in the house of correction.

[4] The pillory (S531) was not abolished until the accession of Queen
Victoria.

Not only men, but women and children even, were hanged for pilfering
goods or food worth a few shillings.[1] The jails were crowded with
poor wretches whom want had driven to theft, and who were "worked off"
on the gallows every Monday morning in batches of a dozen or twenty,
in sight of the jeering, drunken crowds who gathered to witness their
death agonies.

[1] Five shillings, or $1.25, was the hanging limit; anything stolen
above that sum in money or goods might send the thief to the gallows.

Through the efforts of Sir Samuel Romilly, Jeremy Bentham, and others,
a reform was effected in this bloody code. Next, the labors of the
philanthropic John Howard, and later of Elizabeth Fry, purified the
jails of abuses which had made them not only dens of suffering and
disease, but schools of crime as well.

The laws respecting the pubishment for debt were also changed for the
better, and thousands of miserable beings who were without means to
satisfy their creditors were set free, instead of being kept in
useless lifelong imprisonment. At the same time Clarkson,
Wilberforce, Fox, and Pitt were endeavoring to abolish that relic of
barbarism, the African slave trade. After twenty years of persistent
effort both in Parliament and out, they at last accomplished that
great and beneficent work in 1807.

557. War with France (1793-1805); Battle of the Nile; Trafalgar, 1805.

Near the close of the century (1789) the French Revolution broke out.
It was a violent and successful attempt to destroy those feudal
institutions which France had outgrown, and which had, as we have
seen, disappeared gradually in England after the rebellion of Wat
Tyler (SS250, 252). At first the revolutionists received the hearty
sympathy of many of the Whig party (S479), but after the execution of
Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette,[1] England became alarmed not
only at the horrible scenes of the Reign of Terror but at the
establishment of the French democratic republic which seemed to
justify them, and joined an alliance of the principal European powers
for the purpose of restoring monarchy in France.

[1] See "Death of Marie Antoinette," in Burke's "Reflections on the
French Revolution."

Napoleon had now become the real head of the French nation, and seemed
bent on making himself master of all Europe. He undertook an
expeditio