Contrasts in English Criminal Law.
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officers; — all these were punished by the ing the fields of industry, despised, while he 'dreadful penalty of death! went on pilfering." No wonder that humanity revolted. No The number of executions almost exceeds belief. Beginning with the reign of Henry wonder that judges devised expedients VI., more persons were executed in England for the purpose of evading the law which in one year for highway robbery alone than Parliament was unwilling to change; no won the whole number executed for all crimes in der that Lord Mansfield, in a case of grand France in seven years. In the reign of larceny, where the prisoner, a mere lad, had Henry VIII. 72,000 thieves were hanged, at stolen a gold snuff-box from a nobleman, the rate of about 2,000 a year. In 1785, in and under the evidence was undoubtedly the reign of George III., no less than 97 guilty, instructed the jury that, as they were masters of the facts, persons were ex they could find the ecuted in London value of the snuff-box alone for the offence under s. in order of shoplifting; and to reduce the grade as late as the reign of the crime to petty of George III. twen larceny. The owner ty persons were ex protested that the ecuted on the same mere fashion of the morning in London box was worth sixty for privately stealing. guineas, upon which Without going into Lord Mansfield further detail, we see sternly replied : " Sir, a spirit of unmitigat we sit not here to ed ferocity, of savage application of the hang men for fash brute force of the ion's sake. The ju criminal law as the ry may find that only remedy for ev box worth what they ery evil, enshrined on please." The jury, the judgment seat. acting on the hint, As one writer ob found it, much to served, " the system the disgust of the TEMPLE BAR. went on until society owner, to be worth was heartsick at its atrocities, and then 4^., and it was only by a technical juggle rose up the equivocating system which of this kind that the boy's life could be Lord Chancellors and Lord Chief Justices spared. and doctors in moral philosophy upheld as We have now reached, in a rapid review, the perfection of human. wisdom — the sys a stage from which we can, in a subsequent tem of making the lightest as well as the paper, judge with some accuracy of the most enormous offenses capital, that the law magnitude of the task of law reform and the might stand up as a scarecrow — an old, amelioration of the criminal code undertaken ragged, ill-contrived and hideous mawkin — by Sir Samuel Romilly, aided by the caus that the smallest bird, after habitually pilfer- tic wit of Sydney Smith.
