The British nation a history / by George MWrong . a shilling, to steal goods from ashop, to destroy maliciously a tree in a garden, were allpunishable with death ; while graver moral offences, suclias attempted murder, and perjury that might even lead tothe execution of an innocent person, were more lightlypunished. A servant wlio had wounded his master fifteentimes with a hatchet in an attempt at murder, was exe-cuted, not for this offence, but for burglary in enteringthe r(mm. Since the penalty for trifling theft was death, merciful juries andI ji^dg-s acquitted obvi- ously guilty personsrat
The British nation a history / by George MWrong . a shilling, to steal goods from ashop, to destroy maliciously a tree in a garden, were allpunishable with death ; while graver moral offences, suclias attempted murder, and perjury that might even lead tothe execution of an innocent person, were more lightlypunished. A servant wlio had wounded his master fifteentimes with a hatchet in an attempt at murder, was exe-cuted, not for this offence, but for burglary in enteringthe r(mm. Since the penalty for trifling theft was death, merciful juries andI ji^dg-s acquitted obvi- ously guilty personsrather than inflict soterrible a punishment;undue severity thuscaused crime to becondoned, not pun-ished, and accusedpersons, relying ontbis forbearance, some-times preferred to betried on a capitalcharge. Usually itseems there were notmore than fifty execu-tions in London in thecourse of a single year,and when we comparethis with the proba-bly enormous number of thefts in days without police, wesee that the laws rigour was more nominal than Jonathan Wild pelted by the Mob onHIS Way to the Place of Execution. J SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 483 Yet even this number of executions was ghastly. Everysix weeks there was a procession of criminals throughthe streets of Lon-don for the longdistance betweenXewgate and Ty-burn, and noisyand ribald crowdsflocked to see thelast grim spectacleas an the ex-ecutions were hor-rible. The dropwas not inventeduntil late in thecentury, and thefriends of the manwho was hangingby the neck some-times clung to hisfeet in order tohasten 1790 the law required that the execution of femalecriminals should be by burning. By selling convicts fora limited period, and sometimes for life, to work on theplantations in America, a punishment hardly less terriblethan death was inflicted. The price was about £20 foreach convict, and the slavery was as real as that of thenegro. After the American Eevolution criminals we
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