On the whole, there is no exaggeration in saying that, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, England was passing through an epoch of criminality darker than any other in her annals; the resurrectionist atrocities of Burke and Hare, the more inhuman villanies of Williams and Bishop the cold-blooded depravity of Vaughan and his accomplices, and the other lurid crimes which belong to this age, surpass in enormity anything before or since. Such then was the desperate state of society at the dawn of the century. What arrangements did the country make to protect itself against the consequences of this accumulation of crime? What organization was provided for the enforcement of order, and for the protection of life and property? For its first line of defence England trusted to the supposed deterrent effect of a rigorous penal code; the more humane and effectual method, prevention, being lost sight of in the mistaken belief that it was possible to extirpate crime by the severity with which it was punished, a belief that survived in face of the fact, that as punishment increased in bitterness, so did offences grow in frequency and in violence. The penal laws were written in blood. Colquhoun estimated that there were 160 different offences which were punishable by death, without benefit of clergy: a man could be hanged for larceny from the person if the value of the article stolen was more than one shilling: Townsend stated before the parliamentary commission of 1816, that he had known as many as forty people hanged in one day: on another occasion seven persons, four men and three women, were convicted at Kingston of being concerned in robbing a pedlar, "they were all hanged in Kent Street, opposite the door." Such indiscriminate infliction of the extreme penalty of the law could serve no useful purpose,[163] on the contrary it undoubtedly aggravated the very offences it was intended to check. The punishment for a trivial theft being identical with that meted out for the most heinous crime, all sense of proportion in the different degrees of moral guilt was lost. "As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb" represented a point of view not unnatural under the circumstances, and expressed the actual mental attitude of the average criminal.