B. Without violence; including embezzlement, cattle-stealing, larceny, and fraud.
C. Malicious offences against property; including arson, incendiarism, maiming cattle, &c.
III. Forgery and offences against the currency; including the forging of wills, bank-notes, and coining, &c.
IV. Other offences; including high-treason, sedition, poaching, smuggling, working illicit stills, perjury, &c.
M. Guerry, the eminent French statist, adopts a far more philosophic arrangement, and divides the several crimes into—
I. Crimes against the State; as high treason, &c.
II. Crimes against personal safety; as murder, assault, &c.
III. Crimes against morals (with and without violence); as rape, bigamy, &c.
IV. Crimes against property (proceeding from cupidity or malice); as larceny, embezzlement, incendiarism, and the like.
The same fundamental error which renders the government classification comparatively worthless, deprives that of the French philosopher of all practical value. It gives us no knowledge of the character of the people committing the crimes; being merely a system of criminal mnemonics, as it were, or easy method of remembering the several varieties of offences. The classes in both systems are but so many mental pigeon-holes for the orderly arrangement and partitioning of the various infractions of the law; further than this they cannot help us.