IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 233 rejected them as summarily as they would have negatived a motion to extend the franchise to the working classes^ or a till to abolish the penal laws against the Roman Catholics. The political speeches and memoirs of the time are curiously silent on the subject. No member of either House had ventured to take up the question as Romilly took it up in later years. Not one of the many great speeches delivered j^^Jnt, by Burke, Pox, Pitt, and Sheridan was devoted to the question. While boys were frequently hanged in rows for offences for which they would now be sent to reformatories, the great statesmen and orators of the day looked on in silence. They appear to have taken little or no interest in ^cial problems, partly because such questions were lost sight of in the greater attractions of foreign affairs, cul- minating at one time in the war of American Independence, and at another in the French Revolution; and partly because politicians had not then learned to look upon the reform of social evils as of paramount importance to the welfare of the nation. During Pitt's eighteen years of office he might Pitt have effected any changes in the administration of justice he pleased ; but he left it as he found it, not having effecrted, or even sought to effect, any material changes in it what- ever. No statesman of the day was better qualified than Burke to deal with such a subject; he had not only studied juris- Burke, prudence, but he had an instinctive perception of its prin- ciples ; and yet in the whole circuit of his studies there is no evidence that he had devoted any serious attention to the reform of a system which he knew to be radically defec- tive.* A casual reference to the matter may be found here and there in his speeches, enough to show that the tendency of his own mind was wholly opposed to the barbarous code
- On a motion to commit a bill making it felony to destroy any tree, plant,
or shrub in a garden by day or nisht, Burke said that ** the whole system of the penal laws was nulically defective," and he recommended " a revision .of the whole criminal law, which, in its present state, he considered abom- inable." Parliamentary History, vol. xxviii, p. 146. The bill referred to may be taken as a specimen of many other measures of the same kind, generally introduced by property owTiers for their own protection. Digitized by Google
