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No . 4 . Dr . Paley is said to have exclaimed , " I can't afford to keep a conscience . " Did ever expression fall from the lips of a professed moralist more calculated to injure the cause of virtue ? Whether we consider it as an incautious joke or as a declaration which accorded but too well with
his habitual feelings , will all the beauty of his moral sentiments and his admirable display of intellect make suitable amends to society for this apparent deviation from rectitude ? In his writings he has exposed himself to the charge of insincerity and mental prevarication—does not this fatal sentiment countenance the suspicion that he was as little scrupulous in reality as be was unguarded in avowing it ?
No . 5 . * Warwick Borough Sessions , Jan . 1827 . William Webb and Stephen Kite , both labourers , residing in the parish of St . Mary , in this borough , pleaded guilty to an indictment charging them with having been found , in the night of the 12 th December , in a plantation
called the Lilacks , belonging to the Earl of Warwick , with intent to kill game . After receiving a suitable admonition from the Mayor , both prisoners were ordered to be imprisoned in the gaol of this county for the space of twelve calendar months , and kept to hard labour . —Birmingham Chroniele , Jan . 18 , 1827 .
Such is British justice or jurisprudence ! When culprits are encouraged to acknowledge their offence by pleading guilty , it is always considered as an appeal for mitigation in the punishment ; what would have been the sentence in this case had they audaciously denied the fact and been convicted by a jury ? Let any man with a single grain of humanity in his composition reflect on the extreme severity of this sentence compared with the crime—and then say if our boast of equal justice and protection be not
an insult to common sense . Twelve months' imprisonment and hard labour for merely thinking of violating an oppressive and unjust law , without any overt act beyond a simple trespass ! Were there no purchasers there would be no poachers , and on the common principle that " the receiver is worse than the thief , every man sitting down to a table displaying a hare or a partridge which he knows to have been clandestinely procured , must be deserving of the same punishment as the poacher himself , should he only
intend to partake of the plunder ! But should he be wilful and base enough absolutely to eat any portion of the prohibited fare , would a sentence of transportation for seven years be more outrageous than the one here recorded ? And yet we complain of the increase of crime ! What other inference can these nightly depredators draw from such vindictive proceedings , than that all property is for the use of those who can best scramble for it ?
M The good old rule sufficeth them , So simple in the plan—That they should take who have the power , And they should keep who can . "
If the higher classes really wish that the lower should be honest and just , would it not be as well to prove by example that they are so themselves ? No . 6 . Many years ago a provincial journal recorded the following melanchol y case as a fact : As some men were employed in removing some timber on the sea-beach , a heavy beam slipped and pinned one of them on the sand by
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Moral Queries * l 42 b
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VOL . I . 2 F
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1827, page 425, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1797/page/33/
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