effect of the punishment is to excite sympathy for the criminal and
hatred of the law. . . I am inclined to believe that the criminals
of London, spoken of as a class and allowing for exceptions, take
the same sort of delight in witnessing executions, as the sportsman
and soldier find in the dangers of hunting and war. . . I am
confident that few Old Bailey Sessions pass without the trial of a
boy, whose first thought of crime occurred whilst he was witnessing
an execution. . . And one grown man, of great mental powers and
superior education, who was acquitted of a charge of forgery,
assured me that the first idea of committing a forgery occurred to
him at the moment when he was accidentally witnessing the execution
of Fauntleroy. To which it may be added, that Fauntleroy is said to
have made precisely the same declaration in reference to the origin
of his own criminality.

But one convict "who was within an ace of being hanged", among the
many with whom Mr. Wakefield conversed, seems to me to have
unconsciously put a question which the advocates of Capital
Punishment would find it very difficult indeed to answer. "Have you
often seen an execution?" asked Mr. Wakefield. "Yes, often." "Did
it not frighten you?" "No. Why should it?"

It is very easy and very natural to turn from this ruffian, shocked
by the hardened retort; but answer his question, why should it?
Should he be frightened by the sight of a dead man? We are born to
die, he says, with a careless triumph. We are not born to the
treadmill, or to servitude and slavery, or to banishment; but the
executioner has done no more for that criminal than nature may do
tomorrow for the judge, and will certainly do, in her own good time,
for judge and jury, counsel and witnesses, turnkeys, hangman, and