The same evidence was produced as at the previous trial, and the jury, which now had not to consider the question of capital punishment, found them guilty. On another occasion a man was tried at Lincoln for the murder of a Mr. Copeman, and acquitted. On the very same evidence he was tried at the next assizes for robbing Mr. Copeman at the time the murder was done, and he was convicted. In prison, under sentence of penal servitude for life, he confessed that he had killed Mr. Copeman. Mr. Dymond gives several similar instances where jurymen on the plainest testimony have refused to convict, and criminals who, under a milder code would have been kept in prison for life, were let loose on society. Is it possible to argue that a system which thus induces perjury and breaks down at the most important moment is just? Lastly comes the question of expediency. Does capital punishment tend to the greater security of society? Has it any deterrent effect? The answer must again be in the negative. What is our experience of executions? They are supposed to be at once a solemn vindication of the majesty of the law, and a warning to the criminally-disposed to refrain from crime. What is there of solemnity about them, so far as their effect on the people is concerned? The day on which they take place, and the night preceding it, are times of riotous and wicked revel for most of those who witness the hanging. Harlotry flaunts itself at the very foot of the scaffold; drunkenness and debauchery are rampant; robberies are committed within the shadow of the gibbet; obscene songs are shouted from hoarse throats, and the death-struggles of the victim. are made the subject of coarse jokes. Those who have looked upon the seething mass of brutality which surges in living waves about the platform upon which a human being dies by the hand of the law, can never have faith in the deterring influence of the death-penalty. This, it may be objected, is theoretical. Mr. Dymond gives us in his book some practical proofs of its soundness. Sarah Chesham's body, after being hung at Chelmsford, was given to her friends and conveyed home in an open cart. A mob accompanied it, and at Dunmow one of them stole a pair of trousers, and was at once taken into custody to be sent back to Chelmsford for trial. Dr. Lushington tells of a boy who saw an execution for forgery in the morning; went home, and that very day forged upon his master and was left for execution. "A boy named Wicks was executed some years ago in London; he had seen executions, and was desirous of signalising himself on the scaffold, and absolutely purchased a pistol and shot his master, that he might be hanged for it. A man named Connor was also executed in London; he had seen an execution in the morning of a certain day, and the same night was in the hands of the police for the murder of a wretched woman with whom he lodged. A man named Mobbs was hanged some time ago in London, also for the murder of his wife. The very next day a man was taken into custody for attempting to murder his wife, saying to her, 'I will do for you, and be hanged for it, as Mobbs was yesterday morning.' Not long since four men were hanged at one time at Liverpool for murder. Within the same week two more murders were committed in the town. Take a still more recent case, that of Müller. The great interest which his crime had created, the horrible nature of his deed, the marvellous manner of the discovery of his guilt, his arrest, defence, and subsequent declarations of innocence, followed by confession when the rope was round his neck, all tended to fix public attention upon him and his punishment. Surely if the death-penalty had any deterring effect the country ought to have been freed from murder for some time. What was the fact? While Müller was under sentence of death a countryman of his, Carl Köhl, murdered a young man in the Plaistow Marshes, and mutilated the body in the most frightful manner. All experience shows that so far from deterring men from committing crime the gallows has an opposite effect. The Rev. Mr. Roberts, of Bristol, expressly stated that of 167 convicts under sentence of death whom he had attended, 164 had witnessed executions. But there are other considerations worthy of attention. So many avenues of escape are open for the individual who is accused of a capital offence, that there is fair room for calculating on the chance of immunity. The certainty of death might have influence on some minds, though it would not even in them be so effectual probably as imprisonment for life. But just as sailors go to the west coast of Africa with the certainty that some of the crew will die, but the belief that it will not be themselves; or as the soldier goes into battle thinking that while the next man to him may be shot, he will escape harmless; so, with all the difficulties attendant on convictions for capital crimes, the reluctance of juries to give a verdict of guilty where that word may mean death, the chance of a plea of insanity proving available, the probable interference of home secretaries,— murderers may fairly count on escaping the scaffold. Then again, is the spectacle of an execution calculated to inspire respect for human life? You take a healthy strong man, and you strangle him in the sight of a crowd which seems to enjoy the spectacle; and you expect that to be a moral lesson, to impress the people to whom it is taught with a greater regard for the sanctity of life. Such a result is impossible. Where then is the expediency of the punishment? Some estimable people have argued for private executions. But most of the objections to the punishment of death would remain just the same were the criminal executed within the walls of a prison instead of on a scaffold outside. There would still be the same uncertainty as to the fulfilment of the law, the same difficulties for juries, the same harassing of home secretaries; while to all these would be added a feeling of distrust in the public mind lest that which was done privately should not be done at all, or done improperly. There is no real remedy *Speech of Mr. Dymond at Newcastle-on-Tyne, April 10, 1856. but the abolition of the death-penalty altogether, and the substitution for it of a system of imprisonment for life-a hopeless seclusion from the world and from humanity. It is certain that the law cannot remain as at present. In the commonest justice, some distinction ought to be made, in respect to murder, between such cases, for instance, as that of Samuel Wright and William Palmer. The royal commission may confine itself to some such recommendation as this. There will be, however, no final settlement until the penalty is wholly abolished. Mr. Dymond argues vigorously in favour of this result; and argues all the more powerfully because he uses illustrations for arguments. His book has, indeed, far more interest than a so-called sensation novel. Nothing is so generally engrossing as the simple narrative of criminal cases such as those which Mr. Dymond sketches. Nor can they be read without bearing conviction to the mind of the reader of the soundness of the conclusion drawn from them. That conclusion is, that whatever we may try by way of palliative, we must come in the end to abolition. Humanity, justice, the safety of society, all alike demand that we shall not longer retain upon the statute-book a penalty which frequently defeats justice, does not deter from crime, and, indeed, often induces the very evils it is intended to prevent. Mr. Dymond objects to the right of society to inflict capital punishment; but with that exception, a few sentences, which he quotes from Earl Russell's preface to The English Constitution may fitly stand as the moral of his most admirable little volume: “For my own part,” says Earl Russell, "I do not doubt for a moment either the right of a community to inflict the punishment of death, or the expediency of exercising that right in certain states of society. But when I turn from that abstract right and that abstract expediency to our own state of society-when I consider how difficult it is for any judge to separate the case which requires inflexible justice from that which admits the force of mitigating circumstances-how invidious the task of the Secretary of State in dispensing the mercy of the Crown -how critical the comments made by the public-how soon the object of general horror becomes the theme of sympathy and pity-how narrow and how limited the examples given by this condign and awful punishment-how brutal the scene of the execution,-I come to the conclusion that nothing would be lost to justice, nothing lost in the preservation of innocent life, if the punishment of death were altogether abolished. In that case, a sentence of a long term of separate imprisonment, followed by another term of hard labour and hard fare, would cease to be considered as an extension of mercy. If the sentence of the judge were to that effect, there would scarcely ever be a petition for remission of punishment in cases of murder sent to the Home Office. The guilty, unpitied, would have time and opportunity to turn repentant to the Throne of Mercy." Echo. PAN loquitur. THE red moon shone upon the summer corn, As o'er the ebbing sea of her white breast The wild-thyme shed abroad its perfume soft, The amber veil could not her beauty hide; But now no more I see my Echo's face; A low sad voice I hear. Then with hush'd breath I breathe a tender wail And through the waving web of Ladon's weeds J. B. TEMPLE BAR. SEPTEMBER 1865. Sir Jasper's Tenant. BY THE AUTHOR OF “LADY Audley's SecrET," &c. &c. MARCIA DENISON read the last line of Godfrey Pierrepoint's con fession with the summer dawn upon her face, and the fresh breath of the morning breeze blowing in upon her through the open windows. Throughout that dreary record of a blighted life no tear of hers had fallen on the page; but at the last-at the very last-her eyes grew dim, and two big drops rolled slowly down her cheeks and fell on that passage in which the wanderer promised to think of her and pray for her. And from this moment all was over. The brief romance of her life closed with the close of Godfrey Pierrepoint's story. Henceforward he was to be a wanderer upon this earth, and she was not even to know the scene of his wandering. He was to die alone and friendless, and she had no hope of knowing either the hour or the place of his death. While she fancied him oppressed by the suffocating blasts of the desert, he might be freezing in the awful solitude of the arctic zone; while she thought of him as a living presence, he might be lying dead in the trackless depths of some tropical forest, with foul crawling creatures eating their way into his heart. She was never to see him any more. As she lay awake in the broad morning sunlight, her lips shaped themselves into the cruel phraseNever more! never more! Her life, which had been elevated into a new existence by his affection, was to drop back into its old dull course; and the magical influence of his love, which had illumined the commonest things with a kind of radiance, was to fade out and leave all things upon this earth duller and drearier than they had been to her before. For a little time she thought of her loss and sorrow with a dull despair. It seemed as if the link between herself and Godfrey Pierrepoint had been something more than a mutual affection arising out of their own hearts alone. Her instinctive faith in him, her tender reverence for him, seemed to belong to something higher and holier than the VOL. XV. M |