224 CMME AND PUNISHMENT contended that gooseberry bushes ought to be fenced round with gibbets ? " It was to this recklessness about taking human life that Dueuing. *^® practice of duelling owed its popularity throughout the same period. The laws made to prevent it were evaded, the Courts winked at it when they could, and the opinion of Parliament — ^no doubt in harmony with that of society — seemed to be rather in its favour than otherwise. In the course of a debate in the House of Commons on the duel between the Earl of Shelbume and Mr. FuUarton in 1780, one member asked : — Did the honorable gentleman think that any order or resolation of the. House, that any Act of the Legislature, could prevent a gentle- man going out) as it was termed, with another, if he felt his honor injured 1 Had gentlemen so soon forgot that there were Acts of Parliament against duelling now in being ? The very attempt to prevent one man fighting with another was absurd, because it was
- impossible, by any regulation of Parliament, to prevent it.
Burke on To which Burke replied that the right honorable gentle- man could not surely imagine that*he was so absurd as to attempt to make laws for the restraint of the human feelings and passions.* He, therefore, saw nothing particularly reprehensible in the practice ; for either he had nothing to say against it, or he thought it prudent to refrain from expressing his opinion. Pitt and Fox each fought his duel. There were other exhibitions of human suffering to be seen in Phillip^s time even more horrible than that of men hanging from the scafEold in public places. The old law Burning Under which women were burned as well as hanged for petit treason — ^that is, for killing a husband or a master, or for coining — was not abolished till 1789. In the year before, it was put in force against a woman convicted of coining ; but out of consideration for her sex, she was first strangled and then burned. Having been tied by the neck
- Parliamentary History, voL xxi, pp. 324-6. Dr. Johnson defended the
practice of daelling. — Boswell's Johnson, by Napier, voL ii, p. 73 ; iii, p. 316n. ; iv, pp. 12, 205. duelling. women. Digitized by Google
