The remarks of Mr. Hallam on the bill of attainder, though, as usual, weighty and acute, do not perfectly satisfy us.  He defends the principle, but objects to the severity of the punishment.  That, on great emergencies, the State may justifiably pass a retrospective act against an offender, we have no doubt whatever.  We are acquainted with only one argument on the other side, which has in it enough of reason to bear an answer.  Warning, it is said, is the end of punishment.  But a punishment inflicted, not by a general rule, but by an arbitrary discretion, cannot serve the purpose of a warning.  It is therefore useless; and useless pain ought not to be inflicted.  This sophism has found its way into several books on penal legislation.  It admits however of a very simple refutation.  In the first place, punishments ex post facto are not altogether useless even as warnings.  They are warnings to a particular class which stand in great need of warnings to favourites and ministers.  They remind persons of this description that there maybe a day of reckoning for those who ruin and enslave their country in all forms of the law.  But this is not all.  Warning is, in ordinary cases, the principal end of punishment; but it is not the only end.  To remove the offender, to preserve society from those dangers which are to be apprehended from his incorrigible depravity, is often one of the ends.  In the case of such a knave as Wild, or such a ruffian as Thurtell, it is a very important end.  In the case of a powerful and wicked statesman, it is infinitely more important; so important, as alone to justify the utmost severity, even though it were certain that his fate would not deter others from imitating his example.  At present, indeed, we should think it extremely pernicious to take such a course, even with a worse minister than Strafford, if a worse could exist; for, at present, Parliament has only to withhold its support from a Cabinet to produce an immediate change of hands.  The case was widely different in the reign of Charles the First.  That Prince had governed during eleven years without any Parliament; and, even when Parliament was sitting, had supported Buckingham against its most violent remonstrances.

Mr. Hallam is of opinion that a bill of pains and penalties ought to have been passed; but he draws a distinction less just, we think, than his distinctions usually are.  His opinion, so far as we can collect it, is this, that there are almost insurmountable objections to retrospective laws for capital punishment, but that, where the punishment stops short of death, the objections are comparatively trifling.  Now the practice of taking the severity of the penalty into consideration, when the question is about the mode of procedure and the rules of evidence, is no doubt sufficiently common.  We often see a man convicted of a simple larceny on evidence on which he would not be convicted of a burglary.  It sometimes happens that a jury, when there is strong suspicion,