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LORD LANSDOWNE'S ACT.
Substance of " An Act for consolidating and amending the Statutes in England relative to Offences against the Person," now under consideration of Parliament.
When the proposed bill shall have passed into a law, and our criminal code become somewhat more settled than it recently has been, we shall endeavour to take a comprehensive view of this branch of jurisprudence. For the present we shall keep to the act before us, on which our readers may be anxious for information ; and, although it has not as yet received the final touches of the legislature, the material parts may be looked upon as fixed.
The laws which owe their existence, or rather, we should say, their existence in their new and comprehensive shape, to Mr. Peel, relate principally to offences against the property of individuals, and to the administration of the criminal law generally ; the law introduced by Lord Lansdowne relates to offences against the person.
The first section repeals the whole or parts of between fifty and sixty acts of parliament, passed at different periods, from the 9 Hen. 3. c. 26. to the 3 Geo. 4. c. 114. Of the various and complicated changes which these had severally introduced on the antecedent state of the law, we may perhaps have occasion to speak in a future number ; for the present, we will proceed to the second section, which blots the crime of petit-treason from our statute-book. Petit-treason was either where a servant killed his master, a wife her husband, or an ecclesiastical person, secular or regular, his superior to whom he owed faith or obedience. The last of these three cases is evidently a relic of Popish superstition, or church-policy ; the two former instances, the second more especially, have been distinguished in almost all ages and countries from the ordinary crime of murder.
With regard to the different kinds of criminal homicide, murder, and manslaughter, the law is left pretty much in the same state that it was before ; one or two alterations, which
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