ead
could not be made to blush, it was but reasonable that his back should
do so. [275]

Horrible as were the sufferings of Oates, they did not equal his crimes.
The old law of England, which had been suffered to become obsolete,
treated the false witness, who had caused death by means of perjury, as
a murderer. [276] This was wise and righteous; for such a witness is, in
truth, the worst of murderers. To the guilt of shedding innocent blood
he has added the guilt of violating the most solemn engagement into
which man can enter with his fellow men, and of making institutions,
to which it is desirable that the public should look with respect
and confidence, instruments of frightful wrong and objects of general
distrust. The pain produced by ordinary murder bears no proportion to
the pain produced by murder of which the courts of justice are made the
agents. The mere extinction of life is a very small part of what makes
an execution horrible. The prolonged mental agony of the sufferer, the
shame and misery of all connected with him, the stain abiding even to
the third and fourth generation, are things far more dreadful than death
itself. In general it may be safely affirmed that the father of a large
family would rather be bereaved of all his children by accident or by
disease than lose one of them by the hands of the hangman. Murder by
false testimony is therefore the most aggravated species of murder; and
Oates had been guilty of many such murders. Nevertheless the punishment
which was inflicted upon him cannot be justified. In sentencing him to
be stripped of his ecclesiastical habit and imprisoned for life, the
judges exceeded their legal power. They were undoubtedly competent to
inflict whipping; nor had the law assigned a limit to the number of
stripes. But the spirit of the law clearly was that no misdemeanour
should be punished more severely than the most atrocious felonies.
The worst felon could only be hanged. The judges, as they believed,
sentenced Oates to be scourged to death. That the law was defective is
not a sufficient excuse: for defective laws should be altered by the
legislature, and not strained by the tribunals; and least of all should
the law be strained for the purpose of inflicting torture and destroying
life. That Oates was a bad man is not a sufficient excuse; for the
guilty are almost always the first to suffer those hardships which are
afterwards used as precedents against the innocent. Thus i