HOUGHTON, Thomas.

£2,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Book of Funds: or, some reasonable projections and proposals for raising three millions of money per annum, for supplies, to be granted His Majesty. First edition. Houghton proposes methods of financing the Nine Years' War, of which his first is most notable: that everyone condemned to death in England be offered a reprieve of their sentence for all crimes save murder, in return for them paying the exchequer full compensation for their crimes, be levied an additional fine, and pay £50 a year thereafter. If they are not able to pay, Houghton proposes they be branded and used as slaves in the government trading companies. Houghton gives lengthy lists of his proposals for the appropriate fine for each crime, graded by rank in society. His proposals would at least have replaced the prevalent death penalty in the English legal system with a more financially remunerative punishment, and his critiques of the death penalty as ineffectual from both an economic point of view but also as failing to deter crime and reform criminals is notable. As he writes, "whereas hanging them is a great loss to the nation... the preservation of their lives this way, will not only raise ready money for the service of the government; but the sending them abroad will, in a few years, increase the power and strength of the English in foreign parts... the owners abroad enriched, themselves preserved, and the nation rid of rogues, which, in time, and change of place, may grow honest; so that it may be bet

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