THE DIREST PENALTY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 378, 15 July 1911, Page 3

THE DIREST PENALTY.

Happily executions are of comparainfrequent occurrence nowadays in Great Britain and its dependencies beyond the seas, but in dayg gone by—"the good old times," as persons of a sentimental turn of mind are wont to call them—the office of public hangman was no sinecure. Hangings were almost as frequent as weddings a cen tury and a half ago, and the extreme penalty of the law was exacted for offences now punishable with a fine or a short term of imprisonment. The true story told by Dickens in the preface to "Barnaby Rudge" furnishes a case in point. This is the tale of the young wife—she was only eighteen whose husband was seized by a pressgang, she and her two children being afterwards tUined into the streets to starve. The furniture of the little home had been sold to defray some debt alleged to be due by the husband. Subsequently this unfortunate girl visitad a draper's shop and snatching some coarse linen from the counter attempted to conceal it beneath her cloak. Being observed by the shopman she tried to replace the stuff on the counter, but was arrested and thrown into gaol. At her trial she pleaded that "she had lived in credit and wanted for nothing until a pressgang came and stole her husband away from her; but since then shed had no bed to lie upon, nothing to give her children to eat, and they were almost naked, and perhaps she might have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she did." The truth of her story was confirmed by the parish officers, but the inhuman law of the good old decreed that she must die; and so they hanged her. A year or two earlier—about 1780—Phoebe Harris, convicted of coining, was hanged, or rather slowly strangled, and afterwards burned. Even Blackstone, the great legal luminary, considered the burning alive of women for civil offences a great concession to their sex. "The undecency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies," he said; "their sentence is to be drawn to the gallows and there burnt alive. The humanity of the English nation has authorised, by a tacit consent, an almost universal mitigation of such parts of these judgments as savour of torture and cruelty." The English-speaking world have made some progress in "humanity" since those barbarous words were penned.