was held to be sufficient in this general summary of legal murders.
Mr. O'Connell defended, in Ireland, within five and twenty years,
three brothers who were hanged for a murder of which they were
afterwards shown to have been innocent. I cannot find the reference
at this moment, but I have seen it stated on good authority, that
but for the exertions, I think of the present Lord Chief Baron, six
or seven innocent men would certainly have been hanged. Such are
the instances of wrong judgment which are known to us. How many
more there may be in which the real murderers never disclosed their
guilt, or were never discovered, and where the odium of great crimes
still rests on guiltless people long since resolved to dust in their
untimely graves, no human power can tell.

The effect of public executions on those who witness them, requires
no better illustration, and can have none, than the scene which any
execution in itself presents, and the general Police-office
knowledge of the offences arising out of them. I have stated my
belief that the study of rude scenes leads to the disregard of human
life, and to murder. Referring, since that expression of opinion,
to the very last trial for murder in London, I have made inquiry,
and am assured that the youth now under sentence of death in Newgate
for the murder of his master in Drury Lane, was a vigilant spectator
of the three last public executions in this City. What effects a
daily increasing familiarity with the scaffold, and with death upon
it, wrought in France in the Great Revolution, everybody knows. In
reference to this very question of Capital Punishment, Robespierre
himself, before he was


"in blood stept in so far",