p to that
time men and women had been executed, year after year, for stealing
from a shop any goods of the value of five shillings, were the goods
but a few loaves of high-priced bread carried off for the purpose of
relieving the sufferings of a hungry family. Sir James Mackintosh's
measure aimed at the abolition of the death penalty in a large number
of other minor offences, but he only succeeded in robbing the gallows
of its victims in two other classes of small offences as well as that
which has just been mentioned.

At this time of day one reads with amazement the arguments which men
like Lord Chancellor Eldon directed against the humane measures
introduced by Sir James Mackintosh. Parliament and the country were
solemnly warned that if such relaxation of the death punishment were
sanctioned by law, the smaller class of tradesmen would have to give up
their shops and their business altogether, because it would be utterly
impossible for them {21} to keep any goods in their windows or on their
shelves if the punishment of death were not maintained for the theft of
a shawl or a snuff-box. At the same time it was well known to
everybody who had eyes to see or ears to hear that numbers of
shoplifters escaped punishment altogether because humane juries
refused, even on the plainest evidence, to find a verdict of guilty
where such a verdict would send the prisoner from the dock to the
gallows. Many a jury, too, when it was impossible to doubt that a
theft had been committed, acted on the ingenious plan of declaring in
their verdict that the articles stolen, whatever their obvious market
worth, were under the value of five shillings, thereby saving the
offender from the doom of death. Thus the repressive power of the law
was necessarily diminished by the uncertainty which common humanity put
in the way of its regular enforcement, and that very barbarity of
punishment which was intended to keep men back from crime by its mere
terrors gave to the criminal only another chance of escape.

Sir James Mackintosh had brought in his measures as successor, in that
line of philanthropic reform, to the lamented Sir Samuel Romilly, whose
melancholy death, already referred to, had created a profound sensation
throughout England and abroad towards the close of the late reign.
About the time when Mackintosh was thus making his partly successful
attempt to put some check on the application of the death penalty,
Henry Brougham was aro