uch less denomination than these, of
much less. I am sure it cannot be shown, that in any one of
the cases that were punished in that manner, the
aggravations of any one of those offences were any degree
adequate to those which are presented to your Lordship now.
If offences were so punished then, which are not so punished
now, they lose that expiation which the wisdom of those ages
thought proper to hold out to the public, as a restraint
from such offences being committed again.
"I am to judge of crimes in order to the prosecution; your
lordship is to judge of them ultimately for punishment. I
should have been extremely sorry, if I had been induced by
any consideration whatever, to have brought a crime of the
magnitude which this was (of the magnitude which this was
when I first stated it) into a court of justice, if I had
not had it in my contemplation also that it would meet with
an adequate restraint, which I never thought would be done
without affixing to it the _judgment of the pillory_; I
should have been very sorry to have brought this man here,
after all the aggravations that he has superinduced upon the
offence itself, if I had not been persuaded that those
aggravations would have induced the _judgment of the
pillory_."[41]
[Footnote 41: 20 St. Tr. 780-783.]
But Mansfield thought otherwise, and punished him with a fine of L200
and imprisonment for twelve months.[42]
[Footnote 42: 20 St. Tr. 651; 5 Campbell, 415.]
"Thus," says Lord Brougham, "a bold and just denunciation of the
attacks made upon our American Brethren, which nowadays would rank
among the very mildest and tamest effusions of the periodical press,
condemned him to prison for twelve months."[43]
[Footnote 43: Statesmen, 2 Series, 109.]
Thurlow was a man of low intellect, of a fierce countenance, a saucy,
swaggering, insolent manner, debauched in his morals beyond the
grossness of that indecent age,--ostentatiously living in public
concubinage,--a notorious swearer in public and private. But he knew
no law above the will of the hand that fed and could advance him, no
justice which might check the insolence of power. And in less than a
month after Mr. Horne was sent to jail, Thurlow was made Lord
Chancellor of England, and sat on the woolsack in the House of Lords.
His chief panegyrist can only say, "in worse times there have
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