104 Notes of the Month on [J A tf 



CRIME ENCOURAGED BY LAW. The conviction of the murderers of 

 the Italian boy, and the frightful disclosures that followed it, are among 

 the events of the past month that ought to sink most deeply into the 

 public mind. Every member of society, in parliament and out of par- 

 liament, must now feel convinced that the moment has arrived, when 

 all false prejudices and absurd ideas of delicacy must be given up ; and 

 that some immediate legislative enactment must be passed, to crush, not 

 in its bud, but in its full growth and maturity, a crime at which human 

 nature shudders to think what it is capable of, and to which history, 

 blotted as it is with blood, scarcely offers a parallel. 

 - Of the succession of revolting pictures presented in the course of the 

 investigation, from the commencement to the close, that of the execution 

 was not the least hideous. If punishment by death can be justified in 

 any case, unquestionably it is this : yet surely even here the awful 

 penalty is at least sufficient to satisfy the sternest, and the most uncom- 

 passionating lover of justice, without shocking humanity by the most 

 unnatural of all spectacles a criminal yelled and hooted into eternity. 

 We are not romantic enough to expect refinement from people who 

 make a holiday as often as an execution takes place, and who take their 

 station at midnight, in order to view the ceremony to perfection eight 

 hours after ; but in an age like this, we cannot hear without disgust 

 and detestation that so many thousands could be found (one- fourth of 

 them females) to hoot the miserable beings upon the very threshold of 

 death to r heer and wave their hats as the drop fell and to yell their 

 disappointment when, by the removal of a portion of the apparatus, it 

 was understood that one of the culprits had been found undeserving of 

 the dreadful fate to which his fellows were doomed. The idea of jus- 

 tice never entered into any one mind in the multitude ; the only feeling 

 was, that a respite was a drawback upon their delight, and that to 

 diminish the number of victims was to diminish their enjoyment. The 

 only view in which this undiscriminating malignity can be excused is, 

 that they regarded the criminals as fiends, who had outraged human 

 nature to a degree that rendered justice powerless, and atonement im- 

 possible ; and they were incapable of reflecting that the murderers had 

 been previously " resurrectionists" that they were men who had not 

 plunged at once into the deepest depth of crime, -but that they had 

 been led on, through the loopholes which the law had left them, to the 

 commission of a deed which, in their eyes, was only another grade in 

 guilt from plundering the grave, to destroying life from stealing 

 bodies, to stifling them. The law has itself to blame for the outrage, 

 in throwing out lures for its commission. If the purposes of science 

 had been provided for, as every enlightened state but our own has 

 provided for them, this last and foulest stain upon humanity would have 

 been spared. There are fifty ways in which, without much debate, a 

 parliament alive to the necessity of doing something, might make such 

 a provision. 



HOLY WELL STREET AND THE " TIMES." In our speculations two or 

 three months ago, concerning the various courts and crevices of the 

 metropolis into which the Cholera on its first landing in London would, 

 in all probability, creep for shelter, it occurred to us that Holy well- 

 street in the Strand was percisely the retreat upon which the monster 



