What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

stripe;” yet the student of Asiatic folk-lore might well remember that Cain was not sentenced to death, but, on the contrary, was purposely protected from execution.

That the death sentence is a deterrent is commonly said, yet the evidence seems to me unconvincing. The fear of death is a weakness; but, in fact, death is not a subject widely thought of. A murderer no more contemplates death on the scaffold than he thinks of any other form of death. As to the disgrace of such an end, that is more than compensated for by the opportunity of bravery and display so dear to criminal conceit. No sooner is a man condemned to death than the whole attitude of the official mind changes towards him. He is treated with exceptional humanity. His gaoler becomes full of charity towards him. The clergyman assures him of divine forgiveness. He dies in the odour of sanctity, with pious sentiments upon his lips. Time is not perhaps necessary to repentance, but surely as a test of repentance, time is of the essence.

That there is a real human sentiment against hanging comes out, I think, in the odium and horror with which the actual hangman is regarded. Mr. Marwood, of Horncastle—​from whom as a boy I used to buy shoe laces, which were regarded with religious awe by my class mates—​felt this very deeply. He was an amiable, kindly man, as I remember. Indeed, why there should be any special prejudice against a hangman if his office is so necessary and worthy, it is hard to understand. The race is a tender-hearted

one, if records may be believed. Mr. James Berry, to whom Mr. Marwood handed over his rope and pinions, tells us in that naïve and excellent autobiography of his “Experiences of an Executioner,” that before his first execution, when his dinner arrived consisting of “rice pudding, black currants, chicken, vegetables, potatoes, bread and the usual teetotal beverages, I tried to make the best of it, but all that I could do was to look at it, as my appetite was gone.” Is not that even more convincing than all the philosophy of Beccaria? The prisoner eats a good breakfast, the hangman starves, the prisoner in the dock is calm and reasonable, the judge breaks down and weeps. What mean these portents?

Some day it will dawn on rulers that it is not a wise example to the mind of murderous tendency to deliberately do the very thing which the State professes to regard with feelings of grief and indignation. When a low-class ruffian runs amuck, shouting “I’ll swing for you!” and murders his victim, he is proving the corollary of the Mosaic proposition. If the law is to be a life for a life, it is fair for him to take a life when he is ready to give his own in exchange. It is rough, brutal logic, but not wholly fallacious.

And what will bring governments to a really grave consideration of the subject is the increasing difficulty in obtaining a conviction for murder, and the still greater difficulty in carrying out the sentence afterwards. In the Habron case the sentimental public was right and officialdom wrong, and the

former saved a life. Since then the sentimentalists back their opinion against officialdom on every sentence that is pronounced. Scarcely any murderer outrages the public mind so greatly but petitions are widely signed by the hysterical against the fulfilment of the law. True we have abolished Tyburn and the bellman of St. Sepulchre’s, and the apples and ginger-bread and the fighting and bawling and gin drinking. No longer does Lord Tom Noddy invite his friends to supper at the Magpie and Stump “to see a man swing at the end of a string” in the morning sunrise. But have we not something of the same degradation in the highly spiced, detailed accounts of every moment of a murderer’s life from the day of the crime, through the excitement of the chase, up to the dramatic capture, and then along the close verbatim of the evidence until we reach the grand dénouement of the sentence of death. Some there are still faithful to eighteenth-century tradition, huddling in the cold streets round the gaol gates to watch the gaoler put up a notice of the end, for the old black flag dear to this little band of stalwarts has been hauled down, alas! for the last time. Of all the blessings of the Education Acts none is taken greater advantage of, I should say, than the privilege of reading the diligent and accurate reports of murder trials in the Press of to-day. Personally, I prefer the ballads and broadsides and last dying speeches and confessions of the older race of criminals, but some of the picturesque articles of the imaginative—​or, as he prefers to be called, descriptive—​reporter of the more

saffron-coloured Press have the true eighteenth-century brush-mark, and I confess that they give me a momentary second-hand thrill of horror quite acceptable to my coarser nature. I do not wish to do these excellent writers any injury, but I am steadily hardening in the opinion that they are the only persons in the community who derive any benefit whatever from the death sentence, and we must really run the risk of injuring their livelihood.

Personally, I never sat through murder trials unless I had a business interest in them, nor to me are they—​merely as trials—​of greater interest than many other trials. But the overhanging sentence of death gives them a colour that stamps them very vividly in the memory.

What a curious drab, unentertaining drama was that of Mrs. Britland, but for the sentence of death at the fall of the curtain.