wise to tamper with the cat-o'nine-tails that has produced such a fair result. Now I differ with Sir John Beckett on his own ground; I rather incline to think that the short swallow-tailed coats are the cause of the improvement of our army, for I have observed that its discipline and efficiency have been advancing ever since those tails were worn by its officers. And here I must observe that his majesty is not well advised in altering, as he so frequently does, the fashion of the uniforms; for who knows but that the cut of a jacket may have been the secret of our military glory; it is at least as likely as that it turns on the cut of a back. Next to the reasoning, we admire the tact and taste of the judge advocate. In continuation he observed, that he could put the question of flogging upon the prerogative of the crown. Oh, excellent Beckett! This of a truth is a judicious ground of defence. When next soldiers are exhorted to "fight for the crown," let it be added, "and for its glorious prerogative of whipping you, my boys." "Die for your king and his cat-o'nine-tails."

Mr. Hume was visited with a strange hallucination in the course of this debate. Sir J. Hardinge had objected to the substitution of solitary imprisonment for flogging, because it had been found in the Penitentiary that this punishment had no good effect, and that the fear of corporal chastisement was thought requisite by a committee, including Lord Bexley, whom Sir Henry facetiously described as one "who would be foremost to censure any measure of unnecessary severity." Mr. Hume, upon this, was thrown into a wondrous agitation, conceiving that Sir Henry Hardinge meant to class our most respectable friends and natural allies, the soldiers, with convicts! Now, taking Mr. Hume to be a man of great solidity of judgment, strength of nerve, and vigour of stomach, I yet think it extremely probable, that after hearing that pleasant joke about the great tenderness of Lord Bexley, he must have been affected with some qualms which must have disturbed the bile and brought on an attack of dysentery within four-and-twenty hours. I know that such was the effect on me. Indeed the very name of Bexley affects my bile in a most grievous manner. If Mr. Hume then sent for an eminent practitioner, and the doctor told him, " I will not give you such a drug, because we find in the Penitentiary, where dysentery of this character prevails, that it is inoperative;" would Mr. Hume have been wise had he gone into tantarums and said, "Doctor, I don't know what you mean by comparing my bowels with the bowels of convicts; give me leave to tell you, sir, that my bowels are not locked up, they are not confined, sir, but quite the contrary! and the physic fit for the diseases of felon intestines is no physic for mine."

This might or might not be true; but I have more than doubts whether a culprit in the guard-house, is one whit more respectable than a culprit in the Penitentiary.

It has been frequently remarked that there is no office so generally ill filled as that of coroner, and that few duties are so zealously discharged as those of the inquest juries. The jurors find themselves, for the most part, in a new situation, the melancholy business of which is calculated to excite their feelings and give a strong impulse

to their inquiries. The coroner, on the other hand, is commonly a small lawyer of some kind, who has driven, perhaps, a good many miles to the spot, and is mainly anxious to drive back again to his private affairs, or his dinner; sitting on dead bodies is no new occupation to him; he is more deeply concerned about the loss of time than about the loss of life; and more anxious to despatch the business than to search out the truth. The verdict is the release which leaves him free to attend to his other affairs, and the verdict he accordingly desires with as little delay as possible. There are of course exceptions to this sketch; and there are also cases, the circumstances of which will overcome the indifference of office, and rouse the coroner to activity; but they are of rare occurrence. With the jurors the more extraordinary causes of excitement are unnecessary, because being less used to the duty, they are moved by the common event of a mysterious or violent death, rendered impressive by the view of the particular subject under their eyes. Acting under such different feelings, it is not strange that the coroner and his jury should, in nine cases out of ten, be pursuing diametrically opposite objects-the jury pushing their inquiries as far as possible-the coroner endeavouring to limit them to the narrowest conceivable point. The jury investigating every particular connected with the deceased, and in any manner bearing on the immediate cause of death; and the coroner confining them to the barren question, “Of what did he die." A poor creature labouring under cold is turned away from the door of the workhouse; lies in the street exposed to the weather, and perishes. An inquest is summoned. The body viewed. A surgeon examined, who deposes, that the cause of death was an inflammation of the lungs. This satisfies the coroner. Gentlemen, he says, you hear that the deceased's death was occasioned by an inflammation of the lungs. The jury would inquire whether any kind of wrong or ill treatment had led to this inflammation of the lungs, but the coroner's authority prevails; and they find, "died of an inflammation of the lungs," though "died of a brutal overseer” would be a more strictly apposite verdict. If a man be found shot in the high road, the coroner who presides at the inquest knows perfectly well that a verdict of "died of a bullet in his brain," would neither appear very wise nor satisfactory to the public. He feels that it is necessary to go beyond the fact of the bullet in the brain, and to inquire how it came there; and in certain cases juries desire to ascertain the circumstances which have caused the disease of which a person has died. The other day, a poor waterman confined for an assault, we think in Tothill-fields, died in consequence of his having been exposed in a partly open shed to the inclemency of the weather. The surgeon who examined his body would find only a common disease, which is the destruction of hundreds of whom the tenderest care is taken; but the jury carrying their researches further, would discover that this common disease was the consequence of the improper place of confinement. The open shed was as directly the cause of the death of this man, as the pistol ball was the canse of the death of the man found in the highway. No malice, it is true, is to be supposed in the former instance; but the law has its penalties for chance medley, and with excellent effect might they be enforced,

so as to make people suffer for the destruction of life from carelessness.* Three years ago, two men improperly, nay, illegally confined in a cage, were burnt to death. The verdict was, "died of burns, &c." It would more properly have been "died of a magistrate." These remarks have been called forth by the late inquests in the Fleet Prison, in which we observe the usual searching spirit of the jury checked by the contrary habit of the coroner. The two go together like candle and extinguisher. It seems the genius of the one to throw light, and the province of the other to put it out. The sufferer in the first of the cases before us, was a Mr. Devenish, who had surrendered himself, as a prisoner for debt, to the Fleet Prison, when ill of an inflammation of the lungs.

The following extracts from the evidence will show how he was treated in this state.

"Mrs. Devenish, the wife of the deceased, said, that her husband being in a state of bad health, on entering the prison, she applied to Mr. Brown for a room. Mr. Brown [the warden, we believe] said that, when he had paid his fees, he would have a chummage. She offered to pay for a room; but Mr. Brown said, there was only a large room, without beds; and she must put her husband on the boards.

"Mr. Charles Snitch, a surgeon, of Brydges-street, Covent-garden, said, that he attended the deceased on the 1st instant, at his residence, and took forty ounces of blood from him in consequence of a violent inflammation on the lungs; after the deceased's arrest, witness visited him in the Fleet Prison, and saw him in a room with fourteen or fifteen other persons; the place was filled with smoke, and calculated to aggravate his disorder; the deceased walked into the passage to converse with him.

"Mr. Brown deposed, that when the deceased entered the prison, a person applied for a room for him, and he told the party that he would have a chummage ticket in twenty-four hours after he had paid his fees, and in the interim he was directed to go into the warden's room, where he slept on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights. "The sister of the deceased stated to the jury, that her brother slept but one night in the warden's room.

"Mr. Brown here asserted that he did not say to Mrs. Devenish, that the deceased might lie on the boards.'

"Mr. Shelton, the coroner, inquired why the deceased was not put into the infirmary?

"Mr. Brown replied, that there was no infirmary on the master's side."

We request the reader to note this jesuitical reply. It shortly appears that there was an infirmary on the other side of the prison.

The injury by carelessness, for which the negligent party is most rarely held responsible, is injury to life. The person legally charged with the care of a horse, is answerable for any damage he may receive while in his hands; but he who is legally charged with the safe keeping of a man, the support, perhaps, of a whole family, may destroy him by inattention, negligence, or improper treatment, and escape with complete impunity. Why would it not be as just that a wife or a child should be enabled to recover damages for the injury done to a husband or a father, "per quod" they lost their support, as that a trader should recover damages for the mischief done to a bale of merchandize, or a more analogous case, a father for the seduction of his daughter?

"A solicitor, on the part of the relatives of the deceased, stated that Mr. Devenish, when he first arrived at the prison, in consequence of not paying the fees demanded, was put on the poor-side, where there is an infirmary, and he wished to know why Mr. Brown removed him from thence?

"Mr. Brown said that he had been informed that the deceased's disorder was contagious."

By whom? By the surgeon, by any person competent to give information, or by a turnkey that made money of the infirmary beds?

"A juror asked Mr. Brown what was charged per night to the prisoners for lodging in the warden's room?-He replied that they were charged one shilling each, according to Act of Parliament.

"John Juddery, the head turnkey, was examined: He deposed that, on the prisoner's arrival, he showed him into a room where there were six persons.

"Juror: And he was kept out of the room because he did not pay?

"Witness replied, that the deceased did not apply to him about his being excluded from the room. He accommodated the deceased in the warden's room, and charged him 28. a night; he could not afford to do it for less."

This was done, be it observed, in contravention of the Act of Parliament, just before quoted by Mr. Brown.

"Dr. Clutterbuck deposed, that he visited the deceased on Monday, the 19th instant, in room 21, called the infirmary-room, at the top of the prison; he was in bed, and appeared in a hopeless state; he was again bled, and the next day he died.

"The coroner observed, that it was quite lamentable that there was no surgeon or infirmary within the walls of this prison.

"Juddery, the turnkey, was recalled: he deposed that he permitted the deceased to sit in his room, till he went to his bed in the warden's room; he had the privilege of letting out beds to any persons in the prison who possessed none; he charged at the rate of 58. 6d. a week for the use of a bed.-Several questions were put, to show that the witness let beds to prisoners, who were well, for their use in the infirmary, to show that the infirmary was not appropriated to sick persons only.

"Mr. Shelton observed, that the management of the prison was not so much the object of their inquiry, as the cause of the poor man's death."

Here we come to the customary coroner's doctrine; the genuine, the original "Crowners's quest law." The cause of the poor man's death was, nosologically speaking, undoubtedly an inflammation of the lungs; but the main end of the inquiry was to ascertain whether the inflammation of the lungs had not been rendered fatal by the manner in which the deceased had been lodged in prison-and this necessarily involves the prison management.

"Mr. Brown, jun. a son of the warden, stated, that the deceased was received into the prison on the 3d Feb. and that on the 7th,

witness gave him what is called a "chum ticket," by which he became entitled to the use of the room, No. 14, in the third gallery, in common with two other prisoners. The rule of the prison is, that a prisoner shall be located, or, as it is termed, chummed within twentyfour hours of his entrance, provided that within that period he had paid his fees; and the delay in the present instance occurred in consequence of the deceased not having paid his fees. The usual practice is to send for the prisoner to the lobby, and there give him his ticket; but as Mr. Devenish was ill, his ticket was sent him by the crier. The room in which deceased was placed, was that to which he became entitled in regular rotation, the day on which he paid his fees.

"By Mr. Watlington.-Was the deceased apparently very ill when he came into the prison ?—I did not see him.

"Mr. Watlington.-Is there no examination when a prisoner comes in, to ascertain whether he is ill or well?—No.

"Mr. Watlington.-Then supposing he was afflicted with a contagious disease, it would not be discovered?

"Witness.—It would not. The prisoner would be passed into his chummage without any observation."

Why the other Mr. Brown had stated, that the prisoner was removed from the poor side of the prison, where there was an infirmary, because he had been told that his disorder was contagious.

"Coroner. Is there any sick-room on the master's side?-None; but prisoners taken ill on that side would be admitted into the infirmary on the other side, as a matter of course.

"In reply to a question from Mr. Watlington, the witness stated that he did not know whether or not the infirmary was full when the prisoner came into the prison.

"Mr. Brown, sen. was asked the same question, and stated that it was partly occupied by persons in good health, who could not get accommodation elsewhere in the prison. Did not know whether the

turnkey derived any advantage from letting out the room to those persons."

The knowledge of this witness may be matched by the famed Majocci. The Fleet Prison must be marvellously well regulated, if one of the superintendants really does not know what perquisites the turnkeys receive.

"On referring to the evidence of the head turnkey, it appeared that he had put some of his own beds in the room, and had let them out at 28. per night to the prisoners.

"Mr. Watlington observed, that this fact was contrary to the intended use of that room.

"William Ellison, crier of the prison, stated that shortly after the deceased came into the prison, he went, by Mr. Juddery's desire, with his compliments and the key of the sick room, for which kindness the deceased expressed his gratitude. He then seemed very unwell. Witness also took him his chum ticket.

"Mrs. Devenish here stated, that the prisoner upon whom the deceased was chummed refused to admit him, or to open his door. He, however, afterwards paid him 48. 6d. which is the sum regulated by the Act.