community. And yet in moral authority we exalt it above the individual! In age after age the conscience, the living conscience of this country went to prison and to execution to bring it just a little more up-to-date. Revolting juries refused to convict because of its savageries; and still it moved slowly and reluctantly, cruel in its fear of the human nature it did not understand.
Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sentenced to death for breaking a pane of glass and stealing two pence. The sentences were not carried out, but they were pronounced. I suppose it was still considered "exemplary" to remind the criminal classes of what powers the law had over them.
Now let us imagine that some individual caught a boy indulging in petty theft; and to punish him—in hot blood perhaps—took him and hung him up by the neck till he was dead. Should we not be inclined to say that so rabid a wild beast must be exterminated from the face of the earth, lest he should have descendants like himself?
Yet that is what our own Courts of Justice—the authorised instrument of the people of England—were doing in cold blood to young boys in the time of Charles Lamb. They had not the excuse of national danger, or war; yet we don't think that our ancestors ought to
