and successful. It is certain that out of this feeling arises, not
only that passive blindness to their defects of which the example
given by my Lord Tenterden was quoted in the last letter, but an
active disposition to advocate and defend them. If it were
otherwise; if it were not for this spirit of interest and
partisanship; no single pursuit could have that attraction for its
votaries which most pursuits in course of time establish. Thus
legal authorities are usually jealous of innovations on legal
principles. Thus it is described of the lawyer in the Introductory
Discourse to the Description of Utopia, that he said of a proposal
against Capital Punishment, "'this could never be so established in
England but that it must needs bring the weal-public into great
jeopardy and hazard', and as he was thus saying, he shaked his head,
and made a wry mouth, and so he held his peace". Thus the Recorder
of London, in 1811, objected to "the capital part being taken off"
from the offence of picking pockets. Thus the Lord Chancellor, in
1813, objected to the removal of the penalty of death from the
offence of stealing to the amount of five shillings from a shop.
Thus, Lord Ellenborough, in 1820, anticipated the worst effects from
there being no punishment of death for stealing five shillings worth
of wet linen from a bleaching ground. Thus the Solicitor General,
in 1830, advocated the punishment of death for forgery, and "the
satisfaction of thinking" in the teeth of mountains of evidence from
bankers and other injured parties (one thousand bankers alone!)
"that he was deterring persons from the commission of crime, by the
severity of the law". Thus, Mr. Justice Coleridge delivered his
charge at Hertford in 1845. Thus there were in the criminal code of
England, in 1790, one hundred and sixty crimes punishable with
death. Thus the lawyer has said, again and again, in his
generation, that any change in such a state of things "must needs