Basil Montagu did not write an argument against the death penalty. He did something harder to answer. He collected them.Beginning in 1809, a London barrister set out to gather every serious published opinion on capital punishment into one place and let the accumulated weight settle the question. He included his opponents. Paley, the most formidable defender of the English gallows, appears here in his own words, at length, uncut.This edition presents twelve of the voices Montagu assembled. Samuel Johnson on why severity teaches criminals to take larger risks. Blackstone on where the state's right to punish comes from and what that origin forbids. Beccaria on the authority the state never had. Montesquieu on cruelty as the mark of despotism. Clarkson on the Philadelphia penitentiary, where men worked at trades and came out reformed. Goldsmith on penal laws made by the rich and laid upon the poor. Howard on what he found in the prisons of Europe. Turner on the Scripture that supposedly commands the gallows.And Patrick Colquhoun's catalogue: page after page of the acts that carried death in England, from murder to breaking a fish pond. It is the single most devastating thing in the book, and Colquhoun does almost nothing but list them.
