We may search in vain through the annals of crime to find the record of a more infamous life than his. The fellow’s assumption of virtue was, perhaps, the most horrible thing about him.
“Now, sir,” he is reported to have said to the Rev. Mr. Littlewood, “I want to tell you, and I want you to believe me when I say that I always made it a rule, during the whole of my career, never to take life if I could avoid it.”
Virtuous man! “And it does seem odd,” he further observed, “that in the end I should have to be hanged for having taken life—the very thing I was always so anxious to avoid.”
It is a pity he forgot his intense respect for the sanctity of human life on so many occasions. The vagabond who will talk like this, after having for years prowled about at night with a six-chambered revolver strapped to his wrist, must be an extraordinary combination of the heartless ruffian and the sneaking hypocrite.
In addition to this, Peace was perhaps the most accomplished burglar that ever necessitated the vigilance of the police.
But the terms murderer and burglar are scarcely adequate to paint the blackness of his character, for on his own confession this man actually sat in court at the Manchester Assizes and heard the sentence of death passed upon an innocent man for a murder which he himself had committed.
“I liked to attend trials,” he said, “and I determined to be present. I left home for Manchester, not telling my family where I had gone. I attended the assizes for two days, and heard the youngest of the brothers, as I was told they were, sentenced to death. Now, sir, some people will say that I was a hardened wretch for allowing an innocent man to suffer for my crime.”
Undoubtedly all people would. Peace, however, was too much satisfied with his good luck to permit his conscience to trouble him about the matter.
If capital punishment is justifiable, Marwood unquestionably did the State some service in ridding society of Charles Peace.
There is something terrible in the contemplation of a misspent life like his, and the wretched man’s interment, after the terrible scene upon the gallows was enacted, would make sadder even the saddest of all cemeteries—namely, the burial-yard of a county prison.