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such punishments to be efficacious only when rare. This demands a doubt.

Frequency of offences concurrent with fre- quency of punishments in a country or a class, indicates a hardened state of the criminal mind in that country or class, and on this hardened state the fear of punishment will, no doubt, take less effect than it would on a more sensitive state. And if the administration of justice be somewhat reckless and uncertain (as perhaps it was in Lord Coke's time and as it certainly was 100 years ago, and more recently still in the Army and Navy), persons criminally disposed will be reckless too. But to say that offences are frequent because punishments are frequent, or that they are not less frequent than they would be if punishments were not so frequent, seems scarcely reasonable, and looks rather like the ordinary fallacy of attri- buting a relation of cause and effect to concomi- It would be tant effects of the same causes. desirable, however, to ascertain, if possible, whether there is any--and if any, much—-founda- tion for the opinion that corporal punishment It may well frequently inflicted loses its terrors. be that, whilst it is absolutely novel, it is more effective than after the novelty shall have worn off. Novelty will always add something to the impressiveness of objects acting upon the human imagination and sensibilities; but bodily pain must continue to be an object of certain and effective fear even when the particular form of I am of opinion, infliction ceases to be novel. therefore, so far as an opinion can be hazarded

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on reasonable presumptions without statistical data, that penal efficacy might be secured consis- tently with the abridgment of penal imprisonment and the early substitution of protective, by resort- ing to an immediate infliction of corporal punish- ment, as well as by inflicting the more severe forms of penal labour in the earlier stages of penal imprisonment.

If statistical data as to corporal punishment are not to be had at home, possibly they may be supplied from foreign countries or for a few years past from the East Indies. Lord Maenulay's code) followed Livingston's in rejecting corporal punisla“ ment; but after that punishment had been pro- vided for robbery with violence by the English Act of 1863, the East Indian Legislature passed an Act (No. VI of 1864) applying the punishment

to a long list of offences and with much more severity than is authorized by the English Act. This Indian Act ennets (See. 7), that no person shall be punished with whipping who is sentenced to penal servitude or imprisonment for more than five years. The purpose may have been to enable the Judges, by availing themselves of corporal punishment, to pass sentences of shorter imprison- ment, and in so far the system would be more or less analogous to mine.

But in enacting laws for the infliction of corporal punishment it may be necessary to inquire whether the Courts of Justice are likely to give effect to them if only enabling, and should the Courts be unlikely to give effect to them, whether the law should not constrain them

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