every word was law, being ever at his elbow to make a faithful record of his sayings. From the windows of his well-stored library, he looked out upon society as a vast machine, of which every member was a little wheel, and which only needed to be adjusted according to his plans, to make the whole move harmoniously, without jarring or discord. In framing his universal codes, he made too little account of those individualities and idiosyncrasies in human character, which constitute each man's mental and moral peculiarities more or less different from every other man's, and which always have rendered, and always will render, every system nugatory that attempts to govern all mankind by the same laws. There are striking resemblances in human countenances; yet the world does not furnish any two that are exactly alike. There are marked resemblances in human character; yet the race does not afford any two that are pre- · cisely similar. And, until one portrait shall answer as the likeness of two faces, yea, of two nations of faces, will it continue to be impossible to furnish a code of laws that shall answer for the government of all peoples, or, shall be so perfect, that when applied to the government of a single people, it will not need to be constantly altered to suit new exigencies in the ever-shifting phase of human affairs-and these alterations will be always driving society towards those very difficulties from which Mr. Bentham would fain extricate it by his "code for any state."

The defect in Mr. Bentham's mind, to which we have referred, arose no doubt in part from his slight acquaintance with the actual practice of the law, and his total want of experience in the work of legislation. Although he might not have been so profound a legislative philosopher, he would have been a far more practical legal reformer, if he had divided his time between abstract contemplation in his secluded library, and professional contests in Westminster Hall; between the composition of theoretical codes in his quaint old house in Queen's Square, and the ordinary business of legislation in St. Stephen's Chapel. Occasional collisions with his professional brethren at the bar and on the bench, would have suggested new trains of thought. These would have led to the modification of his theories. The conflicts of the forum would have made him better acquainted with the objections which his opponents offered to his legislative plans, and the arguments by which they fortified their own. These would have induced a careful survey of his own ground, and a comparison of it with that occupied by his antagonist, and might have suggested many improvements in his system.

In the particulars we have noted, Mr. Bentham did not differ from the mass of those philosophers-often wiser and better than their cotemporaries who dwell much in the world of abstract speculation, and mingle little in the practical business of life. Just in proportion to their lack of experience in the common-place work of reducing theories to practice, is their confidence in the perfection of their systems. It is when the attempt is made to put them into actual use, that they are found to partake more or less of those imperfections which pertain to all human inventions. And, never participating in these attempts, speculative philosophers, lacking the instructions which such attempts are alone capable of imparting, are wont to impute the partial failure of their systems to anything rather than their own inherent defects, or their want of adaptation to the nature of the objects to which they are applied.

About the year 1816, Mr. Bentham made a formal offer to the governors

of the several states of the American Union, to prepare a code of laws for each state. Some four or five years afterwards, he made a similar offer to all nations professing liberal opinions. These singular proposals, which, as all ordinary men foresaw, brought no acceptances of his offers from those to whom they were addressed, are striking illustrations of his fondness for generalization, of his confidence in the perfection and universal applicability of his system, of his comprehensive benevolence and child-like simplicity, and of that rare combination of excellencies and defects which made up his character.

The labors of this great and good man were of invaluable service to the cause in which he spent nearly sixty years of his life. Though he took no direct share either in the enactment or administration of the laws, his was the master-mind that set other minds in motion; his genius, the spring that operated a vast and powerful reformatory machine. His various treatises contained all the general outlines, and much of the filling up of the numerous improvements which other hands subsequently wrought into the judiciary, and impressed upon the legislation of England. Not a single reform has been recently effected in the English law, but its germ may be found in his works, while some are almost literal transcripts of his writings. Most of these improvements, whether in the judiciary or in the general polity of the country, have been secured through the direct influence of men proud to ackowledge themselves his disciples, while others have been effected by those who were either not aware of the extent to which they were his debtors, or were too mean to acknowledge their obligations to the man who had created the public opinion which they were swift to follow. He lived to see the fruits of his toil in the amelioration of a sanguinary penal code, and especially in the abridgment of the number of capital offences; in the partial reformation of the penitentiary system, and the kindlier treatment of prisoners; in the softening of the rigors of the system of bankruptcy, of imprisonment for debt, and of the laws for the enforcement of pecuniary obligations; in the infusion of a little of the leaven of Christian charity into the poor-laws, and the game laws; in the retrenchment of costs, and the simplification of the practice, in the equity and common law courts; in the appointment of commissioners, selected from among the ablest lawyers of the kingdom, to revise and codify the penal law, to remodel and consolidate the law of real property, and to inquire into and propose remedies for the manifold abuses that infested the Court of Chancery; in the abolition of sacramental tests, and the emancipation of the Catholics; and in the enlargement of the electoral suffrage, the utter demolition of the system of rotten boroughs, and the partial equalization of parliamentary representation.

Upon each of the subjects we have specified, Bentham wrote and published, and in respect to most of them, he wrote and published early and elaborately. He did not live to see either of these reforms carried forward to the point of improvement which his far-penetrating sagacity had reached, while the accomplishment of others that he had initiated or advocated, was postponed; some to be taken up and adopted after his death; some to repose upon their merits till the dawning of better days. But, the great and all-embracing object at which he aimed through life, was secured, and his aged eye rejoiced in the sight of its consummation. He broke the spell which the common law had so long held over the minds of his countrymen. He saw the conviction penetrating a large share of the

intelligence of the nation, and spreading through foreign states and colonies where this system bore sway; but however creditable it might be to the remote times in which it originated, it was unworthy of the genius and unsuited to the wants of an age so enlightened, liberal and enterprising as ours, and, when measured by the standards which now surround it, so far from being "the perfection of reason," it was a disgrace to the human understanding, and the homage paid at its altars a blind and degrading idolatry.

Among the greatest of the unquestioning disciples of Bentham, may be reckoned DUMONT, MILL and BoWRING. M. Dumont, a native of Geneva, a man of acute mind, liberal principles, and extensive acquirements, edited, and in part reduced to writing, several of his most important works, translating them into French, preparing them for the press, and publishing them in Paris. This accomplished scholar was of invaluable service to his friend. He did more than condense and arrange the materials put into his hands. He systematized and illustrated them; often, in respect of methodical adjustment and felicity of style, bringing order out of confusion, and light out of darkness. It was to his luminous pen that Bentham was indebted for the wide celebrity he enjoyed on the continent, before he was hardly known in England. This, coupled with the fact that many of his writings first appeared in the French language, led one of our American Reviews into the very natural error of calling him "a distinguished Frenchman." Mr. James Mill, author of the History of British India, did more, probably, to diffuse the principles of Bentham through England, than any other man. During the last twenty or twenty-five years of Bentham's life, Mill was his familiar associate, and enjoyed his entire confidence. He illustrated his system in several able articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica. His son, Mr. John Stuart Mill, author of the work on Logic, prepared for the press Bentham's great treatise on the Rationale of Evidence. Dr. Bowring, whom Bentham describes as his most intimate and confidential friend for twelve years, was associated with him in founding and conducting the Westminster Review, was ever his warm eulogist, was appointed his executor, and has edited his works.

Though Dumont, Mill, and Bowring gave a wide diffusion to the principles of Bentham, it is to Romilly, MacIntosh, and Brougham, that England is more especially indebted for their partial application to the juridical and legislative systems of that country. Their positions as party chiefs and parliamentary leaders gave them opportunities for moulding them into the policy of the nation, which those gentlemen did not possess. The eminent standing of Romilly and Brougham at the English bar, and the reputation which MacIntosh had acquired by his administration of a judicial office in India, gave an influence among their professional brethren, to the reforms they recommended, which would not have been yielded to them had they rested solely upon the advocacy of any persons, however learned, standing outside of the bar. Professional men are apt to be unreasonably jealous of interference in the "art and mystery" of their craft, by those not of the brotherhood. The bar is not exempt from this infirmity. Its patience has been severely taxed, and its self-complacency a good deal disturbed, both in England and America, during the past thirty years, because of the heavy hand laid upon its venerable monopolies and occult practices by those who have some how learned, that the great body of the people, upon whom the laws are executed, have quite as much right

to understand them, and quite as much interest in their improvement, as the select few who administer them. Romilly, Brougham, and MacIntosh participated in these popular sentiments, and took no pains to disguise their sympathy with them. If this diminished to some extent their influence with the profession, (as it unquestionably did,) it gave them the favorable ear of the masses; and what they lost with the former, was more than made up by the latter; so that they stood in the influential position which lies between the learned prejudices of the bar and the unlearned antipathies of the people.

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY was one of the most accomplished lawyers that ever practised in the English courts. From 1806, when he was appointed Solicitor-General under the Grenville-Fox administration, to his lamented death, in 1818, he devoted much labor to effecting a general reform of the law, and particularly an amelioration of the criminal code. When he commenced his philanthropic work, he found this code rigorous in its precepts, sanguinary in its penalties, abused in its administration, fortified by the approbation of judges, lawyers, and divines, and hedged around by the general sentiment of the country. Blackstone, in his Commentaries, had previously stated (and the severity of the law had then scarcely been abated since he wrote) that "among the variety of actions which men are liable daily to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty are declared by act of parliament to be felonies, without benefit of clergy; or in other words, to be worthy of instant death."

We will enumerate some of the offences made capital by the legislature of this Christian nation. Murder, treason, and rape; counterfeiting, forgery, and altering judicial records; refusing, under certain circumstances, to take the oath of allegiance; obstructing the service of legal process; hunting in the night, disguised in a mask; writing threatening letters, to extort money; pulling down turnpike gates; assembling to cause riots, and not dispersing at the command of a magistrate; transporting wool or sheep out of the kingdom, the second time; smuggling; wandering as gipsies for thirty days; taking a reward for restoring stolen goods, when accessory to the larceny; committing burglary in the night time; robbing on the highway, to the value of a penny; stealing from the person, property to the value of more than a shilling, and from a dwelling, above the value of five shillings, and from a vessel, above the value of forty shillings; stealing fish from ponds, hares from warrens, and conies from the woods; and committing various malicious trespasses upon private property, as throwing down fences, demolishing fish-ponds, destroying trees in parks and gardens, maiming cattle and horses. We exhibit these as lively features of a code, the offspring of a grim and bloody age, which had obtruded its horrid visage into the sunlight of the year eighteen hundred of the Christian era; which had been eulogized by the gentle and classic Blackstone; been pronounced "a mild and cautious system of penal jurispru dence," in a work on Moral Philosophy, by Archdeacon Paley; and was generally approved by a nation that expended ten millions sterling annually to support an established church, and lifted its holy hands in horror at the atrocities and infidelities of its French neighbors.

To the honor of human nature be it recorded, that considerable portions of this Draconian code had become comparatively a dead letter, in the times of which we write. In cases of extreme hardship, the ingenuity of philanthropic lawyers often opened a way of escape for the prisoner

through the loose texture of some statute; the subtlety of humane judges would sometimes aid counsel in refining away the plain meaning of an indictment, so that the wretch who had killed and eaten the hare that poached on his garden might go without day; and the pity of the jury would not unfrequently get the better of their senses and their oaths, while boldly declaring through their verdict, that property which the thief had refused to sell for a crown, was worth but eleven pence. These, and such like expedients, to save lives which the law clamored to sacrifice, strengthened rather than weakened the argument for the abrogation of those parts of the code thus practically nullified by abuses in their administration. But the advocates for harsh and vindictive laws, and especially the champions of the gallows, contended that they ought to remain on the statutebook as a terror to evil doers.

For the work to which he devoted himself, Romilly possessed rare qualifications. Standing at the head of the equity bar, with a mind at once capacious and acute, a well-balanced judgment, and a taste classically pure, a dignity of manner which commanded respect, and an honesty of purpose which silenced calumny, a soul cast in the largest mould, and a heart ever awake to the calls of humanity, and an eloquence which informed the reason and delighted the fancy, he was the model lawyer of his time.

In 1808, he carried through Parliament a bill repealing so much of the penal law as made the stealing of property from the person above the value of twelve pence, a capital crime. But, even then, he was unable to induce the legislature to fix the point at which the offence became capital, higher than £15. This bill, and another of a similar character, had glided through Parliament without exciting general attention. The next year, he brought in bills to abolish the death-penalty for stealing property from a shop above the value of five shillings, and from a vessel above that of forty. He sustained them by a speech abounding in rare and valuable facts concerning the statistics of crime, showing that it was the certainty rather than the severity of punishment which deterred from the commission of offences, and proving that notwithstanding the rigor of the laws, capital crimes had steadily increased in number during the last hundred years; luminous in its exposition of the only legitimate and righteous ends to be accomplished by a penal code, the safety of the community, and the reformation of the criminal; eloquent in its eulogiums of the humane and liberalizing tendencies of the age; and avowing that these bills were introduced to test the temper of the House, and ascertain whether it would encourage him to enter upon a cautious and gradual reformation of the whole penal code. The friends of the code were thoroughly alarmed, and they summoned its champions to the rescue. Not only were the bills defeated, but an excitement was kindled that swept through the land. Divines preached in favor of retaining the death-penalty unabridged and unimpaired; statesmen declaimed against the reckless spirit of innovation that was abroad; judges frowned from under their flowing wigs at him who had dared to lay rude hands upon the judicial fabric which " our wise forefathers" had erected; while reviewers in dull monthlies and penny-aline pamphleteers, ranting tory orators, and nervous old women, took up the hue and cry, and rung the changes upon "the democracy of Jeremy Bentham," and "the horrors of the French revolution."

Romilly met this clamor by publishing the substance of his speech in