DE MINIMIS.
BY the remarks of Mr. Hardwick, the Magistrate at Marl- borough Street Police-office, on a case brought before him this week, a strange provision of the law is disclosed. Into the minute particulars of the case, which is of a disagreeable class, we need not enter. The proprietor of a saloon in Piccadilly was summoned to answer a charge of suffering men and women to " congregate" in his tavern, and of having music. The latter part of the charge was not made out, from a failure of evidence. But it seems that if Mr. Hardwick had chosen to put a strict in- terpretation upon "the act "—which, act the reports do not specify —he might have enforced the absolute prohibition of such " con- gregating," insomuch that a class of women too often homeless would be totally excluded from all houses of refreshment.
No doubt, the present tendency of legislation called moral, is to a general driving out of that unhappy caste from all quarters whatsoever ; but the consequences of such a course can hardly be apparent to the legislators. We will not dwell on the cruelty to a multitude of those who at the worst are the erring sisters of the exterminators ; nor on the injustice of persecuting woman only for offences in which man is the worse accomplice. But it is be- ginning at the wrong end. You cannot ignore the existence of the class ; you cannot exterminate it ; you cannot persecute it with impunity. If, indeed, asylums like that recently established in Lincoln, as a refuge for penitents, were ready to receive the outcasts, there might be a show of justice ; but greater social re- forms would be needed than even that. By laws like that which Mr. Hardwick shirks, you can only drive vice into worse frauds and worse hiding-places ; unless, indeed, your legislation is com- pensated by the reluctance of the Magistrates, shrewd and prac- tised men of the world, to enforce impracticable laws. Such laws, then, entail upon society the vengeance of vice driven to des- peration ; or they hold up a premium to habitual and open nulli- fication of the law by its own ministers.
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