Untitled

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 190, 12 August 1871, Page 2

Crime and Punishment. — The curiosities of literature are as nothing compared to the curiosities of law. At the Criminal Sessions, which commenced last Monday, Patrick Murtha, a middle-aged man, was convicted of an indecentassaulton a girl only six years old. His Honor the acting Chief Justice, in passing sentence, alluded to the enormity of the crime and its fatal and lasting effects on bis unfortunate victim. " The punishment," he said, " for such offences ought to be severe, and should increase with the age of the offender." In this opinion no one will feel inclined to gainsay him. Actuated by such ideas, he proceeded to pass sentence, and everything would have led us to expect that it would be a severe one. It was to be awarded to one of the most hateful crimes that can be imagined, the enormity of which the presiding judge had just dwelt on. What then was awarded the ruffian — five years and a few sound floggings? Nothing of the sort; two years imprisonment, with that light and amusing occupation which i 3 denominated " hard labor," was the "severe punishment" which is considered sufficient to expiate a loathsome crime. What makes the matter all the more remarkable ia that on the same day a young man was found guilty on two charges of forging and uttering cheques for some paltry amounts and sentenced to five years' imprisonment, with "gentle exercise." So it appears you may permanently debauch a young girl's mind and attach a stigma to her thoughout life, and escape with two years' imprisonment, but if you want to enjoy the luxury of imitating another man's signature and curtailing the amount of his bank account, you must be prepared to retire from the world for five years should you be unfortunate enough to be found out. To destroy a fellow-creature, soul and body, is no doubt wrong, if only because it makes one consumer the less with whom we can trade, but to lay sacrilegious hands upon a man's purse is the one unpardonable sin in the eyes of the law, which regards property as more precious than virtue and purity.— -Australasian.

Parliamentary Tale.— On this subject the Australasian writes as follows : — During the Parliamentary recess the daily papers succeed in presenting their readers with bo much interesting matter, that many persons must begin to wish that the custom of reporting debates in the Legislature were abolished, and that the public should be furnished instead with a concine summary, not of the platitudes talked, but, of the actual business transacted. We should .then discover how small is the proportion borne by the latter ito the former; and this would set the slow British mind thinking whether such a mediaeval institution as a House of Talk is adapted to the wants and circumstances of modern society, and whether the gathering together of 70 or 80 men, selected chiefly on account of their capability of talking fluent nonsense, for ; the purpose of transacting the business of the nation, is not a device worthier of the red Indians of America, or of the iuhabitauta of Laputa, than of a people which prides itself upon

its practical habits, and adopts as ohe of its maxims the aphorism that " time is money. It -was one of' the redeeming features of the recent revolution of the Commdng in Paris that it aimed, according td Mr. Frederic Harrison, at the abolition of "that demoralising nuisance, the unwieldy talking Parliament." They substituted for it a simple executive council. " Government by the parliamentary system, is government without real responsibility, without efficiency, and without simplicity. All of these are lost in the meshes of divided authority, and personal rivalries. Government, in a word, breaks down under the tangle of machinery which it has at work." It has no unity of authority, nor continuity of system. The very work which Parliaments are primarily organised to perform — that of legislation — is bly bungled. All s bills^have to be drafted by competent men outside, but in their passage through' both Houses they are pulled to pieces and patched without regard to coherency and consistency, by a body of men, the majority of whom know nothing of legal expression, and are wholly unaware of the effect of many of the alterations and " amendments" they^insist upon making. Take, again, the question of taxation, confessedly one of the most complicated and difficult branches of political science ; and look at the men to wh'oni you entrust the management of your public finances. How many of them could pass an examination in the second chapter of the fifth book of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ? Imagine the direction of the Bank of England entrusted to a dozen persons, consisting of junior clerks, messengers, and porters, and you would have something analogous to what takes place in some of these colonies by favor of the Parliamentary institutions which have been handed down to us from the middle ages, and have become the arena for

ignoble conflicts prompted by "loquacious vanity" and engaged in by pretentious mediocrity.

"Tommy, my son, what are you doing there with your feet dangling in the water?" " Trying to catch cold, ma, so that I may have some more of those cough lozenges you gave me yesterday."