tion from Manchester, and the leave-taking address which so many regarded as the last public word of a great career, found himself unable to go on with that part of his speech. An emotion more honorable to the speaker and his subject than the most elaborate triumph of eloquence, checked the flow of the orator's words, and for the moment made him inarticulate.

Lord Palmerston came back to power with renewed and redoubled strength. The little war with Persia, which will be mentioned afterward, came to an end in time to give him another claim as a conqueror on the sympathies of the constituencies. His appointments of bishops had given great satisfaction to the Evangelical party, and he had become for the time quite a sort of Church hero, much to the amusement of Lord Derby, who made great sport of "Palmerston, the true Protestant;" "Palmerston, the only Christian Primeminister." In the Royal Speech at the opening of Parliament it was announced that the differences between this country and China still remained unadjusted, and that therefore "Her Majesty has sent to China a Plenipotentiary fully intrusted to deal with all matters of difference; and that Plenipotentiary will be supported by an adequate naval and military force in the event of such assistance becoming necessary." It would be almost superfluous to say that the assistance of the naval and military force thus suggested was found to be necessary. The Government, however, had more serious business with which to occupy themselves before they were at liberty to turn to the easy work of coercing the Chinese.

The new Parliament was engaged for some time in passing the Act for the establishment of a Court of Divorcethat is to say, abolishing the ancient jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts respecting divorce, and setting up a regular court of law-the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Court to deal with questions between husband and wife. The passing of the Divorce Act was strongly contested in both Houses of Parliament, and, indeed, was secured at last only by Lord Palmerston's intimating very significantly that he would keep the Houses sitting until the measure had been disposed of. Mr. Gladstone, in particular, offered to the bill a most strenuous opposition. He condemned it on

strictly conscientious grounds. Yet it has to be said, even as a question of conscience, that there was divorce in England before the passing of the Act; the only difference being that the Act made divorce somewhat cheap and rather casy. Before, it was the luxury of the rich; the Act brought it within the reach of almost the poorest of her Majesty's subjects. We confess that we do not see how any great moral or religious principle is violated in the one case any more than in the other. The question at issue was not whether divorce should be allowed by the law, but only whether it should be high-priced or comparatively inexpensive. It is certainly a public advantage, as it seems to us, that the change in the law has put an end to the debates that used to take place in both Houses of Parliament. When any important bill of divorce was under discussion, the members crowded the House, the case was discussed in all its details as any clause in a bill is now debated; long speeches were made by those who thought the divorce ought to be granted and those who thought the contrary; and the time of Parliament was occupied in the edifying discussion as to whether some unhappy woman's shame was or was not clearly established. In one famous case, where a distinguished peer, orator, and statesman sought a divorce from his wife, every point of the evidence was debated in Parliament for night after night. Members spoke in the debate who had known nothing of the case until the bill came before them. One member, perhaps, was taken with a vague sympathy with the wife; he set about to show that the evidence against her proved nothing. Another sympathized with husbands in general, and made it his business. to emphasize every point that told of guilt in the woman. More than one earnest speaker during those debates expressed an ardent hope that the time might come when Parliament should be relieved from the duty of undertaking such unsuitable and scandalous investigations. It must be owned that public decency suffers less by the regulated action of the Divorce Court than it did under this preposterous and abominable system. We cannot help adding, too, that the Divorce Act, judging by the public use made of it, certainly must be held to have justified itself in a merely practical sense. It seems to have been thoroughly appre

ciated by a grateful public. It was not easy, after awhile, to get judicial power enough to keep the supply of divorces up to the ever-increasing demand.

Lord Palmerston then appears to be furnished with an entirely new lease of power. The little Persian War has been brought to a close; the country is not disposed to listen to any complaint as to the manner in which it was undertaken. The settlement of the dispute with China promised to be an easy piece of business. The peace party were everywhere overthrown. No one could well have anticipated that within less than a year from the general election a motion made in the House of Commons, by one whom it unseated, was to compel the Government of Lord Palmerston suddenly to resign office.

CHAPTER XXXI.

TRANSPORTATION.

THE year 1857 would have been memorable, if for no other reason, because it saw the abolition of the system of transportation. Transportation as a means of getting rid of part of our criminal population dates from the time of Charles II., when the judges gave power for the removal of offenders to the North American colonies. The fiction of the years coming immediately after took account of this innovation, and one of the most celebrated, if not exactly one of the finest, of Defoe's novels deals with the history of a convict thus sent out to Virginia. Afterward the revolt of the American colonies and other cases made it necessary to send convicts farther away from civilization. The punishment of transportation was first regularly introduced into our criminal law in 1717, by an Act of Parliament. In 1787 a cargo of criminals was shipped out to Botany Bay, on the eastern shore of New South Wales, and near Sydney, the present thriving capital of the colony. Afterward the convicts were also sent to Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania; and to Norfolk Island, a lonely island in the Pacific, some eight hundred miles from the New South Wales shore. Norfolk Island became the penal settlement for the con

victed among convicts; that is to say, criminals who, after transportation to New South Wales, committed new crimes there, might be sent by the Colonial authorities for sterner punishment to Norfolk Island.

Nothing can seem on the face of it a more satisfactory way of disposing of criminals than the system of transportation. In the first place, it got rid of them, so far as the people at home were concerned; and for a long time that was about all that the people at home cared. Those who had committed crimes not bad enough to be disposed of by the simple and efficient operation of the gallows were got rid of in a manner almost as prompt and effective by the plan of sending them out in ship-loads to America or to Australia. It looked, too, as if the system ought to be satisfactory in every way and to everybody. The convicts were provided with a new career, a new country, and a chance of reformation. They were usually, after awhile, released from actual durance in the penal settlement, and allowed conditionally to find employment, and to make themselves, if they could, good citizens. Their labor, it was thought, would be of great service to the colonists. The Act of 1717 recited that "in many of his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America there was a great want of servants who, by their labor and industry, might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation." At that time statesmen only thought of the utility of the colonies to this nation. Philanthropy might, therefore, for awhile beguile itself with the belief that the transportation system was a benefit to the transported as well as to those among whom they were sent. But the colonists very soon began to complain. The convicts who had spent their period of probation in hulks or prisons generally left those homes of horror with natures so brutalized as to make their intrusion into any community of decent persons an insufferable nuisance. Pent up in penal settlements by themselves, the convicts turned into demons; drafted into an inhabited colony, they were too numerous to be wholly absorbed by the population, and they carried their contagion along with them. New South Wales began to protest against their presence. Lord John Russell, when Secretary for the Colonies in 1840, ordered that no more of the criminal refuse should be carted out to that re

gion. Then Tasmania had them all to herself for awhile. Lord Stanley, when he came to be at the head of the Colonial Office, made an order that the free settlers of Tasmania were not to obtain convict labor at any lower rates than the ordinary market-price; and Tasmania had only put up with the presence of the convicts at all for the sake of getting their labor cheap. Tasmania, therefore, began to protest against being made the refuse-ground for our scoundrelism. Mr. Gladstone, while Colonial Secretary, suspended the whole system for awhile, but it was renewed soon after. Sir George Grey endeavored to make the Cape of Good Hope a receptacle for a number of picked convicts; but in 1849 the inhabitants of Cape Colony absolutely refused to allow a shipload of criminals to be discharged upon their shores, and it was manifestly impossible to compel them to receive such disagreeable guests. By this time public opinion in England was ready to sympathize to the full with any colony which stood out against the degrading system. For a long time there had been growing up a conviction that the transportation system carried intolerable evils with it. Romilly and Bentham had condemned it long before. In 1837 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider and report on the system. The committee included. Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, Charles Buller, Sir W. Molesworth, and Lord Howick, afterward Earl Grey. The evidence they collected settled the question in the minds of all thinking men. The Rev. Walter Clay, son of the famous prison chaplain, Rev. John Clay, says, in his memoirs of his father, that probably no volume was ever published in England of which the contents were so loathsome as those of the appendix to the committee's report. There is not much exaggeration in this. The reader must be left to imagine for himself some of the horrors which would be disclosed by a minute account of what happened in a penal den like Norfolk Island, where a number of utterly brutalized men were left to herd together without anything like beneficent control, without homes, and without the society of women. In Norfolk Island the convicts worked in chains. They were roused at daylight in the morning, and turned out to labor in their irons, and huddled back in their dens at night. In some rare cases convicts were sent directly from England