We have abstained in the foregoing account of the exit of this notorious criminal, from expressing any opinion upon the very remarkable and unusual display of feeling which was manifested by the immense majority of the spectators present, but have contented ourselves simply with describing these ebullitions along with the other incidents attendant on it, conceiving that to our readers who did not witness it, they would form part and parcel of the transactions, aye, and a more important part than either some of the actions of the culprit, or the doings of the officials engaged in it. No one who witnessed the unprecedented conduct of the crowd, could have hindered himself from being impressed with it: and assuredly we did not survey it with indifference, nor refrain from forming an opinion. Some of the journals who record such events, appear to have felt very wrathful upon the occasion, and to have lavished every term of vituperation upon those whose conduct ran counter to their fine drawn sentimentality. We confess that we cannot see any reason for indulging in such excessive sensibility. It is not customary certainly to behave so; and this departure from the etiquette of an execution is probably what has shocked them; but then we must recollect that ordinary executions are very different things from what this was, and that in them the expression of feeling and sympathy for the sufferer is genuine and heartfelt; and if those who exhibit it are entitled to any praise for honesty and sincerity in that case, they have not forfeited it in this, as there can be no doubt that the behaviour complained of was an unpremeditated and simple expression of detestation for the crime, and exultation that punishment had overtaken it.
No comparison can be drawn between a man who is executed for some petty theft, whom the frequenters of executions cannot bring themselves to consider as a very desperate felon, and a monster who is most justly hanged for one execrable murder, when there are fifteen behind as abominable. The sentiments and opinions of the mob cannot be the same in the one case, as in the other; they cannot enter into nice legal distinctions—if indeed legal distinctions would blame them; but they see one man suffer for stealing a few shillings, and they pity him, and another for murdering sixteen individuals, and they execrate him. There is nothing extraordinary in all this, though it is unusual, almost unprecedented, that an opportunity should occur to call it forth. To show any thing else than an implacable aversion to such great moral turpitude, would have been to manifest a slight perception of evil, and we suspect that those who blame the shouters, were themselves actuated by equally honourable feelings, though they would not permit them to operate in the same way.
We will concede to them, that people of very refined feelings and cultivated minds would not triumph over the last moments of the most depraved man who ever lived, and that Burke was that man, perhaps with the exception of Hare, there can be no question; but then we must recollect that those who jostled each other upon the High Street of Edinburgh on the morning of the execution, make no pretensions to such high refinement. We must also bear in mind, that many of the populace were of the same rank in life as the massacred victims, and that they naturally felt more deeply on the subject than those whose station and habits removed them from the risk of being butchered. Also, that a notion had gone abroad among these people that their bodies were mangled for behoof of a science which is to benefit more peculiarly the rich, and that those obnoxious individuals who exercise the inhuman trade of resurrectionists, are screened by them from the punishment they merit. They believed also that there was a desire to deal too leniently towards this ruthless gang, and that although one of them had been sacrificed, others of the delinquents had been snatched from a deserved fate, because their blood was little accounted of. It had been even imagined that a disposition was cherished of saving the life of Burke, and that he was unwillingly consigned to his fate; now all this is very erroneous, and some of it very absurd, but still these opinions were conscientiously held by numbers, and would be as operative in dictating an expression of their feelings, as more rational ideas could have been.
It is not wonderful, then, that when they witnessed the preparations for the ceremony, they should indulge in expressions of satisfaction; and that when the culprit himself was exhibited before them, an uncontrollable and simultaneous shout of triumphant exultation should burst forth, and that execration for his enormous guilt should have led the vast multitude, without concert or premeditation, to repeat again and again their acclamations.
The law in such cases justly and wisely, but relentlessly, consigns the perpetrators to death, and the public voice also relentlessly adds to it obloquy and reproach. Nay more, the Lord Justice Clerk, before passing sentence, mentioned that he was prevented only by a sense “that the public eye would be offended by so dismal a spectacle,” from ordering also, “that to satisfy the violated laws of his country and the voice of public indignation, his body should be exhibited in chains, to bleach in the winds, in order to deter others from the commission of similar offences.” His Lordship, so far from having any aversion to posthumous vengeance, adds, “I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes.” And he could scarcely have used other terms in animadverting upon what he justly characterized in the following words: “A crime more atrocious, a more cold-blooded, deliberate, and systematic preparation for murder, and the motive so paltry, was really unexampled in the annals of this country.” His Lordship’s colleagues also expressed themselves in similar terms, and still the people are blamed for acting in unison with their declared sentiments.
Even the hangman seemed to share in the general feeling. His instructions to the porter who assisted him were conveyed in the following petty sentence, “Hold him till I get the rope adjusted, and then let the —— kick.” When fastening the rope about his neck, he did give it an unmerciful tug, so as nearly to strangle him.
It is admitted by those who complain of the violation of decency and good taste, that he was a cold-hearted miscreant, towards whom a spark of sympathy could not be extended, and his atrocities are denounced in eloquent and indignant terms, and yet it appears to have been anticipated that the public, on the only occasion they had of publicly manifesting their sentiments, should have met him with a semblance of pity and forgiveness. They could not have done so without doing violence to every feeling that agitated them, and it would have been an unaccountable piece of hypocrisy to have attempted it. Public detestation unequivocally expressed, is always an important, and sometimes the most important auxiliary of punishment, and the scorn and contumely that is heaped upon a guilty head may be the best ally of the repressors of immorality, and if there was in that assemblage one individual whose sordid soul, could contemplate the commission of enormities which might outrage humanity, and bring on him similar manifestations of disgust, it must have acted as a solemn warning when he made the terrible discovery, that “when it goeth well with the righteous the city rejoiceth, and when the wicked perish there is shouting.”
Our sentiments concerning the character of the unhappy wretch, and his crimes, has been explicitly stated in the foregoing part of this narrative, but it may not be unacceptable to our readers that a brief view of the opinions of others should be furnished. We subjoin, therefore, the following observations, the merit of which may well justify their insertion.
The atrocious murderer, Burke, whose hands were more deeply dyed in innocent blood than those of any other homicide recorded in the calendar of crimes, has undergone the sentence of the law; and from the narrative of the concomitants of the tragedy, it will be seen that the circumstances attending his exit were as extraordinary as his guilt was transcendant and unprecedented. Essentially and in his real character an ignoble, base, mean-spirited wretch, this wholesale assassin, by the mere extinction or obliteration of every moral principle and feeling of his nature, and by a consequent abandonment of the faculties bestowed upon him to the commission of crime, has succeeded in obtaining “a bad pre-eminence,” even among those who had prostituted and degraded far higher endowments to the ways of iniquity; and a name which ought never to have been heard of beyond the precincts of the lowest and meanest compartment of society, is now damned to immortal infamy, and stands out in strong relief from the long and black catalogue of those who have most signalised themselves by their daring violation of the laws both of God and of man. In fact, it was reserved for this incredible monster and his associate fiends to reduce murder to a system, and to establish a regular traffic in the bodies of their victims. Ordinary homicides slay from passion or revenge; the murders they commit are the product of an ungovernable and overmastering impulse, which hurls reason from her seat, and, in the wild conflict of guilty passion, precipitates them into the commission of acts which are no sooner done than they would perhaps give the universe were they undone. But Burke and his crew possess the horrid and anomalous distinction of having, without the palliation of passion, or of any other motive which a just view of human infirmity can admit in extenuation, and from a base and sordid love of gain, and of acquiring the means of rioting in profligacy and iniquity of every sort, established a traffic in blood upon principles of cool calculation, and an utter recklessness of either God or man, which would have done no discredit to Mammon himself. Hence it is, that Burke is perhaps the only criminal who has died, not only without exciting an emotion of pity in a human bosom, but amidst the curses, both loud and deep, of the assembled thousands who witnessed the ignominious termination of his guilty career. The wild shouts of exultation which saluted him upon his appearance on the scaffold, and which rung in his ears with still fiercer acclamations when the world was closing on him for ever, must have appalled even the heart of ice within his worthless bosom, and sounded as the knell of a judgment to come, where the spirits of the slain would rise up before him to demand a just retribution. Yet at that awful moment, when his deeds of blood must have arisen before him, and when the unknown future must have presented itself to his mind as the past was about to close, the wretch seemed almost calm, and looked defiance, nay, scorn at those who, yielding to their overpowering sense of his crimes, blasted his last moments with their shouts of wild triumph and exultation.