English: "Not any of the horrid deeds of Burke and Hare aroused in the community of Edinburgh greater sympathy with the victim or a more vehement desire for vengeance on the murderers than did the slaying of James Wilson. The Scottish people have ever regarded with especial tenderness those unhappy beings, called by our custom "innocents", upon whom, though adult, an inscrutable Providence has seen fit to lay the blight of intellectual infancy; and any offence done to such helpless folk was properly deemed a crime as heinous as one wrought against an actual child." -- W Roughhead (ed.), Burke And Hare, Notable British Trials Series, Wm Hodge & Co, 1921