ood conduct of a large proportion of this
immense majority that the security is to be found. Observe that
industrious and well-doing majority; you would suppose there is no
danger:--observe the profligate and squalid minority; you would
suppose there is no hope.

At present about 60,000 persons are annually committed, in the
British islands, for serious offences[14] worthy of deliberate trial,
and above double that number for summary or police offences. A
hundred and eighty thousand persons annually fall under the lash of
the criminal law, and are committed for longer or shorter periods to
places of confinement for punishment. The number is prodigious--it is
frightful. Yet it is in all only about 1 in 120 of the population;
and from the great number who are repeatedly committed during the
same year, the individuals punished are not 1 in 200. Such as they
are, it may safely be affirmed that four-fifths of this 180,000 comes
out of two or three millions of the community. We are quite sure that
150,000 come from 3,000,000 of the lowest and most squalid of the
empire, and not 30,000 from the remaining 24,000,000 who live in
comparative comfort. This consideration is fitted both to encourage
hope and awaken shame--hope, as showing from how small a class in
society the greater part of the crime comes, and to how limited a
sphere the remedies require to be applied; shame, as demonstrating
how disgraceful has been the apathy, selfishness, and supineness in
the other more numerous and better classes, around whom the evil has
arisen, but who seldom interfere, except to RESIST all measures
calculated for its removal.

It is to this subject--the ease with which the extraordinary and
unprecedented increase of crime in the empire might be arrested by
proper means and the total inefficiency of all the remedies hitherto
attempted, from the want of practical knowledge on the part of those
at the head of affairs, and an entirely false view of human nature in
society generally, that we shall direct the attention of our readers
in a future Number.

[Footnote 14: Viz., in round numbers--

England, 30,000
Ireland, 26,000
Scotland, 4,000
60,000]

THE HEART OF THE BRUCE.

A BALLAD.

It was upon an April morn
While yet the frost lay hoar,
We heard Lord James's bugle-horn
Sound by the rocky shore.

Then down we went, a hundred knights,
All in our dark array,
And flung our