The two first columns, from 1732 to 1762, are formed from an average of executions, during twenty-two years of that interval, by Sir Theodore Jansen, Chamberlain of London. The last column, of fifteen years, is formed from an average of the last seven years, with which Mr. Akerman politely furnished me, from his books. In consequence of the riots and conflagration in 1780, his records were all consumed, and do not include that year, wherein there was a notorious glut of executions. During the seven years, beginning with 1781, the executed in Mr. Akerman’s books were 439. But every one knows that there are two theatres, a great and a small one, appropriated for human slaughter in this metropolis; these are Tyburn, now removed to Newgate; and for the large Borough of Southwark, Kennington Common. I took a low average of the executions in the latter, allotting three annually, to the two first columns, and six to the last column, and added the whole together. Amongst the London malefactors there are a few pirates, whose crimes are cognizable in the Admiralty Court.
Two thirds, probably, of all those capitally condemned, are afterwards pardoned. Few, comparatively, of the executed have committed murder, not one in twenty; most of the rest are for robberies of various kinds. Many more are reported as murdered in the bills of mortality: but these are not cases of premeditated and malicious homicide, and are softened into manslaughter on trial. Nineteen out of twenty of the executed are males; and by far the greatest proportion between eighteen and forty years of age. What is the proportion of London executions to the whole nation, is a problem which perhaps our judges cannot unravel. They possibly, like the generality of physicians, drive and strut away, “secundum artem,” in the beaten rotine of their profession, without ever attending to a plain political and mercantile axiom, to state their transactions and accounts in numbers and figures. Vice and executions are universally more prevalent in every metropolis: but there is reason to believe, that at present the executions throughout Britain and Ireland, are double or treble to those of London. The comparative population is as nine million to six hundred and fifty thousand. If they are treble, then 4000 are executed every fifteen years in the two islands; and 26,000 in a century: and both the disease and panacea are rapidly increasing. Five or six times this number are, in the same period, transported to distant regions, and partly also lost to the community, together with their blighted procreation.