The Sun.
London, England, 1861-09-11 00:00:00

CAPITAL PUNTSIDIF,NTS,

Mr. ASHWORTH rtad a paper on Capital Punish-
ments and Crime, of which the following ie an
abstract :—We find that in most countries the
punishment of evildoers—even to the extent of
taking away human life—has been justified as a
necessity and defenctd upon one plea or another :
whether in accordance with the Mosaic code, or as
enjoined under the Christian dispensation—de-
fended by philosophy, or claimed as a right by
'royal prerogative. hssing from the question of
divine authority, and tracing by investigation the
theory of our own juttsprudence in this country, we
find that, from time to time, under the ever vary-
ing condition of our people, an adjustment of
punishment for offences has been determined in some
way or other by humor judgment, and, for the most
part, the punishment inflicted has been greatly in
excess of the magnitude of the offences committed.
The extremity of thispolicy would appear to have
been reached in the lime of Henry VIII., during
whose neign it has been stated that the incredible
number of 72.000 persons were executed for the
crime of theft alone, besides those who suffered
death for treason and other grave offences. Dur-
ing the reign of the Stuarts and some of the
Brunswick family the number of capital offences
was gradually increased to the extent of 220, and
the pecuniary amount e,escetided to as low a sum as
five shillings. Coming nearer to our own day, the
prevailing sentiment ie relation to almost all
offences continued to rest upon the theory of the
legislature, that it was needful to hang men by way
of example, in order to prevent others committing
crime. In the year 1786, James Holland of Kirk-
ham, in this county, was condemned at the Lan-
caster Assizes as a " croft breaker," having stolen
30 yards of cotton cloth of the value of £3 from the
bleach grounds of Mr. Thveat, of Burnden, near
Bolton. We will not now remark upon the gravity
of the offence. He was conveyed in a cart from the
Castle of Lancaster to the town of Bolton, and was
executed there on the 18th of September, 1786.
Such was the avowed purpose and determination
that the most should be made of the impressive
effect, that the employers of the neighbourhood had
their servants and werkpeople assembled on the spot
to witness the spectacle : and upon the following
Sunday the Rev. E. Whitehead, vicar of the parish
church, improved the occasion by a sermon upon
the recent execution. After some remarks deploring
" the degeneracy and wickedness of the times," he
proceeded to inquire, " In what past period in this
nation will the people be found more sunk in vice
and pollution than the present ?" He then went on
to assert that iniquity abounds, criminals daily in-
crease, rapine and villany are at their utmost sum-
mit." Following a disclosure of the notoriously ill
success of extreme punishments, a committee was
formed in London about the year 1808, to afford
assistance to Sir Samuel Rominy, M.P., in obtain-
ing the amelioration of our criminal code ; and their
exertions were gradually successful. One offence
after another ceased to be capital, and a change in
our penal code was more and more urgently de-
manded. The difficulty of procuring the repeal, or
even some mitigation of our antiquated penal sta-
tutes, lay with the legislature, and the character of
the obstruction offered will be estimated by refer-
ence to a few only of the accounts of the proceedings.
In the session of 1810. Romilly succeeded in carry-
ing through the House of Commons the repeal of the
law which made it a capital offence to steal the value
of 5s in a shop. The House of Lords threw out the
bill by a majority of 31 to 11, and in this majority
therewere six bishops and one archbishop. From
a beginning so inauspicious to look upon, the pro-
gress of any salutary change could not be very
rapid, and it was in 1833 that Lord Suffield appealed
to their lordships on the following astounding state-
ment—" I hold in my hand a list of 555 perjuredver-
diets delivered at the Old Bailey in 15 years, for the
single offence of stealing from dwelling houses; the
value stolen in these cases being sworn above 405.,
but the verdict returned being reduced by the jury
to the value of 395. only." What was the result of
this appeal ? A change in the law was effected,
and Mr. Chas. Phillips, in a remarkable pamphlet on
capital punishments, published in 1858, facetiously
informs us—" It did not amount to a repeal, but to
an acknowledgment that man, made in the image
of his Maker, had risen in the money market,
and thereupon human life was advanced by statute
from £2, the sum at which it then stood, to £5,
being a rise of 60s. per head." The effect of this
change in the law, as might reasonably be ex-
pected, was that in like mannerjuries had recourse
to an exceptional verdict of £4 19s. The instinct
of the age spurned such atrocities, and as Sir Wil-
liam Grant has remarked :—" There was amongst
prosecutors, witnesses, juries, judges, and the Minis-
ters of the Crown, a general confederacy to pre-
vent the law being executed," adding, "Where the
law and the practice were opposite to one another
one of them must be wrong, and he had no doubt
it was the law." In the case of forgeries, Mr.
Samuel Hoare, a London banker, stated that " not
one in twenty was prosecuted;" and the country
bankers petitioned for a more lenient law, as " they
had found by experience that the infliction of death
prevented prosecutions, and thus endangered the
property which the law was intended to protect."
The question assumed enlarged proportions, and
the peers began to show symptoms of uneasiness ;
they saw that bills were being passed by the Com-
mons which they were constantly rejecting ; they
made impressive appeals to the wisdom of their
predecessors, and especially to the great Law Lords
who had enacted these very statutes which the
Oommons were insisting so strongly upon having
repealed. Lord Wynford assured the house that
" if the capital offence of 40s. should be repealed,
the people of England could not sleep in safety
in their beds." Lord Chief Justice Eilenborough
exclaimed against these "innovations," de-
claring that "he knew not where such specu-
lations were to stop ;" and Lord Chancellor Eldon
very piteously expressed the same concern. We
may now very complacently inquire what has come
of the changes effected, and what of the reliable
character of these high sounding alarms? Public
opinion, founded upon truth and justice, became
irresistible ; most of these inhuman enactments
were at length repealed ; our police was improved ;
prosecutors became more willing to bring criminals
to justice ; and what has been the consequence ?
So tar from any increase of crime, as attendant on
the repeal, it has positively diminished ; commit-
ments have become fester, thus establishing the
proof that laws which had deterred prosecutionhad
encouraged crime. It will hardly be necessary to
offer the remark that fee security of property and
the good order and welfare of the community are
amongst the treasured institutions of our country;
how gratifying is the acknowledgment that these
are now being upheld with greater safety and
without involving any sacrifice of human life, even
of the meanest of our fellow-subjects. From a
Parliamentary paper (No. 585), it appears that in
the course of 22 years, from 1798 to 1818, both
inclusive, there were in Lancashire 153 executions,
more than 50 of which were for offences connected
with forgery ; and let it be borne in mind that
the population of the county, in 1801, was only
672,565. In the last 22 years, the population of
1861 being 2,428,744, or nearly fourfold, the num-
ber of executions had been reduced to 16, and
these for murder only. It may be insisted that any
such comparison as that of the number of executions
does not afford conclusive evidence of the diminu-
tion of crime ; and that, if possible, some other
to be
affording more minute particulars,
ought obe ad-
duced in support of this assumption. It is well
known that in the early part of the present century
there were not in existence the means of collecting
the needful information in the same careful manner
as is now annually prepared by the county consta-
bulary. Some statistics of crime in Bolton were
then referred to, from which it appeared that the
pecuniary loss falling upon the 67,000 inhabitants
of the county constabulary district of Bolton had
been something under £lOO per annum, or a little
over three-eighths of a penny her head. He con-
cluded by saying that in endeavouring to account
for the presence or the absence of crime, it will be
admitted that the employment of the executioner
as a moral teacher has utterly failed, and that the
enactment of stringent laws has not prevented the
onward course of crime. When we come to consider
the conditions tending to crime, it is well known
that the harassing effects of poverty have been but
too frequently the originating cause. Under a pres-
sure so severe, how utterly vain would be the
attempt to enfore the conviction that "honesty is
the best policy ;" whilst on the contrary, the con-
clusion must be obvious that the ameliorating influ-
ence of well-paid employment, cheap food, and com-
mand of enjoyment, tend to diminish crime and to
exalt the character of a people.
Mr. NAPIER said they had just got rid of the
punishment of death in every ease except for
murder and treason. There was a class of cases