At the Haymarket, Mr. and Mrs. CHARLES KEAN have this

week ap- peared together in the Gamester and the Lady of Lyons, for the first time in London. We were fain to avoid Dr. MooRE's doleful tragedy in town, with its pecuniary pathos and dice-box desperation ; preferring to form our judgment of Mr. C. lisstes powers in domestic distresses from his performance in Sir EDWARD BULWER'S clever and effective melodrama. Mr. C. KEAN becomes Claude Melnotte well : in /the pea- sant's dress he looks the aspiring youth ; in the prince's costume he seems the bold and artful adventurer ; and as Colonel Morier he is the very model of a young Republican soldier of fortune. His pantomime, too, is good, bating certain stage-tricks ; and his mute expression of re- morse and shame, in the scene where he confesses his villany, bespeaks the agony and confusion of one overwhelmed by the consciousness of crime : but when he speaks, the prepossession in his favour is dispet.ted, and the intelligent-seeming actor is transformed into a bad theatrical right or wrong, which a confidence in our knowledge produces. Besides this, much of his argument is casuistical ; more like a pamphleteer taking a side for a purpose, than a philosopher inquir- ing with a view to discover truth. Mr. MEitivALK, moreover, like most economists of the modern school, shows a disposition to in- vest economical questions with a degree of mathematical certainty they never can attain. He objects, for example, to the "sufficient price" of the Wakefield system, that it cannot a priori be fixed at all, and not with positive accuracy in any given colony at any given time : which is undoubtedly as true as that human society is not a book of Euclid. These questions, as ADAM SMITH observed of kindred matters, must be settled by "the higgling of the market " ; and the "sufficient price" contains within itself a sufficiently obvious test for practical purposes. If the price be too high, it will readily be discovered by the scanty purchases of land ; if too low, it will stimulate speculative purchases, and perhaps enable the labourers in the colony to become landowners somewhat too soon : but even this evil is in a great measure checked by the large aggregate amount paid for the land, which increases the importa- tion of labour. Another error of Mr. MERIVALE is to uphold, or at least to back, bad systems of colonization, because, after a lapse of time, and probably a change of system, the absurdities of governors are not able to destroy the advantages of fertile soil, light taxation, an industrious enterprising population, and the innate tendency of human society to advance. For example, in 1767, the whole of Prince Edward's Island was granted in one day to a few persons, and up to 1820 its population and prosperity increased very slowly— the population, not more than it ought, we believe, by propagation : in consequence of greater exertions and facilities, that is to say a change of system, the population has nearly doubled since 1820, or rather since a later date. But compare this bad system, which takes three-quarters of a century to double its population, and more than half a century to make a start, with South Australia or New Zealand. Mr. MERIVALE has also a habit of pouncing upon an incidental part, and treating it as if it were the essence of the theory ; and he sometimes dwells upon subordinate matters to the neglect of the main principle, or to its insufficient treatment. In a philosophical point of view, these things lead to false or im- perfect exposition, and in a literary sense to that flatness which always results from what is called hair-splitting and " argufying." The only point in which the present volume equals its predecessor, is in the neatness, clearness, and ease of the style. Divested of that excellence, indeed, some parts of the book would be extremely bean!.

We have stated the errors in these Lectures broadly and plainly. It should be said, however, that much which appears casuistical in Mr. MERIVALB'S arguments, and too curiously considered in his inves- tigation, may arise from an anxiety to exhaust the subject in every possible way : a good enough plan for an author's own study, but by no means necessary to lay before the public, which requires only to learn the general conclusions, and not the steps by which they are arrived at. It may also be said, that after employing his wits in every way to muster objections against a system, he generally winds up with a fair enough summary ; as in his JUDGMENT UPO.,,, THE WAKEFIELD SYSTEM OF COLONIZING.

I have now gone through the principal features of the modern scheme of systematic colonization. Let us divest it of the too exact form in which it has been presented by some of its supporters ; let us dismiss all idea of a precise

between land, labour,ane of aa and capital, sanlexclusives uffierieemn employment t. of e tt uh the proportionai fun on emigration, consider its principles as confined to the sale of rand at as high 'Prices as can reasonably be obtained, and the strict devotion of the fund to a few essential purposes, among which the supply of labour holds the principal place; let us consider it, moreover, as chiefly applicable only to colonies raising large quan- tities of exportable produce, and perhaps also to other colonies so distant from the mother-country that the stream of emigration needs to be artificially directed to them ; let us subject the theory to all the qualifications which I have suggested, although not all of them with equal confidence, and we cannot then fad of being struck with its simplicity, its facility of adaptation, its high practical utility. Never was there a more remarkable instance of the success of a principle against all manner of misapprehension ; against the fear of in- novation; against corrupt interests ; against the inert resistance which all novelty is sure to encounter. At its first announcement, if warmly advocated by a few supporters, it was received by the multitude with incredulity, by the learned with derision. The idea of putting a high price on that which it had been the uniform practice to lavish with unlimited profusion, and expecting thereby to promote colonization, was received by them as the climax of ab- surdity. "The whole scheme," said Mr. M'Culloch,* "seems, in fact, to be little else than a tissue of delusions and contradictions ; and it says little for the discernment of the public that it should have attracted any notice. It is true that the Americans sell their unoccupied lands; but they sell the richest and finest lands in the valley of the Mississippi at less than a dollar an acre, whereas we exact five shillings an acre for the worst land in Canada, and no less than twelve shillings or twenty shillings an acre for the worst land at the antipodes, as in that terra incognita called Southern Australia! If these re- gulations be intended to direct the current of voluntary emigration from our own Colonies to the United States, they do honour to the sagacity of those by whom they were contrived, and there is not a word to be said against them. But in all other respects they seem to be as impolitic and absurd as can well be imagined." The experiment was tried in South Australia. It succeeded, in respect of the quantity of land sold and the number of emigrants conveyed, beyond the expectations of the boldest speculators. The Government at home shook off its prejudice, and resolved on applying it, though prudently and even timidly, in New South Wales. The opposition, nay, the derision with which the alteration was received both at home and in the Colonies may be fresh in the,recollection of some of my hearers. We shall examine at another time the results which it produced. guffice it to say at present, that so great has been the change of opinion, that while some of the original supporters of the theory talk confidently of being able to raise the uniform price of land in South Aus- tralia to 3/. or 41., the Committee of last year, by no means over-favourably disposed to it, themselves report that the minimum price at the auctions "may safely be raised above the present uniform amount of U. per acre." In all,

• Notexxiii. to Adam Smith.

upwards of 1,700,0001. have been realized of late years in the Australian cob- flies by the sale of land.

Among the most important points which Mr. MERIVALE dis- cusses in this volume, are the difference between the use and abuse of transportation, the limitations to which the Wakefield system is subject, the propriety of applying the land-fund to other purposes than the introduction of labour, the management of the aborigines, and the proper time at which a colony should possess self-government. In favour of transportation, be advances the difficulty attendant upon all punishments; the expense, and other obvious objections to imprisonment, and the stigma which attaches to a discharged criminal even if he is reformed ; to which he might have added, the social circumstances that first gave rise to his criminality, which remaining the same, or having perhaps in- creased in force, must still impel him to crime. As regards the li- mitations attached to the Wakefield plan, he considers the system is most favourably developed in regions that can raise exportable produce—as the wool of Australia, in which productive capital pre- , dominates over labour ; least so in countries fitted to maintain in comfort a large agricultural population of small cultivators, but not adapted to produce many articles of export ; whilst in some places, as in parts of Canada, where the expense in clearing the soil from the forest is so great, he does not consider its introduction ad- visable. Admitting the practical difficulty of preventing the Ex- ecutive from tampering with the land-fund if once allowed to touch it, Mr. MERIVALE is inclined to apply a portion of it to what he calls the expenses of " preparation "—meaning surveys, the forma, tion of roads, &c. Speaking of principle, not of practice—of what should be done, not of what can be done—this preliminary expense is clearly the business of the parent state, whose duty it is to start its offspring in the world ; and in a well-informed and well-governed community, not weighed down by the pressure of burdens created by former wars, nor rendered jealous and suspicious by the pro- fligacy of governments, this expense would be cheerfully borne. But with colonies like South Australia, whose originators were scarcely permitted to found the settlement, and then only on dic- tated terms, or New Zealand, whose first colonists went out in op position to the Government, money for " preparation " was out of the question. If the colonies were to be settled at all, they must be settled in the best way the founders could contrive. This, in the case of South Australia, Mr. MERIVALE admits by implication ; but he is incorrect in saying that the source of " difficulty " arising from insufficient preparation was "unforeseen." In a paper in the Spectator, long before the first emigrants departed, he may find a very strenuous argument against the hasty and haphazard way in whieit the colony was proposed to be begun,* as likely to originate diffi- culties.

The arguments of Mr. MERIVALE upon the subject of the abori- gines are not of a very striking or practical character ; nor does he perceive that if a race is to be absorbed by marriages, it may as well perish, for as a race it is equally extinct. His views upon the sub.- tect of colonial self-government are so judicious and practical as to be worthy of extract.

"There is one other problem in policy which is suggested by a view of the progress and institutions of our modern colonial empire. Whichever charac- ter the state means ultimately to impose on her offspring,—that of subjection, or that which Mr. Lewis calls virtual independence,—should the choice be made at once, or should an experimental, temporary scheme be first adopted? The latter has been the modern plan among ourselves. Many of our existing colonies have only had constitutions granted them at a pretty advanced period in their settlement. And some have been subjected at their foundation to ab- solute government, with an understanding that they will by and by receive one : one (South Australia) with a promise, guaranteed by act of Parliament, that the boon shall be given when the number of its inhabitants amounts to 50,000. Certainly, to observers imbued with the notions of these times, such a course is apt, at first sight, to appear the most advisable. We rather shrink from the idea of saddling the first laborious settlers in the wilderness with the duties of self-government : plain, practical institutions we know to be the beat adapted for them ; and these we are apt to identify with absolute rule. Yet it is worth while to pause, and consider in how different a light our ancestors regarded this matter. They never dreamt (that is, in by far the majority of instances) that the colonist was not fully fitted to enjoy at first whatever mea- sure of liberty was to be ultimately his portion. We have seen that the people of Massachusetts Bay made their own constitution almost as soon as they ar- rived there; it was ratified at home, its provisions were transferred not many years afterwards to a royal charter, and continued to exist during the whole period of its dependence. When the enthusiast Roger Williams settled Rhode Island with a few people escaped from the persecution of their Puritan brethren in Massachusetts, he framed in the very next year a republican polity for his dozen or two of families. It was confirmed by charter in 1662, and continues at this very day to be the constituent law of that flourishing little common- wealth. According to our present ideas, Rhode Island would not have been "entitled" to a constitution until a century and a half after its first settlement. "It cannot be questioned that this as well as other political problems are much complicated by the prevalence of high political theories at the present day. The settlers of New England were republican in habits,not in sentiment, (which only grew up at a later iera,) and valued their free institutions just at their practical worth. In our times, we must always expect that a community possessed of political powers will be influenced more or less by exaggerated views and feelings in the exercise of them. But the question remains sub. stantially the same—whether 500 men of ordinary British habits and nodose* and not too much scattered over the soil, cannotadminister themselves muni- cipally as well as 5%000; whether the size of a community, supposing it protected from external violence, has any thing to do with its capacity for self- government. And it is to be observed, that the more dangerous influences of the democratic spirit do not easily grow to a head in a very small community; every man is known, every man is responsible; and free institutions, formed during this period of comparative simplicity, are perhaps more likely to endure safely the expansion of the commonwealth, than to be received with safety by a people already adolescent. Whatever may be the vantage ground secured by the central government during the period of delay, it is certain that when the expected boon arrives it will find the colony divided into two classes—those * Spectator, No. 315; 12th July 1834.

who are its masters now and these who expect to be its masters hereafter; and that it will find the minds of s large number possessed with a prejudiced hatred toward those elements of good society which may have been introduced during the period of minority. I can only refer you, in passing, to the recent history of Newfoundland, as affording perhaps the most striking example of events which have taken place, more or less, in nearly all our present colonies soon after their passage from a state of pupilage to freedom."

DIFFICULTIES OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENT.

It is most important to control those sanguine expectations of good and that impatience of present evil, which are apt to bias our minds in the investigation of questions such as this, by the recollection that the solution of them offers, most emphatically, nothing but a choice of difficulties. Crime and misery, and punishment, considered abstractedly, are evils in every shape; the last among the heaviest evils which society must necessarily endure. Nothing that philanthropy or sagacity can suggest will ever render human punishment other than it is—a coarse, undiscriminating, and imperfect preventive of crime, often demoralizing instead of reforming, and only inflicted because, on the whole, it represses, as we hope, more mischief than it occasions. Now the mind, in dwelling strongly on this or that special form of evil, acquires by degrees an intensity of feeling respecting it which renders it quite incapable of adopting

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the true test, that s, the relative one, and compels it to regard that form, and that alone, as something to be got rid of by any sacrifice. And thus the old history of the good Bishop Las Cases, who introduced Negro slavery in order to relieve the enslaved Indians of America, typifies, as it were, the character of a whole class of reformers, moral and social, not a few of whom have done much service to humanity ; for perhaps no great changes would ever have been brought into execution, if reflection had always accompanied enthusiasm. Such persons are always desirous to shift the burden from the galled shoulders, with little consideration for those on which it is next to be imposed. The whole history of the theory of punishment affords abundant instances of this truth. Our ancestors preferred to punish offenders by the compendious methods of the gallows and the lash. The inefficacy as well as cruelty of those time-honoured practices was abundantly proved; and transportation gradually superseded the infliction of death, as the ordinary punishment for the class of offences next below the heaviest. Evidence has now been carefully accumu- lated of the ill success and injustice of this once admired system. A better regulated method of imprisonment is the proposed substitute. But all punish- ments are ineffective, all punishments are unjust, except by comparison only. If the attention of the observer is directed to any one alone, the inevitable evils attending it will so press upon his attention as to drive him to unfavour- able conclusions; and should imprisonment be adopted as the ordinary penalty for serious offences, it needs little for,sight to anticipate that in a few years it will be assailed by objections to the full as heavy and unanswerable as those which are now urged against transportation. It is so already in the United States, where more attention has been paid to the subject than in any other country.

PAST AND PRESENT COST OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENT.

It is one of the many evils attending over-government, that party-spirit is created and fostered by the mere hope of partaking in the profits of the great expenditure which accompanies it. Our own times are probably the first in which the governing body, in large states, has sought to acquire strength by multiplying dependents on the public purse ; a matter of statecraft now well

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understood n some great European kingdoms. Under our old colonial system, no temptation whatever was held out to self-interest assuming the mask of patriotism—the commonest form of hypocrisy in these days. The expense of the civil establishment in Massachusetts Bay, before the commencement of the American war, was estimated by Adam Smith at about 18,000/. a year ; that of New Hampshire and Rhode Island, 3,500/. each ; that of Connecticut, 4000L; that of New York and Pennsylvania, 4,5001. each ; that of New Jersey, 1,2001.; that of Virginia and South Carolina, 8,0001. each. "An ever-memo- rable example," as he most truly adds, "at how small an expense 3,000000 of people may not only be governed, but well governed." In 1836, the civil ex- penditure of Newfoundland, paid out of its revenue, was 36,0001.; of Prince Edward's Island, 13,000/.; New Brunswick, 52,0001.; Lower Canada, at least 100,000/. If this enormous difference were compensated by superior govern- ment, I for one should be little disposed to cavil at the amount of the sums which the people of the Colonies are called on to advance for the purchase of an inestimable a blessing. But I might safely ask those who entertain the highest notions of government and its duties, whether any of its functions, moral or material, are better fulfilled in our colonies of the present day than they were in the ancient American provinces.