It is a trite axiom in politics, that private benefit must yield to public good; but it is not therefore a natural corollary, that private feelings are to be outraged, and the entire happiness of the social circle to be destroyed by the desperate acts of a gang of miscreants, who make a trade of human life, and murder the defenceless and unprotected, on the mere ground that it is contributary and indispensable to the interests and advancement of a particular science. Weak and imbecile must that government be, which, with the knowledge of the laws and customs of other countries in regard to the procuring of an adequate supply of human corpses for the purpose of instruction to the anatomical student, conjoined with the advice and experience of native talent, cannot devise some effectual measures for the remedy of an evil, which has of late years grown to such an alarming magnitude, as actually to alter the relations of society, and to establish a system of terror, at once inconsistent with individual happiness. The meritorious endeavours of Mr. Warburton during the last session of parliament were directed to this subject; but, with a most contradictory spirit of opposition, it was urged that the feelings of the inmates of a work-house, having no relations nor friends belonging to them, and who, at their death, would be huddled into a grave like so many dogs, were not to be harassed nor wounded; whilst, at the same time, the sanctity of the grave was to be violated,--the unprotected stranger in our land, perambulating our streets to earn his sorry pittance,--the wretched prostitute, discarded from her parents' house,--and, finally, the helpless decrepitude of age, were to be sacrificed by the inhuman butchery of the systematic murderers; and the legislature of the most enlightened nation of the earth (that is, which is boasted to be such) was to look dispassionately on, and wink at the enormity of the crime, on the plea that the interests of science demanded it. The detection of the atrocities of Burke, confessing, as he did, to nineteen murders, ought to have been sufficient to arouse the vigilance of an enlightened legislature to the enactment of those laws which would have put an effectual stop to a repetition of such a horrid system of murder, and have rescued the country from the _onus_ of that disgrace which now lies so heavily upon it. On this point, however, the supineness of the government has been culpable in the highest degree; for to question its knowledge of the existence of the evil, were to suppose that it possesses no information of the dangerous acts of certain individuals, or that it was utterly bereft of the means of detecting them, and of bringing them to justice for the enormity of their crimes. We do not hesitate to declare that an organised system of murder has been and is still carrying on in the metropolis, which makes humanity shudder, which cannot be paralleled