warned the National Assembly that in taking human life, and in
displaying before the eyes of the people scenes of cruelty and the
bodies of murdered men, the law awakened ferocious prejudices, which
gave birth to a long and growing train of their own kind. With how
much reason this was said, let his own detestable name bear witness!
If we would know how callous and hardened society, even in a
peaceful and settled state, becomes to public executions when they
are frequent, let us recollect how few they were who made the last
attempt to stay the dreadful Monday-morning spectacles of men and
women strung up in a row for crimes as different in their degree as
our whole social scheme is different in its component parts, which,
within some fifteen years or so, made human shambles of the Old
Bailey.

There is no better way of testing the effect of public executions on
those who do not actually behold them, but who read of them and know
of them, than by inquiring into their efficiency in preventing
crime. In this respect they have always, and in all countries,
failed. According to all facts and figures, failed. In Russia, in
Spain, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, in Sweden, in England, there
has been one result. In Bombay, during the Recordership of Sir
James Macintosh, there were fewer crimes in seven years without one
execution, than in the preceding seven years with forty-seven
executions; notwithstanding that in the seven years without capital
punishment, the population had greatly increased, and there had been
a large accession to the numbers of the ignorant and licentious
soldiery, with whom the more violent offences originated. During
the four wickedest years of the Bank of England (from 1814 to 1817,