His method does not suit in England, and if there were some who admired the man and his career, it would be a corrective of their admiration to know that the peculiarities of procedure which gave their hero his notoriety are specially repugnant to the laws, and revolting to the people of this country.
THE MORAL OF PEACE’S CAREER.
The last days, the confession, the letters, the will, the dying speech, and the execution of Charles Peace will make a sensational history of the most dangerous description.
The large place which his villainy marked for him in the public attention for several weeks proved a stimulant to many a depraved appetite for notoriety.
All persons, in short, who have had occasion to watch the effect upon the public of the noisy passage of a great malefactor from the day of sentence to the morning of doom, must have remarked the extraordinary copiousness of the record of the sayings, doings, and writings of Charles Peace with positive alarm.
The rogue’s march seemed to merge into a hymn of praise, and then into a chant of victory at the gallows.
People shuddered when the murderer’s repulsive features were first displayed in the shops, in a row with the ostentatious beauties and the unabashed actresses of the day.
“No wonder,” said the crowd, “that this monster is the hero of a string of crimes.” Just as Sydney Smith said of a saintly man that he carried the ten commandments written in his face, might it have been remarked of Charles Peace that the “Newgate Calendar” was wrought in his.
But there is a fascination in the horrible as well as in the beautiful, and the people who were dismayed while they contemplated the brutal jaw, presently craved details of the crimes its owner had committed; of the manner in which he wrote and talked of the human creatures who had associated with—nay, loved him; of his appetite for the fare of the condemned cell, and his capacity for sleep, with Marwood for the subject of his dreams.
The poisonous food was forthcoming in large doses, and be it observed, its production is the inevitable, the forced, result of the demand.