so that government at last becomes the instrument and partner of the great agencies of oppression and wrong-doing in society. Nor is this the worst: instead of concentrating its attention upon the transcendent duty of working out the great ends of justice, and laboring to improve and perfect the methods and appliances for attaining this object, it stands convicted as the open and shameless perpetrator of wrong, violator of the most sacred rights of citizens and the defiant executor of palpable and rank injustice. The prosecutor of criminals, it becomes itself the criminal, and cuts off its victim from all possibility of redress.
An illustration of this has just occurred, which is worth pondering over in this year consecrated to political vainglory. The newspapers inform us that "in November, 1874, Charles and Mary Fisher were sentenced in the county of New York, the former to seven and the latter to five years' imprisonment in Sing Sing, for being accessory to an outrage upon a girl. The governor has pardoned both, upon the representation of the prosecuting officer that they were innocent of the crime." Government has here perpetrated a gross injustice upon two innocent persons—deprived them of their liberty, extorted labor from them, and robbed them of the results of it, subjected them to a cruel degradation, and, when convicted of its own blundering, it lets its victims go without lifting a finger toward repairing the wrongs it has inflicted; Charles and Mary Fisher are without redress. If their rights had been similarly violated by other individuals, government would have recognized their claims to large compensation. But when its own court and its own officers are the self-convicted offenders, those who have suffered may ask reparation in vain. If a citizen is wrongfully deprived of his property by government, he may prosecute and recover it to the uttermost farthing; but, if wrongfully imprisoned, stripped of his wages and disgraced by the very authority that was constituted to mete out equal justice to all, its victims are helpless. If an American citizen were unjustly imprisoned abroad, the government would have redress from the offending nation, though at the cost of war. But when the same thing occurs under its own jurisdiction and by its own fault, all reparation is denied. It may be said that such things cannot occur often; then they are the more easily rectified, and the excuse for withholding justice is only an aggravation. But it is probable that they occur far more often than the public is aware of. For what have we to hope, in the strict administration of justice, from an authority that can itself outrage justice in so glaring a way? What are we to expect from an authority that refuses to hold itself accountable for the wrongs it does. If it be said that the government must assume the infallibility of its ministration of justice, then why liberate Charles and Mary Fisher? And, if the machinery of justice can work so ill as utterly to defeat itself, the proof of which we have in this flagrant case, what confidence have we in the proportions and measures of penalties that are meted out to real criminals? With such obtuseness and indifference to right and wrong as are evinced in this scandalous case, there is surely little confidence to be reposed in the general equities of criminal adjudication. There can be little doubt that the coarsest and most barbarous part of our administration of law relates to the treatment of the criminal classes.
PROF. HUXLEY'S LECTURES.
Prof. Huxley has decided that, from the nature of his engagements, he must give up all expectation of visiting the United States during the winter, and that therefore it would be impossible for him to devote a season to lecturing here. But he is coming over in August to spend a brief vaca-
