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offender if it were legally a murder, or otherwise to punish him as for a murder, a felony, or mis- demeanour soberly committed, would be contrary to all scientific principles; since the effect would be neither to deter men from committing murders or other felonies, nor to deter them from getting drunk; inasmuch as men, when they get drunk, do not usually contemplate committing felonies and suffering the consequences. Nor, indeed, do men practically suffer the full legal consequences of the felonies they commit in and through drunkenness. In the practical administration of justice the maxim of law is used chiefly to exclude false pleas, which would be continually advanced if the law professed to admit drunken- ness in extenuation; and what really takes place is a haphazard compromise in the minds of Magistrates, Judges, and Juries, -according as their minds may be constituted, between a fal- lacious legal maxim and a just moral estimate. And such compromises, pervading as they do the administration of justice in many of its inci- dents, are not necessarily to be deprecated; for dogmatic principles and legal definitions must be perpetually pressing against their circumstantial limits in application and the right result must be sought by compromise. So far forth, there- fore, it is quite possible that the law, with all its apparent inconsequence, may be, in the choice of difficulties, the best that can be devised. But on the other hand, whilst recognizing to this almost hyperbolical extent the heinousness of drunken-
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ness in its criminal consequences, the law hardly so much as takes account of the thing itself,— overlooking the essence whilst it magnifies the accidents. But the thing itself, in its nature and ordinary and constaut accompaniments and results.
is of far more extensive and momentous operation for evil than the occasional crimes committed in drink however horrible; and even of heinous crimes it may well be believed, and indeed can scarcely be doubted, that far more spring from it as an indirect than as a direct result--far more Yet than can ever be distinetly traced to it. when the question is, not of offences great or small committed in and through drunkenness.
but of drunkenness itself as the source of all manner of misery and crime, the law of most countries halts and stumbles; and as to the law of Englaud, whether it be fegarded in letter or in administrative practice, it is impossible that any law of the kind could be at once more feeble in its purport and intent and more crippled in its executory provisions. By the 21st James 1, (cap. 7, sees. 1 & 3), a fine of 58. is imposed, to be levied by distress if not paid within a week. The alternative in default was six hours in the parish stocks, and is now, under the Small Penalties Act of 1865 (28 & 29 Viet. cap. 27, sec. 4), imprisonment for seven days-not, how- ever to take effect until the week allowed by the Act of James I for payment of the fine shall have elapsed. In this matter we seem to have forgotten more than we have learnt since the
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