Still sterner legislative methods were, accordingly, in the opinion of the authorities, called for, and the Act of Indemnity of 1736 was the first result. This was a peculiarly mean and despicable measure, even for a Revenue Act. There is this excuse—although a small one—for it; that the Government was increasingly pressed for money, and that the enormous leakage of customs dues might possibly in some degree be lessened by stern and not very high-minded laws. By this Act it was provided that smugglers who desired (whether on trial or not) to obtain a free pardon for past offences, might do so by fully disclosing them; at the same time giving the names of their fellows. The especial iniquity of this lamentable example of frantic legislation, striking as it did at the very foundations of character in the creation of the informer and the sneak, is a sad instance of the moral obliquity to which a Government under stress of circumstances can descend.
The Act further proceeded to deal with backsliders who, having purged themselves as above, again resumed their evil courses, and it made the ways of transgressors very hard indeed; for, when captured, they were charged with not only their present offence, but also with that for which they had compounded with the Dev— that is to say, with the law. And, being so charged, and duly convicted, their case was desperate; for if the previous offence had carried with it, on conviction, a sentence of transportation (as many smuggling offences did: among them the carrying of firearms by three, or more men, while engaged in smuggling goods), the second brought a sentence of death.
With regard to the position of the pardoned smuggler who had earned his pardon by thus peaching on his fellows, it is not too much to say—certainly so far as the more ferocious smuggling gangs of Kent and Sussex were concerned—that by so doing he had already earned his capital sentence; for the temper of these men was such, and the risks they were made to run by these ferocious Acts were so great, that they would not—and, in a way of looking at these things, could not—suffer an informer to live.
Thus, even the additional inducements offered to informers by statute—including a reward of £50 each for the discovery and conviction of two or more accomplices—very generally failed to obtain results.