lingers a fascination, urging weak and bad people towards it, and
imparting an interest to details connected with it, and with
malefactors awaiting it or suffering it, which even good and well-
disposed people cannot withstand. We know that last-dying speeches
and Newgate calendars are the favourite literature of very low
intellects. The gallows is not appealed to as an example in the
instruction of youth (unless they are training for it); nor are
there condensed accounts of celebrated executions for the use of
national schools. There is a story in an old spelling-book of a
certain Don't Care who was hanged at last, but it is not understood
to have had any remarkable effect on crimes or executions in the
generation to which it belonged, and with which it has passed away.
Hogarth's idle apprentice is hanged; but the whole scene--with the
unmistakable stout lady, drunk and pious, in the cast; the
quarrelling, blasphemy, lewdness, and uproar; Tiddy Doll vending his
gingerbread, and the boys picking his pocket--is a bitter satire on
the great example; as efficient then, as now.

Is it efficient to prevent crime? The parliamentary returns
demonstrate that it is not. I was engaged in making some extracts
from these documents, when I found them so well abstracted in one of
the papers published by the committee on this subject established at
Aylesbury last year, by the humane exertions of Lord Nugent, that I
am glad to quote the general results from its pages:


"In 1843 a return was laid on the table of the House of the
commitments and executions for murder in England and Wales during
the thirty years ending with December 1842, divided into five
periods of six years each. It shows that in the last six years,