United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


During the ten years this law was in operation, there were 411 prosecutions, of which 140 were convictions for keeping unregistered houses, or houses outside the prescribed bounds. Fines were inflicted for these offenses and others, adding considerably to the amount collected regularly each month from each registered house.

Columbus had just returned from his first voyage. He had been scorned as an adventurer by the courtiers of Lisbon, mocked as a visionary by the learned priests of the Council in Salamanca, who, with texts from the Scriptures and quotations from the saints, had tried to convince him that the world was flat; he had been pointed at by the rabble in the streets as a madman who maintained that there was a land where the people walked with their heads down; and, after months of trial, he had been able to equip his three small craft and collect a crew of ninety men only by the aid of a royal schedule offering exemption from punishment for offenses against the laws to all who should join the expedition.

He was tried twenty-one times for different offenses, and acquitted each time. Once when he was visiting in Peoria he was captured by four men from Missouri, who started with him in a wagon to take him to that State. Two sat beside him with cocked pistols, punching him in the side occasionally, and telling him that if he opened his mouth they would blow his brains out.

All of the fines can then be turned over each week to this association and so find their way directly back to the men. Like all other elements, the fining system should not be plunged into head first. It should be worked up to gradually and with judgment, choosing at first only the most flagrant cases for fining and those offenses which affect the welfare of some of the other workmen.

It will be a seasonable occasion also for inquiring how far legislative interposition may be further requisite in providing penalties for offenses designated in the Constitution or in the statutes, and to which either no penalties are annexed or none with sufficient certainty.

Afterward, he played a part in other somewhat similar affairs, for offenses were rapidly becoming more numerous among both Indians and mean whites; but in spite of his efforts the gang he suspected managed to evade the grip of the law. Flett, however, was far from despairing; he waited his time and watched. While he did so, spring came, unusually early.

In Virginia, under the title "Offenses against Morality," the law provides that "any white person who shall intermarry with a Negro shall be confined in jail not more than one year and fined not exceeding one hundred dollars."

There was, therefore, no force and little coherency in the Eleventh Article. It fell of its own weight. Every one of its several averments had been disproven, or at least not proven. It was to a good degree a summing up an aggregation, of the entire bill of indictment on the several distinct forms of offenses charged a crystallization of the whole.

It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Offenses of this character, in addition to their criminality as violations of the laws of our country, have a direct tendency to draw down upon our own citizens at large the multiplied evils of a foreign war and expose to injurious imputations the good faith and honor of the country. As such they deserve to be put down with promptitude and decision.