everywhere indicate what is there considered good.
The observer must give his attention to this. Among a people "whose merchants are princes," the praise of the departed will be in a different strain from that which will be found among a warlike nation, or a community of agriculturists. Here one may find monumental homage to public spirit, in the form of active citizenship; there to domestic virtue as the highest honour. The glory of eminent station, of ancient family, of warlike deeds, and of courtly privileges may be conspicuously exhibited in one district; while in another the dead are honoured in proportion to their contempt of human greatness, even when won by achievements; to their having lived with a sole regard "to things unseen and eternal." An inscription which breathes the pride of a noble family in telling that "all the sons were brave, and all the daughters chaste," presents a summary of the morals of the age and class to which it belongs. It tells that the supreme honour of men was to be brave, and of women to be chaste; excluding the supposition of each sharing the virtue of the other: whereas, when courage and purity shall be understood in their full signification, it will have become essential to the honour of a noble family that all the sons should be also pure, and all the daughters brave. Then bravery will signify moral rather than physical courage, and purity of mind will be considered no attribute of sex.
Even the nature of the public services commemorated, where public service is considered the highest praise, may indicate much. It is a fact of no small significance whether a man is honoured after death for having made a road, or for having founded a monastery, or endowed a school; whether he introduced a new commodity, or erected a church; whether he marched adventurously in the pursuit of conquest, or fought bravely among his native mountains to guard the homes of his countrymen from aggression. The German, the French, the Swiss monuments of the present century all tell the common tale that men have lived and died: but with what various objects did they live! and in what a variety of hope and heroism did they die! All were proud of their respective differences while they lived; and, now that their contests are at an end, they afford materials of speculation to the stranger who ponders upon their tombs.
A variety, perhaps a contrariety of praise, may be found in the epitaphs of a country, a city, or a single cemetery. Where this diversity is found, it testifies to the diversity of views held, and therefore to the freedom of the prevailing religious sentiment. Everywhere, however, there is an affection and esteem for certain virtues. Disinterestedness, fidelity, and love are themes of praise everywhere. Some may have no sympathy for the deeds of the warrior, and others for the discoveries of the philosopher and the adventurer; but the honoured parent, the devoted child, the philanthropic citizen, are sure of their tribute from all hearts.
Even if there were a variety of praise proportioned to the diversity of hearts and minds that utter it, the inscriptions of a cemetery cannot but breathe a spirit which must animate, more or less, the morals of the society. For instance, the cemetery of Père la Chaise utters, from end to end, one wail. It is all mourning, and no hope. Every expression of grief, from tender regret to blank despair, is to be found there; but not a hint of consolation, except from memory. All is over, and the future is vacant. A remarkable contrast to this is seen in the cemetery of Mount Auburn, Massachusetts. The religious spirit of New England is that which has hope for one of its largest elements, and which was believed by the Puritan fathers to forbid the expression of sorrow. One of those fathers made an entry in his journal, in the early days of the colony, that it had pleased God to take from him by an accident his beloved son Henry, whom he committed to the Lord's mercy;--and this was all. In a similar spirit are the epitaphs at Mount Auburn framed. There is a religious silence about the sorrows of the living, and every expression of joy, thanksgiving, and hope for the dead. One who had never heard of death, might take this for the seed-field of life; for the oratory of the happy; for the heaven of the hopeful. Parents invite their children from the grave to follow them. Children remind their parents that the term of separation will be short; and all repose their hopes together on an authority which is to them as stable and comprehensive as the blue sky which is over all.--What a contrast is here! and how eloquent as to the moral views of the respective nations!
There is not a domestic attachment or social relation which is not necessarily modified, elevated, or depressed by the conviction of its being transient or immortal,--an end or means to a higher end. Though human hearts are so far alike as that there must be a hope of reunion, more or less defined and assured, in all who love, and a practical falling below the elevation of this hope in those even who enjoy the strongest assurance,--yet the moral notions of any society must be very different where the ground of hope is taken for granted, and where it is kept wholly out of sight.
* * * * * The observer may obtain further light upon the moral ideas of a people by noting the degree of their Attachment to Kindred and Birth-place.
This species of attachment is so natural, that none are absolutely without it; but it varies in degree, according as the moral taste of the people goes to enhance or to subdue it. The Swiss and the American parent both send their children abroad; but with what different feelings and views! The Swiss father dismisses his daughter to teach in a school at Paris or London, and his sons to commerce or war. He resigns himself to a hard necessity, and supports them with suggestions of the honour of virtuous independence, and of the delight of returning when it is achieved. They, in their exile, can never see a purple shade upon a mountain side, a gleaming sheet of water, or a nestling village, without a throb of the heart, and a sickening longing for home.--The New England mother, with her tribe of children around her on her hill-side farm, nourishes them with tales of the noble extent of their country,--how its boundary is ever shifting westwards, and what a wild life it is there in the forest, with the Red men for neighbours, and inexhaustible wealth in the soil, ready for the hand which shall have enterprise to work for it. She tells of one and another, but lately boys like her children, who are now judges and legislators,--founders of towns, or having counties named after them. As her young people grow up, they part off eagerly from the old farm,--one into a southern city, another into the western forest, a third to a prairie in a new territory; and the daughters marry, and go over the mountains too. The mother may have sighs to conceal, but she does conceal them; and the sons, so far from lingering,--are impatient till they are gone. Their idea of national honour,--both their patriotic and their personal ambition,--is concerned; and they welcome the hour of dispersion as the first step towards the great objects of their life. Some return to the old neighbourhood to take a wife; but they do not think of passing their second childhood where they spent their first,--any more than the Greek colonists who swarmed from their narrow native districts. The settlers of the west go there, not to obtain a certain amount of personal property, but land, station, and power.--How different again are the Scotch--the people of the strongest family attachments! In the modified and elevated feudalism of clanship, pride and love of kindred constitute the animating social principle. Their clan-music is to them what the Ranz de Vaches is to the Swiss: the one echoing the harmonics of social intercourses, as the other revives the melodies of mountain life.
Through the love of kindred, the love of birth-place flourishes among the Scotch. The Highland emigrants in Canada not only clasp hands when they hear played the march of their clan, but wept when they found that heather would not grow in their newly-adopted soil.
* * * * * The traveller must talk with Old People, and see what is the character of the garrulity of age. He must talk with Children, and mark the character of the aspirations of childhood. He will thus learn what is good in the eyes of those who have passed through the society he studies, and in the hopes of those who have yet to enter upon it. Is it the aged mother's pride that her sons are all unstained in honour, and her daughters safe in happy homes? or does she boast that one is a priest, and another a peeress? Does the grandmother relate that all her descendants who are of age are "received church-members"? or that her favourite grandchild has been noticed by the emperor? Do the old men prose of a single happy love, or of exploits of gallantry? or of commercial success, or of political failure? What is the section of life to which the greatest number of ancient memories cling? Is it to struggles for a prince in disguise, or to a revolutionary conflict? Is it to the removal of a social oppression, or to a season of domestic trial, or to an accession of personal consequence? Is it the having acquired an office or a title? or the having assisted in the abolition of slavery? or the having conversed with a great author? or the having received a nod from a prince, or a curtsey from a queen? or have you to listen to details of the year of the scarcity, or the season of the plague?--What are the children's minds full of? The little West Indian will not talk of choosing a profession, any more than the infant Portuguese will ask for books. One nation of children will tell of the last saint's day, and another will refer every thing to the emperor.
Elsewhere you will be treated with legends without end; or you will be instructed about bargains and wages; or the boys will ask you why a king's son should be king whether the people like him or not; and the girls will whisper something to you about their brother being President some day. As the minds of the young are formed, generally speaking, to an adaptation to the objects presented to them, their preference of warlike to commercial, or literary to political honour, is an eloquent circumstance: and so of their sense of greatness in any direction,--whether it be of the physical order, or the intellectual, or the spiritual.
* * * * * From this, the transition is natural to the study of the character of the Pride of each nation. Learn what people glory in, and you learn much of both the theory and practice of their morals. All nations, like all individuals, have pride, sooner or later, in one thing or another. It is a stage through which they have to pass in their moral progression, and out of which the most civilized have not yet advanced, nor discerned that they will have to advance, though the passion becomes moderated at each remove from barbarism. It is by no means clear that the essential absurdity of each is relieved by its dilution. Hereafter, the most modern pride of the most civilized people may appear as ridiculous in its nature as the grossest conceit of utter barbarians now appears to us; but, still, the direction taken by the general pride must show what class of objects is held in most esteem.
The Chinese have no doubt that all other countries are created for the benefit of theirs; they call their own "the central empire," as certain philosophers once called our earth the centre round which everything else was to revolve. They call it the Celestial Empire, of which their ruler is the Sun: "they profess to rule barbarians by misrule, like beasts, and not like native subjects." Here we have the extreme of national pride, which must involve various moral qualities;--all the bad ones which are the consequence of ignorance, subservience to domestic despotism, and contempt of the race of man; and the good ones which are the consequence of national seclusion,--cheerful industry, social complacency, quietness, and order.--The Arab pride bears a resemblance to the Chinese, but is somewhat refined and spiritualized. The Arabs believe that the earth, "spread out like a bed," and upheld by a gigantic angel (the angel standing upon a rock, and the rock upon a bull, and the bull upon a fish, and the fish floating upon water, and the water upon darkness,)--that the earth, thus upheld, is surrounded by the Circumambient Ocean; that the inhabited part of the earth is to the rest but as a tent in the desert; and that in the very centre of this inhabited part is--Mecca. Their exclusive faith makes a part of their nationality, and their insolence shows itself eminently in their devotions. Their spiritual supremacy is their strong point; and they can afford to be somewhat less outwardly contemptuous to the race at large, from the certainty they have that all will be made plain and indisputable at last, when the followers of the Prophet alone will be admitted to bliss, and the punishments of the future world will be eternal to all but wicked Mahomedans. There will be found among the Arabs, in accordance with this pride, a strong mutual fidelity; and, among the best class of believers, a real devotion and a kindly compassion towards outcasts; while, among lower orders of minds, we may expect to witness the extreme exasperation of vindictiveness, insult, and rapacity.--We may pass over the pride of caste in India, of royal race in Africa, and the wild notions of Caribbean and Esquimaux dignity, which are almost as painful to contemplate as the freaks of pride in Bedlam. There is quite enough to look upon in the most civilized parts of the earth.--The whole national character of the Spaniards might be inferred from their particularly notorious pride; the quarterings of German barons are a popular joke; the French pride of military glory is an index to the national morals of France; while, in the United States, the pride of Washington and of territory is oddly combined and contrasted. Nothing can be more indicative of the true moral state of the Americans; they hang between the past and the future, with many of the feudal prepossessions of the past, mingled with the democratic aspirations which relate to the future. The ambition and pride of territory belong to the first, and their pride in the leader of their revolution to the last: he is their personification of that moral power to which they profess allegiance. The consequences of this arbitrary union of two kinds of national pride may be foreseen. The Americans unite some of the low qualities of feudalism with some of the highest of a more equal social organization. Without the first, slavery, cupidity, and ostentation could not exist to any great extent; without the others, there could not be the splendid moral conflict which we now see going on in opposition to slavery, nor the reverence for man which is the loveliest feature of American morals and manners.
From the aristocratic pride of the English the stranger might draw inferences no less correct. If it is found that there is scarcely a gamekeeper or a tradesman among us who is not stiffened with prejudices about rank; that gossips can tell what noblemen pay, and which do not pay, their tradesmen's bills; that persons who have never seen a lord can furnish all information about the genealogy and intermarriages of noble families; that every class is emulating the manners of the one above it; and that democratic principles are held chiefly in the manufacturing districts, or, if in country regions, among the tenantry of landlords of liberal politics;--the moral condition of such a people lies, as it were, mapped out beneath the eye of the observer. They must be orderly, eminently industrious, munificent in their grants to rulers, and mechanically oppressive to the lowest class of the ruled; nationally complacent, while wanting in individual self-respect; reverentially inclined towards the lofty minority, and contemptuously disposed towards the lowly majority of their race; a generous devotion being advantageously mingled, however, with the select reverence, and a kindly spirit of protection with the gross contempt. Such, to the eye of an observer, are the qualities involved in English pride. Upon this moral material, everywhere diffused, should the traveller observe and reflect.
* * * * * Man-worship is as universal a practice as that of the higher sort of religion. As men everywhere adore some supposed agents of unseen things, they are, in like manner, disposed to do homage to what is venerable when it is presented to their eyes in the actions of a living man. This man-worship is one of the most honourable and one of the most hopeful circumstances in the mind of the race. An individual here and there may scoff at the credulity of others, and profess unbelief in human virtue; but no society has ever yet wanted faith in man. Every community has its saints, its heroes, its sages,--whose tombs are visited, whose deeds are celebrated, whose words have become the rules by which men live.
Now, the moral taste of a people is nowhere more clearly shown than in its choice of idols. Of these idols there are two kinds;--those whose divinity is confirmed by the lapse of time, like Gustavus Adolphus among the Swedes, Tell in Switzerland, Henri IV. among the French, and Washington among the Americans; and those who are still living, and upon whose daily doings a multitude of eyes are fixed.
Those of the first class reign singly; their uncontested sway is over national character, as well as the affections of individual minds; and from their character may that of the whole people be, in certain respects, inferred. Who supposes that the Swiss would have been the same as they are, if Tell's character and deeds could have been hidden in oblivion from the moment those deeds were done? What would the Americans have been now if every impression of Washington could have been effaced from their minds fifty years ago? This is not the place in which to enlarge on the power--the greatest power we know of--which man exercises over men through their affections; but it is a fact which the observer should keep ever in view. The existence of a great man is one of those gigantic circumstances,--one of those national influences,--which have before been mentioned as modifying the conscience--the feelings about right and wrong--in a whole people. The pursuits of a nation for ever may be determined by the fact of the great man of five centuries being a poet, a warrior, a statesman, or a maritime adventurer. The morals of a nation are influenced to all eternity by the great man's being ambitious or moderate, passionate or philosophical, licentious or self-governed.
Certain lofty qualities he must have, or he could not have attained greatness,--energy, perseverance, faith, and consequently earnestness.
These are essential to his immortality; upon the others depends the quality of his influence; and upon these must the observer of the present generation reflect.
It is not by dogmas that Christianity has permanently influenced the mind of Christendom. No creeds are answerable for the moral revolution by which physical has been made to succumb to moral force; by which unfortunates are cherished by virtue of their misfortunes; by which the pursuit of speculative truth has become an object worthy of self-sacrifice. It is the character of Jesus of Nazareth which has wrought to these purposes. Notwithstanding all the obscuration and defilement which that character has sustained from superstition and other corruption, it has availed to these purposes, and must prevail more and more now that it is no longer possible to misrepresent his sayings and conceal his deeds, as was done in the dark ages. In all advancing time, as corruption is surmounted, there are more and more who vividly feel that life does not consist in the abundance that a man possesses, but in energy of spirit, and in a power and habit of self-sacrifice: there are perpetually more and more who discern and live by the persuasion that the pursuit of worldly power and ease is a matter totally apart from the function of Christianity; and this persuasion has not been wrought into activity by declarations of doctrine in any form, but by the spectacle, vivid before the eye of the mind, of the Holy One who declined the sword and the crown, lived without property, and devoted himself to die by violence, in an unparalleled simplicity of duty. The being himself is the mover here; and every great man is, in a similar manner, however inferior may be the degree, a spring by which spirits are moved. By the study of them may much of the consequent movement be understood. The observer of British morals should gather up the names of their idols; he will hear of Hampden, Bacon, Shakspeare, Newton, Howard, and Wesley. In Scotland, he will hear of Bruce and Knox. What a flood of light do these names shed on our _morale_! It is the same with the Englishman abroad when his attention is referred in France to Henri IV, Richelieu, Turenne, and Napoleon, to Bossuet and Fenelon, to Voltaire, and their glorious list of natural philosophers: in Italy, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Galileo, and their constellations of poets and artists: in Germany, to Charles V, Luther, Schwartz, Göthe, Copernicus, Handel, and Mozart. There is in every nation a succession of throned gods, each of whom is the creator of some region of the national mind, and has formed men into more or less of his own likeness.
The other kind of idols are those who are still living, and whose influence upon morals and manners is strong, but may or may not be distinguishably permanent. These afford a less faithful evidence,--but yet an evidence which is not to be neglected. The spirit of the times is seen in the character of the idols of the day, however the nation may be divided in its choice of idols, and however many sects there may be in the man-worship of the generation. In our own day, for instance, how plainly is the movement of society discerned, from the fact of the eminence of philanthropists in many countries! Whether they presently sink, or continue to rise, they testify to a prevailing feeling in society. Père Enfantin in France, Wilberforce in England, Garrison in America,--these are watchmen set on a pinnacle (whoever may object to their being there) who can tell us "what of the night," and how a new morning is breaking. Whether they may be most cause or effect, whether they have more or less decidedly originated the interest of which they are the head, it is clear that there is a certain adaptation between themselves and the general mind, without which they could not have risen to be what they are.--Every society has always its idols. If there are none by merit, at any moment, station is received as a qualification.
Large numbers are always worshipping the heads of the aristocracy, of whatever kind they may be; and there is rarely a long interval in which there is not some warrior, some poet, artist, or philanthropist on whom the multitude are flinging crowns and incense. The popularity of Byron testified to the existence of a gloomy discontent in a multitude of minds, as the adoration of De Béranger discloses the political feelings of the French. Statesmen rarely command an overwhelming majority of worshippers, because interest enters much more than sentiment into politics: but every author, or other artist who can reach the general mind,--every preacher, philanthropist, soldier, or discoverer, who has risen into an atmosphere of worship in pursuit of a purpose, is a fresh Peter the Hermit, meeting and stimulating the spirit of his time, and exhibiting its temper to the observer,--foreign as to either clime or century. The physical observer of a new region might as well shut his eyes to the mountains, and omit to note which way the streams run, as the moral observer pass by the idols of a nation with a heedless gaze.
* * * * * Side by side with this lies the inquiry into the great Epochs of the society visited. Find out what individuals and nations date from, and you discover what events are most interesting to them. A child reckons from his first journey, or his entrance upon school: a man from his marriage, his beginning practice in his profession, or forming a fresh partnership in trade; if he be a farmer, from the year of a good or bad crop; if he be a merchant, from the season of a currency pressure; if he be an operative, from the winter of the Strike: a matron dates from the birth of her children; her nursemaid from her change of place. Nations, too, date from what interests them most. It is important to learn what this is. The major date of American citizens is the Revolution; their minor dates are elections, and new admissions into the Union. The people at Amsterdam date from the completion of the Stadt Huis; the Spaniards from the achievement of Columbus; the Germans from the deed of Luther; the Haytians from the abduction of Toussaint L'Ouverture; the Cherokees from treaties with the Whites; the people of Pitcairn's Island from the mutiny of the Bounty; the Turks, at present, from the massacre of the Janissaries; the Russians from the founding of St. Petersburgh and the deaths of its monarchs; the Irish (for nearer times than the battle of the Boyne) by the year of the fever, the year of the rebellion, the year of the famine. There is a world of instruction in this kind of fact; and if a new species of epoch, of which there is a promise, should arise,--if the highest works of men should come to be looked upon as the clearest operations of Providence,--if Germany or Europe should date from Göthe as the civilized world does from Columbus,--this sole test might reveal almost the entire moral state of society.
* * * * * The treatment of the Guilty is all-important as an index to the moral notions of a society. This class of facts will hereafter yield infallible inferences as to the principles and views of governments and people upon vice, its causes and remedies. At present, such facts must be used with great caution, because the societies of civilized countries are in a state of transition from the old vindictiveness to a purer moral philosophy. The ancient methods, utterly disgraceful as they are, must subsist till society has fully agreed upon and prepared for better ones; and it would be harsh to pronounce upon the humanity of the English from their prisons, or the justice of the French from their galley system. The degrees of reliance upon brute force and upon public opinion are yet by no means proportioned to the civilization of respective societies, as at first sight might be expected, and as must be before punishments and prisons can be taken as indications of morals and manners.
The treatment of the guilty in savage lands, and also in countries under a despotism, indicates the morals of rulers only,--except in so far as it points out the political subservience of the people. It is true that the Burmese must needs be in a deplorable social state, if their king can "spread out" his prime minister in the sun, as formerly described: but the mercy or cruelty of his subjects can be inferred only from the liberty they may have and may use to treat one another in the same manner. In their case, we see that such a power is possessed and put to use. The creditor exposes his debtor's wife, children, and slaves, to the same noon-day sun which broils the prime minister. In Austria, it would be harsh to suppose that subjects have any desire to treat one another as the Emperor and his minister treat political offenders within the walls of the castle of Spielburg. The Russians at large are not to be made answerable for the transportation of coffles of nobles and gentlemen to the silver mines of Siberia, and the regiments on the frontier. It is only under a representative government that prisons, and the treatment of criminals under the law, can be fairly considered a test of the feelings of the majority.
It is too true, however, that punishments are almost everywhere vindictive in their character; and have more relation to some supposed principle of "not letting vice go unpunished," than either to the security of society, or the reformation of the offender. The few exceptions that exist are a far more conclusive testimony to an advancing state of morals than the old methods are to the vindictiveness of the mind of the society which they corrupt and deform. The Philadelphia penitentiary is a proof of the thoughtful and laborious humanity of those who instituted it; but Newgate cannot be regarded as the expressed decision of the English people as to how criminals should be guarded. Such a prison would not now be instituted by any civilized nation. Its existence is to be interpreted, not as a token of the cruelty and profligacy of the mind of society, but of its ignorance of the case, or of its bigoted adherence to ancient methods, or of its apathy in regard to improvements to which there is no peremptory call of self-interest. Any one of these is enough, Heaven knows, for any society to have to answer for; enough to yield, by contrast, surpassing honour to the philanthropy which has pulled down the pillory, and is labouring to supersede the hangman, and to convert every prison in the civilized world into an hospital for the cure of moral disease. But the reform has begun; the spirit of Howard is on its pilgrimage; and barbarous as is still our treatment of the guilty, better days are in prospect.
What the traveller has to observe then is, first, whether there has been any amelioration of the treatment of criminals in countries where the people have a voice upon it: and, in countries despotically ruled, whether public sentiment is moved about the condition of state criminals, and whether men treat one another vindictively in their appeals to the laws of citizenship: whether there is a Burmese cruelty in the exercise of the legal rights of the creditor; whether there is a reluctance to plunge others into the woes of legal penalties; or whether offenders are considered as beyond the pale of sympathy. It may thus appear whether the people entertain the pernicious notion that there is a line drawn for human conduct, on one side of which all is virtue, and on the other all vice; or whether they are approximating to the more philosophical and genial belief that all wickedness is weakness and woe, and that therefore the guilty need more care and tenderness in the arrangement of the circumstances under which they live than those who enjoy greater strength against temptation, and an ease of mind which criminals can never know. In some parts of the United States this general persuasion is remarkably evident, and is an incontestable proof of the advanced state of morals there. In some prisons of the United States, as much care is bestowed on the arrangements by which the guilty are preserved from contaminating one another, are exposed to good influences and precluded from bad, as in any infirmary on the ventilation of the wards, and the diet and nursing of the sick. In such a region, vindictiveness in social punishments must be going out, and Christ-like views of human guilt and infirmity beginning to prevail.
The same conclusions may be drawn from an observation of the methods of legal punishment. Recklessness of human life is one of the surest symptoms of barbarism, whether life is taken by law or by assassination.
As men grow civilized, and learn to rate the spiritual higher and higher above the physical life, human life grows sacred. The Turk orders off the head of a slave almost without a serious thought. The New Zealanders have murdered men by scores, to supply their dried and grinning heads to English purchasers, who little imagined the cost at which they were obtained. This is the way in which life is squandered in savage societies. Up to a comparatively high point of civilization, the law makes free with life, long after the private expenditure of it has been checked or has ceased. Duels, brawls, assassinations, have nearly been discontinued, and even war in some measure discountenanced, before the law duly recognises the sacredness of human life. But the time comes.
One generation after another grows up with a still improving sense of the majesty of life,--of the mystery of the existence of such a being as man,--of the infinity of ideas and emotions in the mind of each, and of the boundlessness of his social relations. These recognitions may not be express; but they are sufficiently real to hold back the hand from quenching life. The reluctance to destroy such a creation is found to be on the increase. Men prefer suffering wrong to being accessary to so fearful an act as what now appears a judicial murder: the law is left unused,--is evaded,--and it becomes necessary to alter it. Capital punishments are restricted,--are further restricted,--are abolished.
Such is the process. It is now all but completed in the United States: it is advancing rapidly in England. During its progress further light is thrown on the moral notions of a represented people by a change in the character of other (called inferior) punishments. Bodily torments and disfigurements go out. Torture and mutilation are discontinued, and after a while the grosser mental inflictions. The pillory (as mere ignominious exposure) was a great advance upon the maiming with which it was once connected; but it is now discontinued as barbarous. All ignominious exposure will ere long be considered equally barbarous,--including capital punishment, of which such exposure is the recommendatory principle. To refer once more to the Pennsylvania case,--these notions of ignominious exposure are there so far outgrown, that avoidance of it is the main principle of the management. Seclusion, under the guardianship of the law, is there the method,--on the principle of consideration to the weak, and of supreme regard to the feeling of self-respect in the offender,--the feeling in which he is necessarily most deficient. When we consider the brutalizing methods of punishment in use in former times, and now in some foreign countries, in contrast with the latest instituted and most successful, we cannot avoid perceiving that such are indications of the moral notions of those at whose will they exist, be they a council of despots, or an association of nations. We cannot avoid perceiving from them what barbarism is held to be justice in some ages and countries; and how that which would then and there be condemned as culpable leniency, comes elsewhere to be considered less than justice. The treatment of the guilty is one of the strongest evidences as to the general moral notions