very young man was indicted, at the Huntingdon Assizes, for throwing the following letter, addressed, externally, and internally, to the farmers of Bluntisham, Hunts, into a strawyard :

"We are determined to set fire to the whole of this place, if you don't set us to work, and burn you in your beds if there is not alteration. What do you think the young men are to do, if you don't set them to work? They must do something. The fact is, we cannot go on any longer. We must commit robbery, and everything that is contrary to your wish.

"I am,

"AN ENEMY."

For this offence, admitted by his plea, the prisoner, aged eighteen, was sentenced by a judge since deceased, to transportation for life!

Far be it from me to palliate incendiarism. Least of all, when so many conflagrations have recently illuminated the horizon; and so near the time when the memory of that arch incendiary, Guy Faux, will be revived by effigies and bonfires. I am fully aware of the risk of even this appeal, at such a season, but with that pleading shade before me, dare the reddest reflections that may be cast on this paper.

Only catch a real incendiary, bring his guilt clearly home to him, and let him suffer the extreme penalty of the law. Hang him. Or, if absolutely opposed to capital punishment, and inclined towards the philanthropy of a very French philosophy, adopt the Christianly substitute recommended in the "Mysteries of Paris," and blind the criminal. Let fire avenge fire, and, according to the prescription for Prince Arthur, with irons hot burn out both his eyes. Cruel and extreme as such tortures may seem, they would scarcely expiate one of the most dastardly and atrocious of human crimes, inasmuch as the perpetrator can neither control its extent, nor calculate the results.

The truth is, my faith stops far short of the popular belief in the prevalence of wilful and malignant fire-raising-that an epidemic of that inflammatory character is so rife and raging as represented in the provinces. I am too jealous of the national character, too chary of the good name of my humble countrymen, and think too well of "a bold peasantry, our country's

pride," to look on them, willingly, as a mere pack of Samson's foxes, running from farm to farm, with fire-brands tied to their tails. If there be any notable increase in the number of fires, some portion of the excess may be fairly attributable to causes which have converted simple risks into doubly hazardous; for example, the prevalence of cigar smoking, and especially, the substitution for the old tinder-box, of dangerous chemical contrivances, facile of ignition, and distributed by myriads throughout the country. Talismans that, like the Arabian ones, on a slight rubbing, place a demon at the command of the possessor-spells which have subjected the fire spirit to the instant invocation not merely of the wicked, but of the weak and the witless, the infant and the idiot. Generally, we work and play with the element more profusely than formerly: witness the glowing flames, flakes, sparks, and cinders, that sweep across streets, over seas and rivers, and along railroads, from the chimneys, funnels, and furnaces, of the factories, and floating and flying conveyances of Pluto, Vulcan, and Company. Another cause, spontaneous combustion, has lately been convicted of the destruction of the railway station at New Cross; and there is no reason to suppose that conflagrations from carelessness, and excessive house-warmings from inebriety, are less common than of old. Children will still play with fire; servants, town and country, persist in snuffing long wicks, as well as noses, with finger and thumb; and agricultural distress has not so annihilated the breed of jolly farmers, but that one, here and there, is still capable of blowing himself out, and putting his candle to bed.

In the meantime, vulgar exaggeration ascribes every "rapid consumption" of property, not clearly traceable to accident, to a malicious design. The English public, according to Goldsmith, are prone to panics, and he instances them as arming themselves with thick gloves and stout cudgels against certain popular bugbears in the shapes of mad dogs. And a fatal thing it is, proverbially, for the canine race to get an ill name. a panic becomes a far more tragical affair, when it arms one class of society against another; and, instead of mere brutes. and curs of low degree, animals of our own species are hunted down and hung, or, at best, all but banished to another world,

But

by transportation for life. It is difficult to believe that some such local panic did not influence the very severe sentence passed on Gifford White. Indeed, the existence of something of the kind seems intimated by the Judge himself, along with the extraordinary dictum that a verbal burn is worse than the actual cautery. Lord Abinger said :

"The offence was of a most atrocious character; and it might almost be said, that the sending of letters threatening to burn the property of the parties to whom they were addressed was worse than putting the threat in execution; for when a man lost his property by fire, he at least knew the worst of it; but he to whom such threats were made, was made to live in a state of continual terror and alarm.”

Very true and very harshly applied. The farmers of Bluntisham are not of my acquaintance; but presuming them to be not more nervous and timorsome than farmers in general, might not their terror and alarm have been pacified on rather easier terms? Would not the banishment of the culprit for seven, or at most fourteen years, have allowed time, ample time, for the yeomanly nerves to have recovered their tone; for their affrighted hair, erect as stubble, to have subsided prone as rolled grass; nay, for the very name of Gifford White to have evaporated from their agricultural heads? Were I a Bluntisham farmer, I could not eat with relish another rasher of bacon, or swallow with satisfaction another glass of strong ale, without protesting publicly against such a sacrifice to my supposed aspen-fits, and setting on foot a petition amongst my neighbors for a mitigation of that severe and satirical sentence which condemned a fellow parishioner to expiate my fears by fifty-two years of penanceaccording to the scriptural calculation of human life-in the land of the kangaroo. I could not sleep soundly, and know that for my sake a son of the same soil had been rooted out like a common weed--severed from kith and kin; from hearth and home, if he had one; from his mother-country, hard step-mother though she had proved; from a familiar land and native air, to a foreign one and a new climate, with strange faces around him, and strange stars above him,—a banished man, not for a little while, or for a long while, but for ever!

But, methinks I hear a voice say, it was necessary to make an example-a proceeding always accompanied by a certain degree of hardship, if not injustice, as regards the party selected to be punished in terrorem; unless the choice be made of a criminal especially deserving such a painful preference-as for robbery with personal violence: whereas there appear to be no aggravations of the offence for which Gifford White was sentenced to a murderer's atonement. On the contrary, he pleaded guilty: a course generally admitted as an extenuation of guilt: his youth ought to have been a circumstance in his favor; and above all, the consideration that a threat does not necessarily involve the intent, much less the deed. All who have been led, by word or writing, to hope or fear for good or evil, have had reason to know how far is promise from performance,-as far as England from New South Wales. Expectants never die the sooner for golden prospects held out to them; and threatened folks are long-lived, to a proverb. And why? Because the enemy who announces his designs is the least dangerous; as the Scotch say, "his bark. is waur than his bite." The truth is, menaces are about the most abundant, idle, and empty of human vaporings; the mere puffings, blowings, gruntings, and growlings from the safetyvalves and waste-pipes of high-pressure engines. The promissory notes of threateners to large amounts are ludicrously associated, instead of payment, with "no effects." Who of us has not heard a good mother, a fond mother, a doting mother, but sharp-tempered, promise her own dear but troublesome offspring, her very pets, such savage inflictions, such breaking of bones and knocking off plaguy little heads, as ought, sincerely uttered, to have consigned her to the custody of the police? There, as my Uncle Toby says, she found vent. Who has never known a friend, a worthy man, but a passionate one, to indulge in such murderous threats against the life, body, and limbs of a tight boot-maker, or a loose tailor; a blunt creditor, or a sharp critic; as ought, if in earnest, to have placed him in handcuffs and a strait waistcoat? But nobody mistakes these blazes of temper for the burnings of settled malignity-these harmless flashes of sheet lightning for the destructive gleam of the forked. It is quite possible, therefore, that the incendiary letter of Gifford

White, though breathing Congreves and Lucifers, was purely theoretical; albeit read by the judge as if in serious earnest, like the fulminating prospectuses of the Duc de Normandie or Captain Warner.

I confess to have searched, in vain, through the epistle for any animus of peculiar atrocity. Its address, generally to the farmers, shows it not to have been the inspiration of personal malice or private revenge. The threat is not a direct and positive one, as in resolved retaliation for some by-gone wrong; but put hypothetically, and rather in the nature of a warning of probable consequences, dependent on future contingencies. The wish of the writer is obviously not father to the menace: on the contrary, he expostulates, appeals, methinks most touchingly, to the reason, the justice, even the compassion, of the very parties -to be burnt in their beds. So clear a proof, to me, of the absence of any serious intent, or malice prepense, that the only agitation from the fall of such a missive in my farm-yard, if I had one, would be the flutter amongst the poultry. At least theirs would be the only personal terror and alarm,-for, with other feelings, who could fail to be moved by a momentous question and declaration reëchoed by hundreds and thousands of able and willing but starving laborers? “What are we to do if you We must do something. The fact is, we

don't set us to work?

cannot go on any longer!"

Can the wholesale emigration, so often proposed, be only transportation in disguise for using such language in common with Gifford White.

To me-speaking from my heart, and recording my deliberate opinions on a material that, frail as it is, will long outlast my own fabric, there is something deeply affecting in the spectacle of a young man, in the prime of health and vigor, offering himself, a voluntary slave, in the labor-market without a purchaser-eagerly proffering to barter the use of his body, the day-long exertion of his strength, the wear and tear of flesh and blood, bone and muscle, for the common necessaries of life— earnestly craving for bread on the penal conditions prescribed by his Creator-and in vain—in vain! Well for those who enjoy each blessing of earth that there are volunteers to work out