THE RAYNER CASE.
rn THE EDITOR or lam "Srsorsso•."3 SIE,—I do not know if it is too Into to send you the words of a wise Judge—Russell Gurney, sometime Recorder of London —which seem to me a weighty warning against the state of mind issuing in the recent reprieve of a deliberate and unexonsed murderer. He was contemplating between twenty and thirty years ago the introduction of a Bill in Parliament for the improvement of our law of homicide, and I recovered for him, by the kindness of Mr. Hutton, a letter in your columns of high legal authority which had strangely escaped his notice, and which I wish you could republish now. He read it with the attention it deserved (it was a protest against the reprieve of a female criminal guilty of a peculiarly wicked murder), and I remember well, after the lapse of a generation, the tones of his comment as he laid down the Spectator "People do not enough reflect that it is the most important object of law to protect those who are subject to strong temptation." As he spoke the last two words I felt that, together with their protest against the sentimentality then, as now, seeking to weaken that barrier, they embodied such a sense of the abyss beyond, and of thq strength of the passions hurling men towards it, far more profoundly sympathetic with human trial and struggle than anything that can be called humanity in the present effusion of seeming mercy and actual cruelty.—I am, Sir, Ao., JULIA WEDGWOOD. [We regret to be unable to trace the letter to which our correspoudent alludes.—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
