Still the judges rode their circuits, leaving briefly minuted "calendars" in the hands of the executioners, who erected close behind them the gallows and the gibbet as monuments of their dispensation of "justice." Barristers bandied repartees and cracked jokes over good dinners, and serjeants hobnobbed with their brethren of the bench and of the coif, apparently unconcerned at the responsible part they were enacting in this awful drama; while the poor rabble put on their best attire on the days of execution, and liberally patronized the venders of cakes and ale who, near the gallows, erected booths as on other gala days,--many of the spectators, no doubt, thinking that it would not be so bad a thing, after all, if it came their turn next to better their desperate condition by swinging on the newly contrived gallows, on which ten criminals could be hanged together.[29] [Footnote 29: See a picture of the new gallows, in the illustrated "Newgate Calendar."] Alas! well may we ask with astonishment if it is possible that such a state of society really existed in the England of Hannah More, of Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke,--the land throughout which the Wesleys were preaching and singing to eager multitudes of the free grace and abounding mercy of God; where the pious Cowper was pleading for the relief of "insolvent innocence," and Clarkson and Wilberforce and Granville Sharp were rousing the public mind to the evils of slavery in distant colonies! The case of petit treason which we have been considering occurred nine years before Beccaria startled all Europe with "the code of humanity,"--his treatise on crimes and punishments; yet had he known of our experience in this Province, he could have pointed to Massachusetts as the strongest practical illustration of the truth of his theory, that it is not necessary to multiply extreme penalties in order to prevent crime, but that we are to look for the amelioration of manners and the diminution of public and private wrongs to the mental and moral education of the people rather than to the terrors of the law. In 1777, when the Revolutionary War was beginning to assume its gravest aspect, and when the hopes of traitors were reviving, the barbarous incidents of the punishment for treason were abolished by the legislature of Massachusetts, and this crime was made punishable simply by hanging. Eight years later the distinction between petit treason and murder was abolished,--an improvement of the criminal code in which we were followed by Great Britain five years later still.[30] [Footnote 30: The Massachusetts act is as follows:-- "Whereas it does not appear reasonable any longer to continue the distinction between the crimes of murder and petit treason: