There was, some months ago at London, a malefactor who had been condemned to be transported to America to work there at the sugar works with the negroes. In England, any criminal, as in many other countries, may get a petition presented to the king, either to obtain a free pardon, or a mitigation of the sentence. This one presented a petition to be hanged, alleging that he mortally hated work, and that he had rather suffer strangling for a minute, than to make sugar all his lifetime. Others may think otherwise, every one to his taste. But it has been already said, and cannot be too often repeated, that a man hanged is good for nothing, and that punishments ought to be useful. Some years ago, in Turkey, two young men were condemned to be impaled, for having, (without taking off their caps,) stood to see the procession of the Lama pass by. The Emperor of China, who is a man of very good sense, said, that for his part, he should have condemned them to walk bareheaded, in every public procession, for three months afterwards. "Proportion punishments to crimes," says the Marquis Beccaria; but those who made the laws were not geometricians. * * * * * I hate the laws of Draco, which punish equally crimes and faults, wickedness and folly. Let us,--especially in all litigations,--in all dissensions, in all quarrels,--distinguish the aggressor from the party offended, the oppressor from the oppressed. An offensive war is the procedure of a tyrant; he who defends himself is in the character of a just man. As I was absorbed in these reflections, the Man of Forty Crowns came to me all in tears. I asked, with emotion, if his son, who was by right to live twenty-three years, was dead? "No," said he, "the little one is very well, and so is my wife; but I was summoned to give evidence against a miller, who has been put to the torture, ordinary and extraordinary, and who has been found innocent. I saw him faint away under redoubled tortures. I heard the crash of his bones. His outcries and screams of agony are not yet out of my ears; they haunt me. I shed tears for pity, and shudder with horror." His tears drew mine. I trembled, too, like him; for I have naturally an extreme sensibility. My memory then represented to me the dreadful fate of the Calas family! A virtuous mother in irons,--her children in tears, and forced to fly, her house given up to pillage,--a respectable father of a family broken with torture, agonizing on a wheel, and expiring in the flames; a son loaded with chains, and dragged before the judges, one of whom said to him: _"We have just now broken your father on the wheel; we will break you alive too."_