all. Should he be frightened by the manner of the death? It is
horrible, truly, so horrible, that the law, afraid or ashamed of its
own deed, hides the face of the struggling wretch it slays; but does
this fact naturally awaken in such a man, terror--or defiance? Let
the same man speak. "What did you think then?" asked Mr. Wakefield.
"Think? Why, I thought it was a--shame."

Disgust and indignation, or recklessness and indifference, or a
morbid tendency to brood over the sight until temptation is
engendered by it, are the inevitable consequences of the spectacle,
according to the difference of habit and disposition in those who
behold it. Why should it frighten or deter? We know it does not.
We know it from the police reports, and from the testimony of those
who have experience of prisons and prisoners, and we may know it, on
the occasion of an execution, by the evidence of our own senses; if
we will be at the misery of using them for such a purpose. But why
should it? Who would send his child or his apprentice, or what
tutor would send his scholars, or what master would send his
servants, to be deterred from vice by the spectacle of an execution?
If it be an example to criminals, and to criminals only, why are not
the prisoners in Newgate brought out to see the show before the
debtors' door? Why, while they are made parties to the condemned
sermon, are they rigidly excluded from the improving postscript of
the gallows? Because an execution is well known to be an utterly
useless, barbarous, and brutalising sight, and because the sympathy
of all beholders, who have any sympathy at all, is certain to be
always with the criminal, and never with the law.

I learn from the newspaper accounts of every execution, how Mr. So-
and-so, and Mr. Somebody else, and Mr. So-forth shook hands with the