the general policy of the cabinet.  Indeed, as he was replaced at the Foreign Office by his old colleague and rival, Mr. Canning, in one point of view the administration may be said to have been strengthened by the change, since, as an orator, Canning had confessedly no equal in either House of Parliament.  Another change was productive of still more practical advantage.  Lord Sidmouth retired from the Home Office, and was succeeded by Mr. Peel, previously Secretary for Ireland; and the transfer of that statesman to an English office facilitated reforms, some of which were as yet little anticipated even by the new Secretary himself.  The earliest of them, and one not the least important in its bearing on the well-doing of society, the mitigation of the severity of our Criminal Code, was, indeed, but the following up of a series of measures in the same direction which had been commenced in the time of the Duke of Portland’s second administration, and, it must be added, in spite of its resistance.  The influence of various trades, and of the owners of different kinds of property, pressing in turns upon our legislators, had rendered our code the most sanguinary that had, probably, ever existed in Christendom.  Each class of proprietor regarded only the preservation of his own property, and had no belief in the efficacy of any kind of protection for it, except such as arose from the fear of death; nor any doubt that he was justified in procuring the infliction of that penalty to avert the slightest loss to himself.  The consequence was that, at the beginning of the present century, there were above two hundred offences the perpetrators of which were liable to capital punishment, some of a very trivial character, such as cutting down a hop-vine in a Kentish hop-garden, robbing a rabbit-warren or a fish-pond, personating an out-pensioner of Greenwich Hospital, or even being found on a high-road with a blackened face, the intention to commit a crime being inferred from the disguise, even though no overt act had been committed.  An act of Elizabeth made picking a pocket a capital offence; another, passed as late as the reign of William III., affixed the same penalty to shop-lifting, even when the article stolen might not exceed the value of five shillings.  And the fault of these enactments was not confined to their unreasonable cruelty; they were as mischievous even to those whom they were designed to protect as they were absurd, as some owners began to perceive.  In the list of capital offences was that of stealing linen from a bleaching-ground.  And a large body of bleachers presented a petition to Parliament entreating the repeal of the statute which made it such on the ground that, practically, it had been found not to strike terror into the thieves, but almost to secure them impunity from the reluctance of juries to find a verdict which would sentence a fellow-creature to the gallows for such an offence.