persons of distinction, he was sentenced to be burnt as a calumniator." It is very extraordinary, that they should thus proportion the punishments betwixt the crime of high-treason and that of calumny. This puts me in mind of a saying of Charles II. king of Great Britain. He saw a man one day standing in the pillory; upon which he asked what crime the man had committed. He was answered, Please your Majesty, he has wrote a libel against your ministers. The fool! said the king, why did not he write against me? they would have done nothing to him. "Seventy persons having conspired against the emperor Basil*, he ordered them to be whipt, and the hair of their heads and beards to be burnt. A stag one day having taken hold of him by the girdle with his horn, one of his retinue drew his sword, cut the girdle, and saved him; upon which he ordered that person's head to be cut off, for having, said he, drawn his sword against his sovereign." Who could imagine that the same prince could ever have passed two such different judgments? It is a great abuse amongst us to condemn to the same punishment a person that only robs on the high-way, and another who robs and murders. Surely, for the public security, some difference should be made in the punishment. In China, those who add murder to robbery, are cut in pieces +; but not so the others; to this difference it is owing, that though they rob in that country, they never murder. In Russia, where the punishment of robbery and murder is * In Nicephorus's History. + Du Halde, tom. i. p. 6, the same, they always murder*. The dead, say they, tell no tales. Where there is no difference in the penalty, there should be some in the expectation of pardon. In England they never murder on the high-way, because robbers have some hopes of transportation, which is not the case in respect to those that commit murder. Letters of grace are of excellent use in moderate governments. This power which the prince has of pardoning, exercised with prudence, is capable of producing admirable effects. The principle of despotic government, which neither grants nor receives any pardon, deprives it of these advantages. * Present State of Russia, by Perry. MR. CLARKSON. FROM HIS PORTRAITURE OF QUAKERISM. PUBLISHED IN THE YEAR 1807. I FIND it almost impossible to proceed to the great courts of meetings of the Society, which I had allotted for my next subject, without stopping awhile to make a few observations on the principles of that part of the discipline, which I have now explained. It may be observed, first, that the great object of this part of the discipline is the reformation of the offending person. Secondly, that the means of effecting this object consists of religious instruction and advice. And, thirdly, that no pains are to be spared, and no time to be limited, for the trial of these means; or, in other words, that nothing is to be left undone, while there is a hope that the offender may be reclaimed. Now these principles the Quakers adopt in the exercise of their discipline, because as a Christian community, they believe they ought to be guided only by Christian principles, and they know of no other, which the letter or the spirit of Christianity can warrant. I shall trespass upon the patience of the reader in this place, only till I have made an application of these principles, or till I have shewn him how far these might be extended, and extended with advantage to morals, beyond the limits of the Quaker Society, by being received as the basis, upon which a system of penal laws might be founded among larger societies, or states. It is much to be lamented that nations professing Christianity, should have lost sight, in their various acts of legislation, of Christian principles, or that they should not have interwoven some such beautiful principles as those, which we have seen adopted by the Quakers, into the system of their penal laws. But if this negligence or omission would appear worthy of regret, if reported of any Christian nation, it would appear most so if reported of our own, where one would suppose that the advantages of civil and religious liberty, and those of a reformed religion, would have had their influence in the correction of our judgments, and in the benevolent dispositions of our will. And yet nothing is more true than that these good influences have either never been produced, or, if produced, that they have never been attended to upon this subject. There seems to be no provi sion for religious instruction in our numerous prisons. We seem to make no patient trials of those, who are confined in them, for their reformation; but, on the other hand, we seem to hurry them off the stage of life, by means of a code which annexes death to two hundred different offences, as if we had allowed our laws to have been written by the bloody pen of the pagan Draco. And it seems remarkable that this system should be persevered in, when we consider that death, as far as the experiment has been made in our own country, has little or no effect as a punishment for crimes. Forgery, and the circulation of forged paper, and the counterfeiting of the money of the realm, are capital offences, and are never pardoned. And yet no offences are more frequently committed than these. And it seems still more remarkable when we consider, in addition to this, that, in consequence of the experiments made in other countries, it seems to be approaching fast to an axiom, that crimes are less frequent in proportion as mercy takes the place of severity, or as there are judicious substitutes for the punishment of death. I shall not inquire, in this place, how far the right of taking away life on many occasions, which is sanctioned by the law of the land, can be supported on the ground of justice, or how far a greater injury is done by it, than the injury the criminal has himself done. As Christians, it seems that we should be influenced by Christian principles. Now, nothing can be more true, than that Christianity commands us to be tender-hearted one to another, to have a tender forbearance one with another, and to regard one another as brethren. We are taught also that men, independently of their accountableness to their own governments, are accountable for their actions in a future state, and that pu nishments are unquestionably to follow. But where are our forbearance and our love; where is our regard for the temporal and eternal interests of man; where is our respect for the principles of the Gospel-if we make the reformation of a criminal a less object than his punishment; or if we consign him to death in the midst of his sins, without having tried all the means in our power for his recovery? Had the Quakers been the legislators of the world, they had long ago interwoven the principles of their discipline into their penal codes, and death had been long ago abolished as a punishment for crimes. As far as they have had any power with legislatures, they have procured an attention to these principles. George Fox remonstrated with the judges in his time on the subject of capital punishments. But the Quakers having been few in number, compared with the rest of their countrymen, and having had no seats in the legislature, and no predominant interest with the members of it, they have been unable to effect any change in England on this subject. In Pennsylvania, however, where they were the original colonists, they have had influence with their own government, and they have contributed to set up a model of jurisprudence worthy of the imitation of the world. William Penn, on his arrival in America, formed a code of laws chiefly on quaker-principles, in which, however, death was inscribed as a punishment, but it was confined to murder. Queen Anne set this code aside, and substituted the statute and common law of the mother country. It was, however, resumed in time, and acted upon for some years; when it was set aside by the mother country again. From this time it continued dormant till the separation of America from England. But no sooner had this event taken place, which rendered the American states their own legislators, than the Pennsylvanian Quakers |