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Of these some are involuntary, some voluntary.... Voluntary commutations are when a man voluntarily transfers his chattel to another person. And if he transfer it simply so that the recipient incurs no debt, as in the case of gifts, it is an act not of justice, but of liberality.

He was an ardent defender of the settlement at Molokai, where all the island lepers were segregated. There was much talk and feeling among the natives, fanned by the demagogues, concerning the cruelties of Molokai, where men and women, not alone banished from friends and family, were compelled to live in perpetual imprisonment until they died. There were no reprieves, no commutations of sentences.

In the fourth division they adduce besides another argument in proof of this assumption, in this manner: "For both the rising and setting of the stars preserve some definite order, and their annual commutations do not only always take place in the same manner by some express necessity, but they are also adapted to the service of everything, and their daily and nightly changes have never injured anything in any particular from being altered capriciously."

It was at first difficult to say what object the Government had in view in endeavouring to compel the Reformers to sign petitions, unless it were the unworthy one of desiring to humiliate men who were already down, or the perhaps more contemptible one of forcing them to turn informers by a process of self-excusing and thus enable them to differentiate in the commutations.

These consist in the use of certain externals, whether things, persons, or even works: of things as when one man takes from or restores to another that which is his: of persons as when a man does an injury to the very person of another...: and of works as when a man justly enacts a work of another or does a work for him.... Commutative justice directs commutations that can take place between two persons.

Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists, scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard all toiling and tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay wages and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the accommodations for them less adequate.

On the following day it was announced to the prisoners that they had been misinformed with regard to the five and twelve months' commutations that the intention and resolution of the Executive was merely to grant these men permission to appeal at the end of the periods named to the aforesaid magnanimity.

"Some since, subtler than the Jews, have managed commutations more to their own advantage, by enriching themselves, and beggaring, if Fame be not a liar, many an honest dissenter." It is fair to produce witnesses, is she a liar or not? The report is almost impossible. Commutations were contrived for roguish registers and proctors, and lay chancellors, but not for the clergy.

Heike's sentence was commuted so as to excuse him from going to the penitentiary; just as the penitentiary sentence of Morse, the big New York banker, who was convicted of gross fraud and misapplication of funds, was commuted. Both commutations were granted long after I left office. In each case the commutation was granted because, as was stated, of the prisoner's age and state of health.

But in spite of this opposition the act of 1823 had been widely adopted. Stanley's bill to render such commutations compulsory passed, but his other two bills, providing a new ecclesiastical machinery for buying up tithes, were abandoned at the end of the session. Of course the substitution of the government for the clergyman as creditor in respect of arrears had no soothing effect on the debtors.