clearly emerging was the conviction that terror was not sufficient in itself—that
in London, where so much crime was relatively minor and so much of it com-
mitted by women or by children too young to be executed in large numbers,
terror had its limits. Capital punishment needed at least to be supplemented by
more moderate sanctions and more effective policing and prosecution.
What form such changes might take was being revealed in practice, not in
conformity to a grand plan or with a final destination in mind, but in response
to immediate problems. Piecemeal though these responses were, they antici-
pated some of the arguments that would be made by the reformers of the late
eighteenth century. They anticipated Beccaria’s emphasis on the importance of
preventing crime, and some ofhis attitudes towards punishment—in particular
that moderate punishments, adjusted to fit the crime and administered quickly
and with certainty, would provide more effective deterrence than occasional
displays of the extreme violence on the scaffold.^15 Moderate punishments would
encourage victims to prosecute, and potential offenders would learn that if they
committed a crime they would be caught, if caught convicted, and if convicted
punished. That argument had not been made coherently or clearly in England
in the first half of the eighteenth century. But it had been forming in practice
over a long period in the attempts to create a system of policing, prosecution,
and punishment that would address the crime problems of the emerging
modern city.Conclusion 475(^15) Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments( 1764 , first English edn. 1767 ; trans. by Jane Grigson,
Oxford, 1964 ).
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