No boy is admitted before he is seven years old, or
after he is nine; and no boy can remain in the school
after he is fifteen, King’s boys and ‘Grecians’
alone excepted. There are about 500 Governors,
at the head of whom are the Sovereign and the Prince
of Wales. The qualification for a Governor is
payment of 500 pounds.—Ibid.
One hears much about the ‘hideous Blue Laws
of Connecticut,’ and is accustomed to shudder
piously when they are mentioned. There are people
in America—and even in England!—who
imagine that they were a very monument of malignity,
pitilessness, and inhumanity; whereas in reality they
were about the first sweeping departure from
judicial atrocity which the ‘civilised’
world had seen. This humane and kindly Blue Law
Code, of two hundred and forty years ago, stands all
by itself, with ages of bloody law on the further
side of it, and a century and three-quarters of bloody
English law on this side of it.
There has never been a time—under the Blue
Laws or any other—when above fourteen
crimes were punishable by death in Connecticut.
But in England, within the memory of men who are
still hale in body and mind, two hundred
and twenty-three crimes were punishable
by death! {10} These facts are worth knowing—and
worth thinking about, too.
