Of a different stamp to Jack Sheppard, and a much greater ruffian, was his little less notorious contemporary Jonathan Wild. This man was a product of the age and of the extraordinary remissness of the law, which made his operations both possible and profitable. The smallest thefts, if only of the value of one shilling, were punishable then, and long afterwards, by death. Nothing shows more strikingly, how remote we of this twentieth century are from the cruelty and harshness of only a century ago, than the short extracts which it is the custom of some of the older London newspapers, _The Times_ and _The Observer_ among them, to reprint from their issues of a hundred years back. Time after time you read, packed away in a few lines, as though of little concern, the proceedings at the Old Bailey Sessions, thus: “Joseph Bailey, convicted of the theft of spoons. Death.” Again, “Henry Trudwick, convicted of the theft of an embroidered waistcoat. Death.” Even the abstraction of a pocket-handkerchief has sufficed to bring a lad to the gallows. Every Sunday morning in sessions, the box for the condemned in Newgate prison chapel was crowded with wretches, who were to die on the morrow. Looking over the galleries and shouting down encouragement to them, with many oaths and much blasphemy, was another group, equally large. These were awaiting trial and sentence, and were soon to fill the empty places. Executions were so common that the few newspapers of the eighteenth century took no trouble to record them, save when the harvest of death was unusually large, or some picturesque villain by his dashing exploits filled the public eye, and a far-spreading crowd gathered to see his exit from the stage. The rigour with which capital punishment was applied to almost every crime sent troops of victims to Tyburn’s “triple tree.” Also it became responsible for many ill-favoured ruffians escaping penalty of any kind. But while the criminal code was remorseless in its treatment of the meaner offender, it took no account of the man who was responsible for inciting and abetting him, the “fence,” or receiver of stolen goods. It made no attempt to reach him. That finer subtlety of the law, the “compounding of a felony,” was a much later abstraction; and a feature of the newspapers of the day was the list of advertisements from people whose property had been stolen, and who were quite willing to pay handsomely for its return. Some of them are quaint reading, as this from _The Postman_ (from Tuesday, 25th June, to Thursday, 27th June 1706):