No less than three men were executed at Maidstone on
Tuesday, and the journals are evidently concerned for the effect which so many executions may produce in increasing the dislike of capital punishment. We cannot see it at all. All three men were merely deliberate murderers, and two of them murderers without any provocation at all, except that they had in the course of military duty been "reported." If ever crimes deserved death theirs did, and we cannot see that the accident of their being executed in one day and one place alters their guilt or the requirements of human justice in any way whatever. We can understand the objection to the punishment of death, which indeed we think all Calvinists bound to make, and can dimly comprehend, though we condemn, the feeling which opposes the execution of many for the murder of one, but the horror of punishing many separate persons for many separate crimes because they were all committed within one jurisdiction seems to us simply silly. We might just as well refuse the Victoria Cross because two men in one regiment had earned it by their valour.
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