Note 105 — XII. SIR THOMAS MORE. 1480–1535.
Reading edition
More points out very forcibly that to hang for theft is tantamount to offering a premium for murder. Two hundred and fifty years later Beccaria and other humanitarians vainly advanced similar objections to the criminal code of christian Europe. It is hardly necessary to remark that this Draconian bloodthirstiness of English criminal law remained to belie the name of “civilisation” so recently as fifty years ago.