The Sun.
London, England, 1842-10-18 00:00:00

far as that goes, it appears that the man was
healthy when he was sent to the House of Cor-
rection in February, and having been sentenced
to hard labour, was there placed on the tread-
wheel. His work in that situation was very
fatiguing, and the prison diet insufficient nourish-
ment. When not on the wheel, he was confined
to a cold damp cell, with nothing but a stone or
an iron bedstead to sit on. Into these cold cells
the prisoners were often removed from the wheel,
with their shirts so wet with perspiration, that
they could wring them. To these causes, and
being made to work when he was unwell, his
death is ascribed. Other persons complain of
the treatment in the prison, and accuse it of
great hardships and death.
We are not disposed to aggravate these
charges, or defend the system. As far as we
know, our prison discipline, in spite of the many
efforts which have been made to reconcile con-
finement and severe punishment with humanity
—to gratify at once the kindly feelings of some,
and the desire of vengeance in others—remains,
and ever will remain, a sore trial for those who
have not been educated, as it were, to live in a
gaol. We doubt whether it be possible to re-
concile imprisonment and forced labour, in con-
junction with scanty fare and the privation of
society, with the enjoyment of health. Man
was not intended to be entombed till death, and
a prison, with its clammy stone walls and stone
floors, is little better than a tomb for the living.
We shall be slow, therefore, to aggravate charges
against those who have to administer the system,
whatever the system itself may deserve. In-
carceration for a length of time, in conjunction
with hard and forced labour, and insufficient diet,
must, we believe, except in rare instances,
be productive of feebleness, disease, and prema-
ture death.

We are much afraid that none of the fine de-
vices adopted in model and other prisons are
likely to get over the inherent qualities of the
system. Men of acute feelings must, therefore,
make up their minds to submit to much pain
from sympathy, or give up the idea of severely
punishing a great multitude of offences. We
know no means of reconciling severe punishment
with notions of great humanity; and putting
men to death, transporting them, and imprison-
ing them, have accordingly, each in its turn,
been condetnned,by those who chiefly consult their
own feelings. Nor must those persons who make
the effort to reconcile these opposites throw the
blame, as they are generally wont, on the
gaolers, or on medical men who have to look
after the prisoners. It is the very nature of the
trust confided to them to make them either
severe or careless. The persons placed under
their charge have no means of helping them-
selves. They are degraded, and almost at their
mercy. It is impossible that the prisoners
should inspire them with respect; and though
gaolers, magistrates, and workhouse-masters
may sometimes pity individuals, it seems almost
impossible that they should treat paupers or
prisoners with strict justice. The system, then,
appears to exert a baneful influence on those who
administer it, and we can rarely expect them to
keep to the strict line of their duty.
Such characteristics of the system, and
the great extent to which it is now car-
ried out, require that the Press should.watch
its operations and results attentively. Amongst
the persons confined at Northleach, and who
" perished," as the Times said, " unde-
a slow and torturing death," was a man named
WILSON, whose offence was " deserting his fa-
r mily," and leaving them chargeable to the pa-
rish. A great multitude of persons get a month
or two months at the tread-mill, which is at pre-
sent the favourite punishment, for many minor
offences. The more frequently the punishment
is inflicted, the more careless or severe will be
men in authority, and all its bad consequences
will be exasperated. Already it is attended with
tke fatal consequences ascribed to it in the cases
of BEALE and WILSON, and, being applied to a
great many offences, it requires to be most assi-
duously watched. Nothing occurs more readily
to the majority of mankind, includini legislators,
than the idea that punishment is sure to prevent
any given offence, and under this hasty conclu-
sion punishments have been amazingly increased.
If first impressions—at least on such subjects—
should be regarded with distrust, the present
condition of our country (in which punishment
seems to have lost its efficacy, and crimes to in-
crease even faster than gaols) should incline us
very much to doubt the prevalent notion, and
should rather make us check the enactment of
so many• penal laws than hope to obviate the
physical and moral evils of imprisonment by
some ingenious devices.

THE TRIAL OF MARSHAL NEY.
(From the Edinburgh Review, just published.)
In the beginning of 1815, Marshal Ney was Go-
vernor of Besancon, but residing on his estate near
Chateaudun a town between Chartres and Orleans,
about 80 miles from Paris. On the 6th of March he
received an order from Soult, then Minister of War,
to proceed to Besancon. News travels slowly in
France ; though Bonaparte had been five days in
Provence, the fact was unknown at Chateaudun, and
Ney, curious as to the motive of the order, took Paris
in his road. He arrived on the 7th, and found M.
Batardy, his attorney, at his house waiting for him.
They arranged some private business, and Batardy,
surprised at Ney's making no allusion to what occu-
pied every mind in Paris, ventured to remark, "This
is a strange event." " What event ?" answered Ney.
"Don't you know," replied Batardy, "that Bonaparte
has landed at Cannes—that Monsieur proceeded this
morning to Lyons, and that you are ordered to your
government ?'t At first Ney treated the news as in-
credible ; but when he was told that it was officially
stated in the 3loniteur, he leant his head upon the
mantel-piece and exclaimed, " What a calamity !
what a horrible event ! What can be done ?—what
is there to oppose such a man as that ? Would he
have ventured to return unless he had relied on find-
ing here enemies to the Government ?"
Ney went immediately to the Minister, and was
told that he would find his instructions at Besancon.
He then saw the King, made his memorable promise
to bring back Bonaparte in a cage, left Paris for
Besancon, and appears to have arrived there during
the night between the 9th and 10th. The 10th he
employed in directing the forces under his control to
meet at Lons le Saulnier, a small town to the South
of Besancon, and to the east of the high-road from
Lyons to Paris. On the 11th he set out himself for
Lons le Saulnier. In,the mean time, Grenoble had
opened its gates to Bonaparte ; he had rushed forward
to Lyons, the second city in France, occupied by a
considerable force under Monsieur and Marshal Mac-
donald. The city and the garrison had received him
with enthusiasm ; Monsieur and Macdonald had been
forced to fly ; the trifling band with which he had
landed had been swelled by the garrisons of Grenoble
and Lyons to more than 10,000 men, and was aug-
menting every day by the desertion rom the Royal
forces of individuals, companies, and even regiments.
On his road Ney met M. de St. Amour and M. de
Soran returning from Lyons, who described to him
the revolutionary madness which they had witnessed
in the people, and the cries of Vive l'Empereur
which they had heard from the troops whom
they had met on their march. In the morn-
ing of the 12th he reached Lons le Saulnier.
During the whole of that day, and until the night of
the 13th, he appears to have been making active pre-
parations to attack Bonaparte, or at least to resist him.
The troops nominally under his order did not amount
to 5,000 men ; they were deficient in ammunition, and
scarcely provided with artillery—the artillery horses
having been hired by the farmers, and not to be found
when unexpectedly wanted. Bonaparte's proclama-
tions were scattered round, and seemed everywhere
to produce their intended effects. In the evening of
the 13th, Ney's spies informed him that Bonaparte,
preceding his own forces with an escort of only 40
men, had entered Macon in triumph ; that from
Macon to Bourg (which is only seven posts from
Lons le Saulnier) the whole country was in what the
French call exaltation, that even the villagers, and the
people in the fields, were crying Vive l'Empereur.
Ney's last acts on the 13th were to make arrange-
ments—the prudence and details of which raised the
admiration of the peers at his trial—to write to Mar-
shals Suchet and Oudinot, who were co-operating
with him in support of the Royal cause. to communi-
cate his proceedings; and to require all the regimental
and non-commissioned officers of his small force
separately to swear before him to be faithful to the
Bourbons. It is to be observed that on this very
day, at a Council held in the Tuileries, it was ad-
mitted that resistance was hopeless—that not a soldier
would fire on his former Emperor, and that the only
debatable question was, in what direction the King
should fly.
Late in the night between the 13th and 14th, Ney
was guilty of his first breach of duty. He admitted
messengers from Bonaparte; they brought him a
letter from Bertrand, assuring him that Louis had
been been betrayed by his Ministers ; that troops de-
voted to Bonaparte had been posted along the road to
Paris, so as to ensure his advance without opposition ;
and that the whole enterprise had been concerted
with England and Austria. The folly of the last
statement ought not to revolt us, when we remember
that the successor to Napoleon was the grandson of
Francis, and that M. Berryer, who has passed his life
in estimating evidence, even now believes that we
effected Bonaparte's escape. Absurd as they really
were, they did not appear so to Ney. With Ber-
trand's letter came a proclamation ready prepared in
the name of Ney, in which he was made to declare
that the cause of the Bourbons was lost for ever, and
that liberty and Napoleon were triumphant. And
there came also orders from Bonaparte, expressed as
if the old relations between himself and Ney had
remained uninterrupted, and giving instructions in
the style which he had long been accustomed to obey.
Between three and four in the morning of the 14th,
he was roused from his sleep by M. de Capelle, the
Prefect of Bourg, who had to tell him that one of his
regiments, the 76th, stationed at Bourg, had pro-
claimed Bonaparte; that even the regiment at St.
Amour, which formed the advanced guard of the
small force at Lons de Saulnier, was preparing to go
over; and that throughout the country the higher
classes were stupified, and the lower mad with revo-
lutionary excitement. This information appears to
have convinced him of the impossibility of further
opposition. " Can I stop," he said to M. de Capelle,
" with my hand the rising of the tide ?" A few hours
afterwards he ordered his troops to be called together ;
but before he took a decisive step, summoned the two
generals next him in command, lie Bourmont and Le-
courbe, both of them supposed to be devoted to the
King, showed them the proclamation, repeated the
contents of Bertrand's letter, and asked their advice.
No fourth person was present. De Bourmont and
Lecourbe state that they urged him to remain faithful
to the King ; Ney maintains that they approved of
his joining Bonaparte. It is in favour of Ney's state-
ment that they both accompanied him to the parade,
where the troops were formed in square, stood on
each side of him while he read the proclamation,
heard it without any expression of dissent, and dined
with him the same evening. The dinner was silent
and melancholy. We fully believe Ney's account of
the effect produced on his own mind by the irrevocable
step which he had taken. "From the time of that
unhappy proclamation life was a burden to me ' • I
wished for nothing but death, and did all I could to
find it at Waterloo. A hundred times I was on the
point of blowing out my brains ; all that restrained
me was my wish to defend my character. I knew
that all honourable men must blame me—l blamed
myself. I did wrong, I admit it, but I was not a
traitor ; I was partly deceived, and partly carried
away."
Ney proceeded to meet Bonaparte at Dijon, and a
few days afterwards was ordered to visit the northern
and eastern frontier, from Lille to Landau, to ascer-
tain the state of the fortresses and hospitals; and to
publish everywhere that Bonaparte had returned
under a treaty between himself, England, and Austria
—stipulating that he was never to carry on war be-
yond the frontier of France; that he was to give
l'rance a liberal constitution ; and that his wife and
child were to remain as hostages in Vienna until he
had performed all the positive parts of his engage-
ment. Having executed his mission, he retired into
the country, and took so little part in the transactions
of Aiwa and May, that when, on the Ist of June, he
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nago," answered Ney ; " now it is too late."
He returned after the battle of Waterloo to Paris ;
and by his bold exposition in the Chamber of Peers,
on the 22d of June, of the real facts and consequences'
of the battle, materially assisted in driving Bonaparte
from power. In that speech Ney maintained that the
allies would be before Paris in a week. His predic-
tion was accomplished; and on the morning of the 3d
of July it seemed probable that, before the evening, a
battle would have been fought, more disastrous to
France, and particularly to Paris, than any event in
the history of the French nation. Davoust, who com-
manded the army defending the town, had a large body
of infantry (80,000 men, according to M. Berryer),
25,000 cavalry, and between 400 and 500 pieces of
field artillery —a force insufficient for victory, but suf-
ficient to maintain a contest destructive of the city in
which it was to take place. Already the firing had
begun, when the Provisional Government and Davoust
sent to propose a negotiation; of which the bases were
to be the entry of the allied forces, on the one hand,
and the preservation of Paris and the security of all
who inhabited it, on the other. On these terms the
Convention of the 3d of July, 1815, was framed ; and
ratified by the Duke of Wellington and Blucher on
the part of the allies, and by Davoust on the part of
the Provisional Government. The twelfth article
provided that all the inhabitants, and generally all
persons found in Paris, should continue to enjoy all
their rights and liberty, and should not be liable to
any molestation or inquiry whatsoever, with relation
to their functions, to their conduct, or to their politi-
cal opinions. It appears, from the evidence of Gene-
ral Guilleminot, one of the r.-gotiators of the Conven-
tion, that this was the clause to which the defenders of
Paris attached the most importance. Had it been re-
fused, he was to break off the discussion, and the battle ,
would have commenced.
Relying on the protection given to him by the Con-
vention, Ney remained in Paris till the 6th of July,
and continued in France until the 3d of August,
when he was arrested on a charge of treason, and
ordered to he tried by a court-martial, comprising
among its members four of the Marshals of France.
Ney protested against the jurisdiction of such a tri-