But if conviction is secured, there is still a wide range in the measure of punishment. Even in the compact and uniform administration of English law, the punishments for the same offences vary almost indefinitely,--a verdict for manslaughter, for example, may be followed by a sentence of transportation for life or imprisonment for an hour! In our score or two of independent sovereignties, this diversity of punishment for similar offences is much greater, and as every man is disposed to expect indulgence towards himself, the lightest punishment is expected, and a severe one is regarded as cruel and tyrannical. The uncertainty to which we have referred, has been justly regarded as a provocation to crime. Those who feel tempted to transgress the laws must be supposed to make some sort of calculation as to the risk they will run. If they perceive that the advantage of a criminal course is more certain than its punishment--or, at least, if it appears so to them--they will pursue the course of their inclinations. But if the punishment, however slight, were indissolubly associated with the notion of the offence, the latter would be rarely committed. If the punishment merely consisted, as Bentham says, in taking from the offender the fruits of his crime and that punishment _were certain_, no more such crimes would be committed; for no man would be so foolish as to commit them. But, as there are so many chances of escape, it is necessary to make punishments more severe than if they oftener followed the offence. No measures, therefore, can be more humane than such as tend to attach certainty of punishment to crime, because, just in proportion as that certainty is increased, the severity of the penalty may be diminished. Hence also it further appears that the due proportion and immediate connection between crimes and their punishment are points likely to have great weight with criminals; because the great body of offences being larcenies, and perpetrated from cupidity and not from passion, the thief will soon abstain from plunder, and the forger from his counterfeit art, when common sense calmly whispers that he will lose and not gain by the transaction. The million (says a late writer) derive their impressions of legal obligations by experience of it in the persons of others, if not of themselves. They have no instruction in the principles of jurisprudence, or of ethics; no access to tuition, either oral or written, on subjects like these. Their estimate of the criminality of excessive self-indulgence is formed by its visible effects. They restrain an intemperate propensity because they see the drunkard revelling in misery, or the thief carried away in handcuffs to the cells of a prison. Such plain matter-of-fact lessons as these are sufficiently intelligible, and their impressiveness ought not to be diluted.