NEWS OF THE WEEK.
RETURNING health and parting crime occupy the town in con- 'unction, as the Cholera and the Bermondsey murder have done before : this week we have the thanksgiving and the execution— the common talk of Tuesday and the common duty of Thursday.
• R is not a very suitable combination, but so it happens in human affairs, that the good jostles with the bad, the base with the sublime; the worst part of the evil, however, being always of our own manufacture.
Murder, for instance, is a human product : the ignorance and bad training which occasion murder are the results of human mis- doing; the brutal exhibition of Tuesday is an eminently human work. There is shame in the fact, but also hope; since the human origin of the evil, and our sense that it is evil, indicate that the riddance of it is in our own power. Efforts are made to effect a step in that direction, by preventing public executions ; and to that end, Mr. Charles Dickens bestows his descriptive powers on the atrocious composition and demeanour of the crowd—its infa- mous characters, its gross pleasures, its unnatural levity. The benevolent novelist seems to regard the collection and the blood- relishing stimulation of such a crowd as the most revolting part of an execution ; and he recalls a promise made by Sir George Grey, to consider the expediency of executing the extreme sen- tence of the law within the prison-walls. We can conceive that the gloomy mystery of such a mode might impart an imposing terror, which is assuredly wanting in the naked infliction of death. On the other band, while we have amongst us such a tribe as that collected in Horsemonger Lane unredeemed, it is perhaps as well that it should be paraded occasionally in our view, lest we forget it even more completely than we do; and it should seem that a public execution is almost the only occasion for that sort of conference between the public at large and the public of the New Cut or Mutton Hill—about the very worst occasion that could be. It is a horrid business in all its parts; but numbers are beginning to reflect upon it, and that is the first step to amendment—which will ultimately go beyond the British version of death by bow- string, a private hanging.
In the other matter also numbers are beginning to reflect healthily, and upon authority too. The Bishop of London has .made an admirable use of the thanksgiving, in expounding the rationale of a practical piety. The enlightened Prelate shows how much of the parting pestilence was produced by causes which human care might have removed, and how a pious observ- ance of the Divine laws would save a recurrence of the visitation ; so that if we neglect this duty, we refuse with our eyes open, to be the obedient and true instruments of irovidence. We scarcely have the right to give thanks if we will not work for the boon.
