the crowd pressed round him,
imploring the hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl.
[206] Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court
days for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there
whipped. [207] A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman
burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled
horse or an overdriven ox. Fights compared with which a boxing match is
a refined and humane spectacle were among the favourite diversions of a
large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each
other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one
of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells on
earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes
the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the
dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them
signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked
with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive
and restless compassion which has, in our time, extended a powerful
protection to the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro
slave, which pries into the stores and watercasks of every emigrant
ship, which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken
soldier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill fed or
overworked, and which has repeatedly endeavoured to save the life
even of the murderer. It is true that compassion ought, like all other
feelings, to be under the government of reason, and has, for want of
such government, produced some ridiculous and some deplorable effects.
But the more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice
that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred,
and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from
a sense of duty. Every class doubtless has gained largely by this great
moral change: but the class which has gained most is the poorest, the
most dependent, and the most defenceless.

The general effect of the evidence which has been submitted to the
reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, in spite of evidence, many
will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more
pleasant country than the England in which we live. It may at first
sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward with
eager speed, shoul