the cause of liberty, we may boast of a constitution perhaps as nearly approaching to perfection, as human powers allow; still we must not wonder, that some things have been left by our ancestors to their posterity, which either through the want of time, of sufficient light upon the subject, or through the pressure of greater matter, they were unable to perform. Nor should this prove to us a cause of complaint; for indeed has not this gradual, though continual course towards the reformation of the first sketch of our constitution, formed the great and only cause of the permanence of our rights, by the security it afforded against the workings of impatient, though honorable feelings, against the fixing as corner-stones in our constitution, rotten principles of action? but chiefly by its impeding the overbearing flood of hasty reformation from sweeping with it in its course, all the good that was united even with the bad?
Following the same course, it is now the time to look to our laws, which though they may not appear to some immediately to concern the welfare of our constitution, still have the most intimate concern therein; for so closely linked are private and public good, that we much doubt the possibility of drawing the separating line. It is not, however, our intention, to enter into the whole of this subject at once, but to confine ourselves, for the present, to the examination of the relative proportion of punishment and guilt, in those cases where death is ordained by our criminal code. A subject which every one, who is in the habit of reading our daily papers, must perceive requires strong attention and gradual reform. The multiplicity of crimes, the great number of those yearly condemned to death, the great number of cases in which both judges and jury are obliged to use modifying powers, certainly point out the existence of some radical error in the very foundation of our criminal laws.
