This small number of executions, and all at one time, though in different places, is seriously recommended; because it is certain that a great havoc among criminals hardens rather than subdues the minds of people inclined to the same crimes, and therefore fails of answering its purpose as an example.  Men who see their lives respected and thought of value by others come to respect that gift of God themselves.  To have compassion for oneself, or to care, more or less, for one’s own life, is a lesson to be learned just as every other; and I believe it will be found that conspiracies have been most common and most desperate where their punishment has been most extensive and most severe.

Besides, the least excess in this way excites a tenderness in the milder sort of people, which makes them consider government in an harsh and odious light.  The sense of justice in men is overloaded and fatigued with a long series of executions, or with such a carnage at once as rather resembles a massacre than a sober execution of the laws.  The laws thus lose their terror in the minds of the wicked, and their reverence in the minds of the virtuous.

I have ever observed that the execution of one man fixes the attention and excites awe; the execution of multitudes dissipates and weakens the effect:  but men reason themselves into disapprobation and disgust; they compute more as they feel less; and every severe act which does not appear to be necessary is sure to be offensive.

In selecting the criminals, a very different line ought to be followed from that recommended by the champions of the Protestant Association.  They recommend that the offenders for plunder ought to be punished, and the offenders from principle spared.  But the contrary rule ought to be followed.  The ordinary executions, of which there are enough in conscience, are for the former species of delinquents; but such common plunderers would furnish no example in the present case, where the false or pretended principle of religion, which leads to crimes, is the very thing to be discouraged.

But the reason which ought to make these people objects of selection for punishment confines the selection to very few.  For we must consider that the whole nation has been for a long time guilty of their crime.  Toleration is a new virtue in any country.  It is a late ripe fruit in the best climates.  We ought to recollect the poison which, under the name of antidotes against Popery, and such like mountebank titles, has been circulated from our pulpits and from our presses, from the heads of the Church of England and the heads of the Dissenters.  These publications, by degrees, have tended to drive all religion from our own minds, and to fill them with nothing but a violent hatred of the religion of other people, and, of course, with a hatred of their persons; and so, by a very natural progression, they have led men to the destruction of their goods and houses, and to attempts upon their lives.