owners of factories and subjected to the utmost rigour of enforced labour.  The treatment of the insane was darkened by incredible barbarities.  As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and left from Saturday to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves.  Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the most brutal type.  Our prisons were unreformed.  Our penal code was inconceivably sanguinary and savage.  In 1770 there were one hundred and sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the number had greatly increased.  To steal five shillings’ worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death.  A girl of twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the man who had stolen it.

In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining.  People still living have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains.  I have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late Lord de Ros:  “The executioner and his assistant cut down one of the corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head hanging over on the block.  The man with the knife instantly severed the head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held it up, saying in a loud voice, ‘This is the head of a traitor.’  He then dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through the same ghastly operation.  It was observed that the mob, which was very large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a loud and deep groan of horror burst from all sides, which was not soon forgotten by those who heard it.”

Duelling was the recognized mode of settling all personal disputes, and no attempt was made to enforce the law which, theoretically, treated the killing of a man in a duel as wilful murder; but, on the other hand, debt was punished with what often was imprisonment for life.  A woman died in the County Jail at Exeter after forty-five years’ incarceration for a debt of L19.  Crime was rampant.  Daring burglaries, accompanied by every circumstance of violence, took place nightly.  Highwaymen infested the suburban roads, and not seldom plied their calling in the capital itself.  The iron post at the end of the narrow footway between the gardens of Devonshire House and Lansdowne House is said by tradition to have been placed there after a Knight of the Road had eluded