BRUTAL EXECUTIONS.
Tim scene at the Old Bailey on Monday morning could have none but bad effects. It was calculated entirely to shut out from sight the question otjustice or of retribution ; and to excite no feelings but brutalizing curiosity or sympathy for the criminal: When Bousfield was struggling with Ins fate as he hung suspended by the neck, and three times yucceeded in resting his feet uteri the beams, no spectator could have refrained from sympathizing with him, unless it were tome man so worse than savage as to take pleasure in the spectacle of agony.
When despair grows reckless and casts aside all sense of de- cency in dying, the criminal or the victim, as the case may be is able to wreak a summary vengeance on the bystanders, by casting the horror back in their faces. When the old Countess of Salis- bury was condemned to death, she warned the executioner that his post should not be without its labour i • and she took to her heels, dodged him about the scaffold pursued by his axe lifted in air. There is something at once peculiar, revolting' and ludicrous, in the picture of the nimble old lady pursued by the headsman, with a gaping crowd for an audience. Sometimes the victim rises terribly superior, and, the character of the scene is entirely changed; but still it s not conducive to the sense of justice. The reign of James the First was fertile in persecutions of the Jesuits : amongst the number who were semi= ficed was one Green, who was condemned to die the death of a traitor ; and, according to the form of sentence in those days he was first to be hanged and then to be quartered, bein&previollsly exenterated. Even this was a mitigated sentence. The number of accomplices in Anthony Babington a conspiracy, who suffered on two successive days, were sentenced to undergo the worst part of the punishment before death ; but on the second day a more merciful dispensation permitted them to be killed first ; and it was this mitigated sentence that was pronounced on Green. In that case the executioner performed his office badly; and green revived sufficiently to sit up and look around him when the bar- ber-surgeon began to execute the more dreadful part of the sen- tence. At this point, a lady—Mrs. Elizabeth Willoughby— stepped upon the scaffold and supported the head of Green on her lap while his lingering spirit underwent the last torments. She wiped his brow with her handkerchief, and declared that it burned under her hand. The mob had behaved with disgusting brutality ; they had pulled at the rope after Green was taken down from the scaffold ; but many who witnessed the firmness of the man under his unspeakable torments, and the devotion of the lady, must have gone away filled with feelings very different from those of sympathy or admiration for his judges and executioners. Here the hoiror of the scene is redeemed by something that compels sympathy or even admiration for the victim; and it will usually be found so : either the horrors are simply brutalizing, or if they are redeemed from that base influ- ence, a sympathy is created for the sufferer. For the thousandth time the question arises, what can be the moral use of these exhibitions ? In the United States the cere- mony is performed by the Sheriff more in private ; but even there privileged persons are admitted to the show ; and some traveller describes a scene of the kind. The condemned. man sat sullenly eyeing his spectators before the ceremony; and he suddenly asked some of them what could. induce them to come there to see a fellow creature hanged. It was difficult to answer the question. The mo- tive which collects the crowd at a hanging might enlighten us as to the effect of the show. Conscious that the public has not entire- ly.given up its faith in the gallows, a great contemporary performs suit and service to the popular feeling by reminding us, that if Bousfield was dragged to death, the spectacle was not more revolting than that which imagination calls up of the bloody corpses of his wife and children. But Bousfield did not collect a crowd to view the bloody corpses; nor is it exactly harmonizing with the dignity of justice that the Sheriff should descend into a competition with the criminal. There is no doubt that abroad they consider us to do these things barbarously. In France they hold the guillotine to be a less objectionable instru- ment of extreme justice than the gallows ; and while we satirize the Spaniards for the brutality with which they assemble to see a bull tortured to death, they retort upon our folly which collects the lower class of the population the more to brutalize it by show- ing a man tortured to death. Perhaps the best we can say in support of the practice is, that we have fallen into the custom, and do not know how to get out of it. There does seem a chance, however, that we shall have to give it up from the difficult of obtaining men to perform the duty of hangman. We must either employ notoriously abandoned characters, or the Sheriff himself must undertake the work; for the post is becoming so odious that Calcraft himself is growing nervous, and through his trepidations performs his task clumsily. But the office of justice is reduced ad abaurdum when it depends for its completeness upon the nerves and adroitness of a Caloraft.
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