Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/251

Rh from that circumstance; for immediately after that we find him prosecuting a young man, a banker's clerk, for an abominable offence. The officer was the only evidence, and the clerk was pilloried opposite Princes Street, Mansion house. We know not whether the clerk is dead or alive; nor whether his condemnation and punishment has undergone the same revision as some others: Bill Soames's for instance; he was convicted on the evidence of Vaughan, and that of a man (gentleman!) never heard of before or since; but the enquiry terminated in the remission of the punishment, which shows how little reliance was to be had upon the latter evidence when deprived of the support of the former's. The sweep boy who picked up the pocket book (an empty one!) knew not who threw it away, and his evidence went to nothing more than the mere fact of picking up.

Every one knows how guilty Soames was of numerous other robberies, but no one would say that he ought to be punished upon a false charge, or an entrapped crime. If this were proper and right, why not, with the confession of the Attofney General before us, that the five men "deserved to be hanged," hang them all at once in the