Immorality was punished sometimes by the stocks and a whipping. Cardinal Wolsey, when incumbent of Lymington, was set in the stocks on a Fair day for drunkenness. Then there were also the dark house or dun geon, the drunkard's clock, the whipping post, entries in the Hustings Book, brand ing, and all sorts of arbitrary fines and imprisonment. Nothing was too high or too low for the borough magnates, except such matters as had to go to sessions. A man who had associated with another man's wife " in a very suspicious manner," was im prisoned for more than a year. A walk on the Sunday,.a hasty word, or absence from church, were also duly punished. Even love matters were not above the cognizance of justices. The game-laws have been very fertile in punishments, and still occasion a large part of the crime of country districts. To take an egg out of the nest of a swan, falcon, goose-hawk, lanner or goose, was visited by a year and a day's imprisonment and a fine at the will of the Crown. For " killing or wounding any deer in any park or enclosed ground " was, by a statute of George I, transportation to the plantations for seven years. As time proceeds, these cruel pun
ishments, so incommensurate with the of fences for which they were designed, have dropped one by one away. With this ame lioration, the habits and happiness of the people have correspondingly improved. Our morals are purity itself compared to those of the past. And why? Because we are better instructed in secular knowledge; be cause we have more freedom, and so acquire habits of self-control and self-respect; be cause we have got rid of prying agitators and social spies. But the madness of those who would restore the old state of things is like that which afflicted the inhabitants of the Neapolitan districts for two centuries ending with the seventeenth — the madness of self-destruction. Theirs was attributed to the bite of the tarantula; ours is a more virulent poison of the mind. Lecky tells us " the patients thronged in multitudes to wards the sea, and often, as the blue waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and rushed with passion into the waves." So amongst us are thous ands who advocate those harsh measures and backward marches which would ulti mately engulf us in all the horrors of anar chy and general criminality. — Ladv COOK, in the Humanitarian.
