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p to that time men and women had been executed, year after year, for stealing from a shop any goods of the value of five shillings, were the goods but a few loaves of high-priced bread carried off for the purpose of relieving the sufferings of a hungry family. Sir James Mackintosh's measure aimed at the abolition of the death penalty in a large number of other minor offences, but he only succeeded in robbing the gallows of its victims in two other classes of small offences as well as that which has just been mentioned. At this time of day one reads with amazement the arguments which men like Lord Chancellor Eldon directed against the humane measures introduced by Sir James Mackintosh. Parliament and the country were solemnly warned that if such relaxation of the death punishment were sanctioned by law, the smaller class of tradesmen would have to give up their shops and their business altogether, because it would be utterly impossible for them {21} to keep any goods in their windows or on their shelves if the punishment of death were not maintained for the theft of a shawl or a snuff-box. At the same time it was well known to everybody who had eyes to see or ears to hear that numbers of shoplifters escaped punishment altogether because humane juries refused, even on the plainest evidence, to find a verdict of guilty where such a verdict would send the prisoner from the dock to the gallows. Many a jury, too, when it was impossible to doubt that a theft had been committed, acted on the ingenious plan of declaring in their verdict that the articles stolen, whatever their obvious market worth, were under the value of five shillings, thereby saving the offender from the doom of death. Thus the repressive power of the law was necessarily diminished by the uncertainty which common humanity put in the way of its regular enforcement, and that very barbarity of punishment which was intended to keep men back from crime by its mere terrors gave to the criminal only another chance of escape. Sir James Mackintosh had brought in his measures as successor, in that line of philanthropic reform, to the lamented Sir Samuel Romilly, whose melancholy death, already referred to, had created a profound sensation throughout England and abroad towards the close of the late reign. About the time when Mackintosh was thus making his partly successful attempt to put some check on the application of the death penalty, Henry Brougham was aro
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