murder on the heels of another?

One forgery came crowding on another's heels in the same way, when
the same punishment attached to that crime. Since it has been
removed, forgeries have diminished in a most remarkable degree. Yet
within five and thirty years, Lord Eldon, with tearful solemnity,
imagined in the House of Lords as a possibility for their Lordships
to shudder at, that the time might come when some visionary and
morbid person might even propose the abolition of the punishment of
Death for forgery. And when it was proposed, Lords Lyndhurst,
Wynford, Tenterden, and Eldon--all Law Lords--opposed it.

The same Lord Tenterden manfully said, on another occasion and
another question, that he was glad the subject of the amendment of
the laws had been taken up by Mr. Peel, "who had not been bred to
the law; for those who were, were rendered dull, by habit, to many
of its defects!" I would respectfully submit, in extension of this
text, that a criminal judge is an excellent witness against the
Punishment of Death, but a bad witness in its favour; and I will
reserve this point for a few remarks in the next, concluding,
Letter.


III


The last English Judge, I believe, who gave expression to a public
and judicial opinion in favour of the punishment of Death, is Mr.
Justice Coleridge, who, in charging the Grand Jury at Hertford last
year, took occasion to lament the presence of serious crimes in the