s, and serjeants hobnobbed with their brethren of the bench and
of the coif, apparently unconcerned at the responsible part they were
enacting in this awful drama; while the poor rabble put on their best
attire on the days of execution, and liberally patronized the venders
of cakes and ale who, near the gallows, erected booths as on other
gala days,--many of the spectators, no doubt, thinking that it would
not be so bad a thing, after all, if it came their turn next to better
their desperate condition by swinging on the newly contrived gallows,
on which ten criminals could be hanged together.[29]

[Footnote 29: See a picture of the new gallows, in the illustrated
"Newgate Calendar."]

Alas! well may we ask with astonishment if it is possible that such a
state of society really existed in the England of Hannah More, of Sir
William Jones and Edmund Burke,--the land throughout which the Wesleys
were preaching and singing to eager multitudes of the free grace and
abounding mercy of God; where the pious Cowper was pleading for the
relief of "insolvent innocence," and Clarkson and Wilberforce and
Granville Sharp were rousing the public mind to the evils of slavery
in distant colonies!

The case of petit treason which we have been considering occurred nine
years before Beccaria startled all Europe with "the code of
humanity,"--his treatise on crimes and punishments; yet had he known
of our experience in this Province, he could have pointed to
Massachusetts as the strongest practical illustration of the truth of
his theory, that it is not necessary to multiply extreme penalties in
order to prevent crime, but that we are to look for the amelioration
of manners and the diminution of public and private wrongs to the
mental and moral education of the people rather than to the terrors of
the law.

In 1777, when the Revolutionary War was beginning to assume its
gravest aspect, and when the hopes of traitors were reviving, the
barbarous incidents of the punishment for treason were abolished by
the legislature of Massachusetts, and this crime was made punishable
simply by hanging. Eight years later the distinction between petit
treason and murder was abolished,--an improvement of the criminal code
in which we were followed by Great Britain five years later still.[30]

[Footnote 30: The Massachusetts act is as follows:--

"Whereas it does not appear reasonable any longer to continue the
distinction between the crimes of murder an