doing of society, the mitigation of the severity of our Criminal Code, was, indeed, but the following up of a series of measures in the same direction which had been commenced in the time of the Duke of Portland's second administration, and, it must be added, in spite of its resistance. The influence of various trades, and of the owners of different kinds of property, pressing in turns upon our legislators, had rendered our code the most sanguinary that had, probably, ever existed in Christendom. Each class of proprietor regarded only the preservation of his own property, and had no belief in the efficacy of any kind of protection for it, except such as arose from the fear of death; nor any doubt that he was justified in procuring the infliction of that penalty to avert the slightest loss to himself. The consequence was that, at the beginning of the present century, there were above two hundred offences the perpetrators of which were liable to capital punishment, some of a very trivial character, such as cutting down a hop-vine in a Kentish hop-garden, robbing a rabbit-warren or a fish-pond, personating an out-pensioner of Greenwich Hospital, or even being found on a high-road with a blackened face, the intention to commit a crime being inferred from the disguise, even though no overt act had been committed. An act of Elizabeth made picking a pocket a capital offence; another, passed as late as the reign of William III., affixed the same penalty to shop-lifting, even when the article stolen might not exceed the value of five shillings. And the fault of these enactments was not confined to their unreasonable cruelty; they were as mischievous even to those whom they were designed to protect as they were absurd, as some owners began to perceive. In the list of capital offences was that of stealing linen from a bleaching-ground. And a large body of bleachers presented a petition to Parliament entreating the repeal of the statute which made it such on the ground that, practically, it had been found not to strike terror into the thieves, but almost to secure them impunity from the reluctance of juries to find a verdict which would sentence a fellow-creature to the gallows for such an offence.
Nor was this by any means the only instance in which the barbarity of the law defeated its object. And its combined impolicy and inhumanity had some years before attracted the notice of Sir Samuel Romilly, who had been Solicitor-general in the administration of 1806, and who, shortly after its dissolution, began to apply himself to the benevolent object of procuring the repeal of many of the statutes in question, and in the course of a few years did succeed in obtaining the substitution of milder penalties for several of the less flagitious offences. He died in 1818; but the work which he had began was continued by Sir James Mackintosh, a man of even more conspicuous ability, and one who could adduce his own experience in favor of the changes which he recommended to the Parliament, since he had filled the office of Recorder of Bombay for eight years, and had discharged his duties with a most diligent and consistent avoidance of capital punishment, which he had never inflicted except for murder; his lenity, previously unexampled in that land, having been attended with a marked diminution of crime. He procured the substitution of milder penalties in several additional cases; and at last, in 1822, he carried a resolution engaging the House of Commons "the next session to take into its serious consideration the means of increasing the efficacy of the criminal law by abating its undue rigor." And this success had the effect of inducing the new minister to take the question into his own hands. Peel saw that it was one which, if it were to be dealt with at all, ought to be regulated by the government itself, and not be left to independent members, who could not settle it with satisfactory completeness; and therefore, in 1823, he introduced a series of bills to carry out the principle implied in Mackintosh's resolution of the preceding year, not only simplifying the law, but abolishing the infliction of capital punishment in above a hundred cases. He was unable to carry out his principle as fully as he could have desired. The prejudice in favor of still retaining death as a punishment for forgery was too strong for even his resolution as yet to overbear, though many private bankers supplied him with the same arguments against it in their case which had formerly been alleged by the bleachers. But the example which he now set, enforced as it was with all the authority of the government, was followed in many subsequent sessions, till at last our code, instead of the most severe, has become the most humane in Europe, and death is now never inflicted except for murder, or crimes intended or calculated to lead to murder. It is worth remarking, however, that neither Romilly, Mackintosh, nor Peel ever entertained the slightest doubt of the right of a government to inflict capital punishment. In the last address which Mackintosh delivered to the grand-jury at Bombay he had said: "I have no doubt of the right of society to inflict the punishment of death on enormous crimes, wherever an inferior punishment is not sufficient. I consider it as a mere modification of the right of self-defence, which may as justly be exercised in deterring from attack as in repelling it."[187] And in his diary, when speaking of a death-warrant which he had just signed, he says: "I never signed a paper with more perfect tranquillity of mind. I felt agitation in pronouncing the sentence, but none in subscribing the warrant; I had no scruple of conscience on either occasion."
And it seems that his position is unassailable. The party whose interest is to be kept in view by the Legislature in imposing punishments on offences is society, the people at large, not the offender. The main object of punishment is to deter rather than to reform; to prevent crime, not to take vengeance on the criminal. And, if crime be more effectually prevented by moderate than by severe punishments, society has a right to demand, for its own security (as a matter of policy, not of justice), that the moderate punishment shall, on that ground, be preferred. That punishments disproportioned in their severity to the magnitude of the offence often defeated their object was certain. Not only had jurymen been known to confess that they had preferred violating their oaths to doing still greater violence to their consciences, by sending a man to the gallows for a deed which, in their opinion, did not deserve it, but the very persons who had been injured by thefts or forgeries were often deterred from prosecution of the guilty by the knowledge that the forfeiture of their lives must follow their conviction. It was almost equally certain that criminals calculated beforehand on the chance of impunity which the known prevalence of these feelings afforded them. Wherever the sympathy of the public does not go along with the law, it must, to a great extent, fail; and that the terrible frequency of sanguinary punishment had failed in all its objects, was proved by the fact that, in spite of the numerous executions which took place, crimes increased in a still greater proportion than the population. Under the reformed system, now first inaugurated on an extensive scale, crimes have become rarer, detection and punishment more certain-a combination of results which must be the object equally of the law-giver and the philanthropist.