Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/347

 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 237 Liords. Among those who opposed the stealing-in-shops bill were seven bishops^ the Archbishop of Ganterbxiiy among them. Bomillj charitably supposed that they voted Theaeven against his bill ^'out of servility towards the Government "; *^'*' because he was unwilling to believe that they, '^ recollecting the mild doctrines of their religion, could have come down to the House spontaneously to vote that transportation for life is not a sufficiently severe punishment for the offence Hanging of pilfering five shillings worth of property, and that nothing nhiiiings. but the blood of the offender could afford an adequate atonement for such a transgression.'** It was not necessary to impute servility to the bishops in order to account for their votes. They may be credited with having acted conscientiously, seeing that their opinions coincided with those of distinguished law lords, refined moral philosophers and other eminent persons, including the members of the Perceval Government. Perhaps the most popular as well as the most authoritative work on moral and political philosophy in their days was Paley's, originally Paiey's published in 1785; and Paley not only approved of but Philosophy. applauded the criminal laws of his time, as the best possible method of administering penal justice. His view was that the law of England, by the number of statutes creating capital offences, swept into the net every crime which under any possible circumstances might merit the punishment of death j but that when the execution of the sentence came under the consideration of the Executive, a small proportion only of each class of offenders was singled out to serve as examples to the rest. By this means, while few criminals actually suffered death, ^^ the tenderness of the law " could not be taken advantage of by others. The happy result so wiadom and arrived at proved " the wisdom and humanity " of the the law. ^ ° design.f • Memoin, vol. ii, p. 325. t The tenderness of the law seems to have been an article of faith with many men besides Blackstone and Paley. Burke, for instance, in a speech delivered in the House of Commons m 1785, spoke of England as " a Digitized by Google