In the course of this speech--which was delivered with great clearness and elocutionary power--the Queen expressed marked pleasure at a further mitigation of the criminal code, which she hailed as an auspicious commencement of her reign. The change was assuredly much needed, and the subject had engaged the attention of eminent statesmen and lawyers for several years. Jeremy Bentham had exposed the unreasonable and cruel severity of the punishments attached to comparatively trivial offences; and Sir Samuel Romilly, seconded by Sir James Mackintosh and Sir Fowell Buxton, had brought the state of the law before the notice of the Legislature. For a long while, the disinclination of Parliament to deal with important reforms kept this crying abuse of justice in the background; but in 1833 a Royal Commission was issued, for the purpose of inquiring how far it might be expedient to reduce the written and unwritten law of the country into one digest, and to report on the best manner of doing it. In the following year, the Commissioners were further required to state their opinions on the subject of the employment of counsel by prisoners, and on capital punishment. At the present day, it seems almost incredible that until 1836 the accused in criminal trials were not professionally defended. But still worse was the merciless spirit with which the rights of property were hedged about. A case is reported in which a poor Cornish woman, who, urged by want caused by the impressment of her husband as a seaman, had stolen a piece of cloth from a tradesman’s door, was hanged for the fact. Indeed, in the earlier years of the present century, the death-penalty was so frequent, and attached to so many offences, that numerous criminals were executed regularly every Monday morning outside Newgate. The extreme rigour of the law, however, was softened by various Acts of Parliament, passed from 1824 to 1829, with which the name of Sir Robert Peel is honourably associated. But much still remained to be done; and the Acts to which the Queen alluded, and which were introduced into the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, confined the punishment of death to high treason, and, with some exceptions, to offences consisting of, or aggravated by, violence to the person, or tending directly to endanger life. By the Criminal Law Consolidation Acts of 1861, death is now confined to treason and wilful murder; so that the reign of Queen Victoria has been distinguished, amongst other things, by a great and beneficent reform in the criminal laws of England.