Consider, for instance, the immense amount of suffering and demoralization needlessly caused by our severe laws in the last century. Those many merciless penalties which Romilly and others succeeded in abolishing, were as little justified by social necessities as by abstract morality. Experience has since proved that to hang men for theft, was not requisite for the security of property. And that such a measure was opposed to pure equity, scarcely needs saying. Evidently, had considerations of relative expediency been all along qualified by considerations of absolute expediency, these severities, with their many concomitant evils, would have ceased long before they did. Again, the dreadful misery, demoralization, and crime, generated by the harsh treatment of transported convicts, would have been impossible, had our authorities considered what seemed just as well as what seemed politic. There would never have been inflicted on transports the shocking cruelties proved before the Parliamentary Committee of 1848. We should not have had men condemned to the horrors of the chain-gang even for insolent looks. There could not have been perpetrated such an atrocity as that of locking up chain-gangs “from sunset to sunrise in the caravans or boxes used for this description of prisons, which hold from twenty to twenty-eight men, but in which the whole number _can neither stand upright nor sit down at the same time, except with their legs at right angles to their bodies_.” Men would never have been doomed to tortures extreme enough to produce despair, desperation, and further crimes—tortures under which “a man’s heart is taken from him, and there is given to him the heart of a {161} beast,” as said by one of these law-produced criminals before his execution. We should not have been told, as by a chief justice of Australia, that the discipline was “carried to an extent of _suffering, such as to render death desirable, and to induce many prisoners to seek it under its most appalling aspects_.” Sir G. Arthur would not have had to testify that, in Van Diemen’s Land, convicts committed murder for the purpose “_of being sent up to Hobart Town for trial, though aware that in the ordinary course they must be executed within a fortnight after arrival_;” nor would tears of commiseration have been drawn from Judge Burton’s eyes, by one of these cruelly-used transports placed before him for sentence. In brief, had abstract equity joined with immediate expediency in devising convict discipline, not only would untold suffering, degradation, and mortality have been prevented; but those who were responsible for atrocities like those above-named, would not themselves be chargeable with crime, as we now hold them to be.