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 'civilized' 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!* These facts are worth knowing- and worth thinking about, too.
* See Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p. 11.
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