forming poachers with as great jealousy as the Royal
Forests. It is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow! It is so much
simpler to consign a soul to perdition, or gay masses, for money, to
save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it grow up in
neglect and run to ruin for want of humanizing influences! They hung
poor, crazy Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval. The ordinary of
Newgate preached to women who were to swing at Tyburn for a petty theft
as if they were worse than other people,--just as though he would not
have been a pickpocket or shoplifter, himself, if he had been born in
a den of thieves and bred up to steal or starve! The English law never
began to get hold of the idea that a crime was not necessarily a sin,
till Hadfield, who thought he was the Saviour of mankind, was tried for
shooting at George the Third;--lucky for him that he did not hit his
Majesty!

It is very singular that we recognize all the bodily defects that unfit
a man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that limit his
range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his moral powers were
perfect I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we extirpate vermin; but
I don't know that we have any more right to judge them than we have to
judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats and weasels, though
we think it necessary to treat them as criminals.

The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly
studied, unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures
that I consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a
branch of positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense
debt. It has melted the world's conscience in its crucible and cast it
in a new mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more like
those of humanity. If it has failed to demonstrate its system of special
correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed relations between
organization and mind and character. It has brought out that great
doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable
and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I
can think of since the message of peace and good-will to men.

Automatic action in the moral world; the _reflex movement_ which _seems_
to be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such
(metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody
shall study this as Marshall Hall has s