In neither of these views is the effect of a public execution upon the criminal taken into account. This effect, as instanced at the execution of the Mannings for murder, in 1849, was thus forcibly urged by Sir Francis Head:
The merciful object of every punishment which the law inflicts, is not so much to revenge the past crime as to prevent its recurrence. Now, Mrs. Manning’s last moments clearly explain, or rather indisputably prove, the benefit which society practically derives from a public execution. She had courage enough—as she sat smiling by his side—to plan the murder of “her best friend;” to dig his grave; to prepare vitriol and lime to burn his body; to blow his brains out; to bury him in her own kitchen. She had resolution enough—almost before he was cold—to go to his lodgings to obtain his property. Her self-possession before the police authorities at Edinburgh was unexampled; her hardness of heart on her trial, as well as in prison, most extraordinary. And yet this bold, courageous woman, who after the murder, and with her hands stained with blood, had said to her husband, “I think no more of what I have done than if I had shot the cat that is on the wall!” afterwards triumphantly adding, “I have the nerve of a horse!” did not dare to face the indescribable terrors of a public execution! She did not fear death in private; on the contrary, she almost succeeded in gradually, with her own hands, strangling herself; but her obdurate heart quailed at the idea of beholding in fearful array before her, the uplifted horrid faces of the London mob; and accordingly, as her last act, “she drew from her pocket a black silk handkerchief, requested that she might be blindfolded with it; and, having a black silk veil fastened over her head, so as completely to conceal her features from public gaze, she was conducted in slow and solemn procession towards the drop;” and as for a few fleeting moments she stood with bandaged eyes beneath the gibbet, how unanswerably did the picture mutely expound the terror which the wicked very naturally have of being publicly hanged before the scum and refuse of society! “The whistlings—the imitations of Punch—the brutal jokes and indecent delight of the thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds,” so graphically described by Mr. Charles Dickens, were—by her own showing—not only the most fearful portion of her sentence, but, under Providence, these coarse ingredients may possibly have effected that momentary repentance which the mild but fervent exhortations of the chaplain had failed to produce.
Many men, neither sentimental nor enthusiastic, nor even philanthropists, however, conclude that though public executions under the present system are deterring, to a certain extent, yet they are exceedingly brutalizing and calculated to harden and deprave the spectators. Sir George Bowyer, M.P., has said:
The problem remains unsolved how the terror of capital punishments is to be purified from the abominable accessories and consequences which Dickens and Thackeray have so vividly and usefully described. I am not one of those who think that capital punishments are either unlawful or inexpedient. The passage in Holy Writ which says that the civil ruler bears the sword to be a terror to evil-doers, points out with infallible authority both the lawfulness and the use of the extreme penalty. But still I must admit that this dreadful prerogative of Sovereignty—the power of life and death—may be, and is in this country, exercised in such a way, that one might almost doubt whether the moral pestilence which it spreads did not counterbalance the security that it affords to society.
The Committee of the House of Lords on Capital Punishment were so convinced of the evil effects of the present mode of carrying into effect capital punishments, that they recommended that executions should in future take place within the prison, and in the presence only of official and selected witnesses. But this opinion does not solve the difficulty. Mr. George Augustus Sala truly says that private executions would not be tolerated in the present state of society. Besides, certainly the terror produced by the sight of death cannot be equalled by the sound of a bell or the hoisting of a black flag, which the Lords’ Committee propose; and these forms would soon lose any impressiveness. The sight of death is, indeed, most awful to human nature:
“—— O sight
Of terror, foul and ugly to behold,
Horrid to think—how horrible to feel!”
The knowledge that a criminal had been put to death would no doubt be less terrible to the criminal and dangerous population if they were prevented from seeing the execution. If the plan of private executions be rejected, what can be done to give a character to public executions more wholesome than that justly condemned by the committee?
The cold, business-like formality of a public execution is then referred to: beyond a glimpse of the chaplain’s surplice there is nothing to remind the spectators of the awful and sacred character with which the Christian religion invests death. The people see a man strangled, and that is all.
Archdeacon Bickersteth evidently felt this when he said before the Lords’ Committee, “I would suggest that the churches might be opened.... There might be a service at the time, and perhaps a prayer for the criminal.” This is a very pregnant hint. At the execution of three men at Dundalk a few years ago, when the criminals came on the scaffold, all the people knelt and prayed for them at the request of the priest. Those who were there describe the scene as most solemn and honourable to the Irish character. The prisoners confessed their guilt and declared their penitence. An account describing a late execution for murder at Ancona, says that the prisoner knelt on the scaffold and repeated the Litany, the crowd making the responses. A friend of mine who was at an execution for murder in Rome, told me that the thousands of spectators round the scaffold recited the Miserere and De Profundis in a loud voice. How different this is from “levity, jeering, laughing, hooting, whistling, low jesting, and indecent ribaldry” described before the Committee! This contrast surely suggests that the people in England should be better taught than they are, and that it is by religious influences that executions can be purified from their abominable and loathsome effects. The people should be made to feel that they are, so to speak, attending a death-bed scene of the most frightful and appalling kind, and not the mere slaughter of a biped without feathers.
Sir George Bowyer then relates how the problem is solved in Italy, where, in every city is a religious society of laymen, called “the Confraternity of Death,” or of Mercy, whose duty it is to attend criminals before and at their execution: