strong for even his resolution as yet to
overbear, though many private bankers supplied him with the same
arguments against it in their case which had formerly been alleged by
the bleachers. But the example which he now set, enforced as it was with
all the authority of the government, was followed in many subsequent
sessions, till at last our code, instead of the most severe, has become
the most humane in Europe, and death is now never inflicted except for
murder, or crimes intended or calculated to lead to murder. It is worth
remarking, however, that neither Romilly, Mackintosh, nor Peel ever
entertained the slightest doubt of the right of a government to inflict
capital punishment. In the last address which Mackintosh delivered to
the grand-jury at Bombay he had said: "I have no doubt of the right of
society to inflict the punishment of death on enormous crimes, wherever
an inferior punishment is not sufficient. I consider it as a mere
modification of the right of self-defence, which may as justly be
exercised in deterring from attack as in repelling it."[187] And in his
diary, when speaking of a death-warrant which he had just signed, he
says: "I never signed a paper with more perfect tranquillity of mind. I
felt agitation in pronouncing the sentence, but none in subscribing the
warrant; I had no scruple of conscience on either occasion."

And it seems that his position is unassailable. The party whose interest
is to be kept in view by the Legislature in imposing punishments on
offences is society, the people at large, not the offender. The main
object of punishment is to deter rather than to reform; to prevent
crime, not to take vengeance on the criminal. And, if crime be more
effectually prevented by moderate than by severe punishments, society
has a right to demand, for its own security (as a matter of policy, not
of justice), that the moderate punishment shall, on that ground, be
preferred. That punishments disproportioned in their severity to the
magnitude of the offence often defeated their object was certain. Not
only had jurymen been known to confess that they had preferred violating
their oaths to doing still greater violence to their consciences, by
sending a man to the gallows for a deed which, in their opinion, did not
deserve it, but the very persons who had been injured by thefts or
forgeries were often deterred from prosecution of the guilty by the
knowledge that the forfeiture of their lives must foll