Fowle's New Hampshire Gazette And General Advertiser

May 6. Among the unhappy objects who are ordered for execution on Thursday next, are two boys, the eldest not seventeen years of age, the other not fourteen. The crime for which they were convicted was for taking some penny pies and thirteen pence from an itinerant pastry cook, who soon after, with the assistance of a notorious thief-taker, took them into custody.--

The boys alleged, in their defence, they won the prosecutor's property by tossing up (a practice very common among those of the lower rank). The jury, however, did not believe them, and brought the prisoners in guilty.--The prosecutors retired, and soon after, at a publick house, as we are well informed, in the hearing of several persons of reputation, expressed the most savage satisfaction at the certainty of their receiving the reward of 40l. for the testimony they had given.
"There is no good," says the French moralist Charron, "without its concomitant evil, which wise men should endeavour to prevent or avoid." The reward of forty pounds, enacted to be paid to the prosecutors of every offender guilty of felony, is doubtless, founded upon political sagacity, and has had very salutary effects: but the temptation is often too great for the needy and unprincipled to resist; a fact which is fatally illustrated in the transactions of those miscreants, Salmon, Berry, and M'Donald, who, it is well known, several years since, swore away the lives, at different times, of a great number of innocent persons, for the sake of the reward only.