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 follow their conviction.

It was almost equally certain that criminals calculated beforehand on the chance of impunity which the known prevalence of these feelings afforded them.

Wherever the sympathy of the public does not go along with the law, it must, to a great extent, fail; and that the terrible frequency of sanguinary punishment had failed in all its objects, was proved by the fact that, in spite of the numerous executions which took place, crimes increased in a still greater proportion than the population.

Under the reformed system, now first inaugurated on an extensive scale, crimes have become rarer, detection and punishment more certain--a combination of results which must be the object equally of the law-giver and the philanthropist.
It is not quite foreign to this subject to relate that, a year or two before, a mode of trial had been abolished which, though long disused, by some curious oversight had still been allowed to remain on the statute-book.