he administration may be said to have been strengthened
by the change, since, as an orator, Canning had confessedly no equal in
either House of Parliament. Another change was productive of still more
practical advantage. Lord Sidmouth retired from the Home Office, and was
succeeded by Mr. Peel, previously Secretary for Ireland; and the
transfer of that statesman to an English office facilitated reforms,
some of which were as yet little anticipated even by the new Secretary
himself. The earliest of them, and one not the least important in its
bearing on the well-doing of society, the mitigation of the severity of
our Criminal Code, was, indeed, but the following up of a series of
measures in the same direction which had been commenced in the time of
the Duke of Portland's second administration, and, it must be added, in
spite of its resistance. The influence of various trades, and of the
owners of different kinds of property, pressing in turns upon our
legislators, had rendered our code the most sanguinary that had,
probably, ever existed in Christendom. Each class of proprietor regarded
only the preservation of his own property, and had no belief in the
efficacy of any kind of protection for it, except such as arose from the
fear of death; nor any doubt that he was justified in procuring the
infliction of that penalty to avert the slightest loss to himself. The
consequence was that, at the beginning of the present century, there
were above two hundred offences the perpetrators of which were liable to
capital punishment, some of a very trivial character, such as cutting
down a hop-vine in a Kentish hop-garden, robbing a rabbit-warren or a
fish-pond, personating an out-pensioner of Greenwich Hospital, or even
being found on a high-road with a blackened face, the intention to
commit a crime being inferred from the disguise, even though no overt
act had been committed. An act of Elizabeth made picking a pocket a
capital offence; another, passed as late as the reign of William III.,
affixed the same penalty to shop-lifting, even when the article stolen
might not exceed the value of five shillings. And the fault of these
enactments was not confined to their unreasonable cruelty; they were as
mischievous even to those whom they were designed to protect as they
were absurd, as some owners began to perceive. In the list of capital
offences was that of stealing linen from a bleaching-ground. And a large
body of bleachers presented