TO THE READER.

We must here abruptly, and with regret, but for obvious reasons, the size to which this Publication is already swelled, cut off the remainder of our comments, amounting to nearly one hundred pages more. Those left behind unnoticed of the last group, comprehend most of the chronic cutaneous diseases, the subjects, peculiarly, of the Cosmetic Art. Through the last group of external accidents and diseases, I meant to have persevered in my general plan. For instance, under Gangrene, I should have discriminated the ages, mortality, cures; and at the same time, that originating from external injuries, or surgical operations, and that from spontaneous corruption. Under Fractures, I should have gauged the success and miscarriage of amputation, both after sudden accidents, and in consequence of chronic diseases. This is a most important part of military surgery, and I believe, in a great measure, unexplored. From the trepan and lithotomy, I should also have stated the blanks and prizes. With the surgical group I am obliged to omit the casualties of London: one alone of which I could not entirely postpone, without introducing a few observations in this place, that is the Executed.

Executed.

Murder, robbery, sedition, and war, are amongst the principal political casualties, chronic distempers, fevers, and frenzies of every nation. In ascertaining the numbers executed, particularly, the London bills of mortality are shamefully erroneous and defective. As I thought it a casualty of infinite importance to be exactly stated and recorded, I made numerous efforts to procure authentic information, by successively and repeatedly waiting upon the Keeper of Newgate, the Clerk of the Arraigns, the Clerk of the Peace for the County, the Town-Clerk of London, the Sheriff’s office of London, and the Secretary of State’s. Throughout this inquiry I was every where treated with liberality and urbanity; and where there was any prospect of information, was permitted access to the records. But, to my astonishment and mortification, I could not find any vestige of records of executions in London before 1754. These were in the Clerk of Arraigns’ office, but were buried in a heap of extraneous law rubbish; and to extract which, the Clerk of the Arraigns told me, it would require three entire days for myself and one of his clerks. I called twice at the Old Bailey, anxious to undertake this task, however laborious; but it so happened, that at both times they were full of business in the office, and could not spare time, nor even room, for my inquiry. By other means, I have come near part of the truth. (Vid. Chart.)

The two first columns, from 1732 to 1762, are formed from an average of executions, during twenty-two years of that interval, by Sir Theodore Jansen, Chamberlain of London. The last column, of fifteen years, is formed from an average of the last seven years, with which Mr. Akerman politely furnished me, from his books. In consequence of the riots and conflagration in 1780, his records were all consumed, and do not include that year, wherein there was a notorious glut of executions. During the seven years, beginning with 1781, the executed in Mr. Akerman’s books were 439. But every one knows that there are two theatres, a great and a small one, appropriated for human slaughter in this metropolis; these are Tyburn, now removed to Newgate; and for the large Borough of Southwark, Kennington Common. I took a low average of the executions in the latter, allotting three annually, to the two first columns, and six to the last column, and added the whole together. Amongst the London malefactors there are a few pirates, whose crimes are cognizable in the Admiralty Court.

Two thirds, probably, of all those capitally condemned, are afterwards pardoned. Few, comparatively, of the executed have committed murder, not one in twenty; most of the rest are for robberies of various kinds. Many more are reported as murdered in the bills of mortality: but these are not cases of premeditated and malicious homicide, and are softened into manslaughter on trial. Nineteen out of twenty of the executed are males; and by far the greatest proportion between eighteen and forty years of age. What is the proportion of London executions to the whole nation, is a problem which perhaps our judges cannot unravel. They possibly, like the generality of physicians, drive and strut away, “secundum artem,” in the beaten rotine of their profession, without ever attending to a plain political and mercantile axiom, to state their transactions and accounts in numbers and figures. Vice and executions are universally more prevalent in every metropolis: but there is reason to believe, that at present the executions throughout Britain and Ireland, are double or treble to those of London. The comparative population is as nine million to six hundred and fifty thousand. If they are treble, then 4000 are executed every fifteen years in the two islands; and 26,000 in a century: and both the disease and panacea are rapidly increasing. Five or six times this number are, in the same period, transported to distant regions, and partly also lost to the community, together with their blighted procreation.

We are struck with horror even on reading the history of savage jurisprudence, customs, and butchery of mankind in ancient times; such as the sanguinary codes of Draco and other regal monsters; the sacrifices to idols; the martyrs to gloomy fanaticism; the brutal spectacles of the Romans, wherein gladiators, lions and tygers, were exposed to tear each other to pieces. But I doubt whether, in the most flagitious and facinorous ages of Rome, the Tarpeian rock was besmeared with the blood of such a multitude of human victims; or that in any part of the globe, from London to the Antipodes, out of an equal proportion of mankind, there are so many sacrifices annually made to violated jurisprudence; and to the modern idol, property and money! I meant to have contrasted the executed with those destroyed in wars, by the sword of the enemy (exclusive of diseases) during the present century; but the introduction would be here premature; nor could I launch out in sufficient illustration.

Besides the political patients doomed to the radical cure, or extermination, by the executioner, if we may credit one of our best writers, they are a mere handful compared to those who are consigned to a slow and lingering death. Dr. Johnson, in one of his excellent essays in the Rambler, against perpetual imprisonment for debt, calculates, that half a million of mankind are destroyed in a century in the prisons of Great Britain, by the complicated horror of confinement, sorrow, famine, filth, and disease; and to these I would add suicide. I am inclined, however, to believe, that Dr. Johnson’s computation is exaggerated, by at least four hundred thousand. By far the largest proportion of these are unfortunate sacrifices to poverty and misfortunes, and to the callous vindictiveness of avarice. In the juridical pharmacopœia, this may be compared to the hot iron and cautery of the coarse empiricks of antiquity; with which they outrageously and indiscriminately tortured their patients. It would not disgrace the christianity or humanity of our legislature and lawyers, were they to revise their catechism and breviary of jurisprudence, both as affecting life and liberty: or, throwing religion and humanity to one side, let the question be tried by commercial scales; and, like the Venetian Jew, human flesh estimated in ounces and pounds with brutes, metals, and chattels!