It is a most striking and instructive anomaly, and worthy of the statesman, the philanthropist, the Christian, and all who wish for the moral progress of society, to consider and seriously examine the seeds of evil it is sowing broadcast among the human family. France is a huge nation of contradictions, never to be thoroughly understood, and England is now, in a threefold sense, her sister! Every since their first sanguinary revolution some classes of the French people have fondly hugged the guillotine as a national toy of great worth, and petted three generations of Sansons as their most excellent scientific headsmen; they have also at every execution followed the criminal sitting in a cart, bound and bare-necked, on his coffin, beside his confessor, and gloated with open mouths and staring eyeballs upon the descending blade and the head rolling into the basket of sawdust; and have dipped their handkerchiefs in the bloodsplashes that appeared to fall beyond the bounds of the gibbet. Other classes, of which judges and juries are made, have tried murderers of the most demoniac nature, and to the amazement of the whole woard, by the fiction of “extenuating circumstances” appended to their verdicts, have saved them from capital punishment and consigned them to the galleys; in violation of their own consciences and oaths and the law, which sustains the guillotine as an engine of terror and example!
In our own country within the last few months we have witnessed the passing of a law abolishing public executions, on account of the demoralization that always attended their exhibition in the public highway, and which was complained of for many years by the virtuous and good of every class, who could discern the evils they generated and their inefficiency for either terror or example!
But oh! most singular inconsistency, with the passing of that law, and the substitution of private strangling within the prison-yard, the last tatters of the old worn-out argument in favour of executions as a terror to evil-doers and an example to embryo-offenders, are completely torn away, and yet England at this time nurses three rival hangmen in her official lap for performing her secret hanging business! The three worthies are Askern, of York Castle, Smith, of Stafford-gaol, and Calcraft, of Newgate, in London. Three heroes of the gallows—three professional stranglers—yes, “three servants of the law,” England can now boast of, against France’s single hero of the guillotine to hang up their fellow sinners for a terror and an example! Let us now enquire of the advocates of death punishments how secret executions can terrify or afford an example in the eyes of those they are intended to influence, when they are permitted no longer to witness them?
It needs not a waste of words to prove clearly, that what was before a barbarous and demoralising exhibition, and an inefficient preventative of crime, is now a useless operation and a ghastly tragedy for sickening and torturing all those whom the law compels or the authorities permit to be personal spectators. As the daily and weekly papers published since Calcraft’s and Smith’s joint essays with the first private strangling machine at Maidstone, have proved, murders and other sanguinary offences tending to the same end, do not in the least decrease; but on contrary, the graphic accounts of the first private execution, and the form and action of the new method that were afterwards given in every morning and evening journal, served only to entertain and amuse the lovers of horrors, and were followed by a repetition of capital crimes in several places, as if no such punishment awaited the perpetrators of them. And so will it be after the second trial of the new system, on the boy Mackay, at Newgate, for the Norton Forgate murder, until society to its lowest depths is more moralised and humanised; and a more exacting retribution is enforced against the hardened classes, whom no law of capital punishment will now terrify into submission.
As the Star’s special reporter’s description is worth preserving in its entirety, both for what it says, and for what it does not say. in favour of our argument, at its conclusion, we shall transcribe it into this part of our book:
The first execution within the prison walls, and in presence only of a limited number of spectators, in accordanoe with the new Act of Parliament for the better regulation of capital punishment, took place on Tuesday morning, August 13th, at Maidstone Gaol. The culprit who suffered sentence was Thomas Wells, late a porter in the employ of the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway Company, who was left for death after the last assizes for the murder of Mr. Walsh, the station-master at Dover. In the course of his duties Mr. Walsh had occasion to find fault with Wells, who took reproof in very ill part, and revenged himself on the first available opportunity on the unfortunate station-master by shooting him dead as he sat alone at his work in his office. The alarm was raised, and Wells was found hiding close at hand. The proofs of his crime were so positive that he scarcely attempted to deny it, and on his trial he was at once found guilty and condemned to death. The reports which from time to time have appeared in the public prints since his condemnation have described the young man—he was little more than eighteen years of age—as sincerely penitent, and these reports are borne out by the prison officers, who seemed to have been much impressed by his quiet and decorous conduct.
The curious in such matters will note as an odd coincidence the fact that Maidstone—a town so notorious for its anti-capital punishment feeling, that lawyers will tell you it is most difficult to get a jury to return an adverse verdict against a prisoner on trial for his life—should have been the first place in which the arrangements of the death sentence under the new law should have been carried out. Whether in pursuance of this feeling the inhabitants wilfully ignored the tragedy which was about to be enacted in the immediate outskirts of their town, or whether they were indifferent to it, or whether the exact period of the execution has been hidden from them, it is impossible to say; but it is certain that, amongst the people freely scattered about the broad and handsome streets on Wednesday evening, there was not the slightest indication that anything unusual was to take place among them the following day. A travelling menagerie, which had pitched its tent close by the borders of the canal, was thronged with delighted gazers, among whom the private-soldier element was strongly represented. The local volunteers, headed by their band, were attended in their march by many of the youthful population, and a still larger gathering followed the band of the militia regiment, and grouped round them as they played in front of their headquarters, the Mitre Hotel. But in none of the crowds, composed as they were of townspeople—old and young, male and female—did one hear the best allusion, either in earnestness or ribaldry, to the criminal who was spending his last hours within a few hundred yards of the place where this gaity was beingcarried on, and to whose ears, deafen them how he might, abstract his senses how he would, the clangour of the drums must have been painfully audible. Nor was there any remarkable difference yesterday morning. It had been expected that a large majority of the shops would remain closed until after the execution, which was fixed to take place at half-past ten, but the shutters were taken down at the usual hour, men proceeded to their usual avocations, and there was not the smallest sign—not even that most ordinary sign of men and women conversing in knots and groups—of anything unusual being about to happen, until one reached the immediate neighbourhood of the gaol, and there, on the far side of the broad road running round by the court-house, was a thin fringe of humanity, some fifty persons in all, in one long line, looking towards the great gate of the gaol, and talking among themselves. Emphatically a “bad lot” this, tramps out on hopping excursions, beggars, a female gipsy or two—men and women, too, the lowest scum of the population, and a dozen eager-eyed, wolfish, cunning-looking blackguard boys. They gape and stare, though there is nothing for them to look at as yet; the gaol-gate is closed, and there is no one in the immediate neighbourhood, so they take stock of the flagstaff, on which, in accordance with official injunctions, the “black flag” is to be run up at the moment of the execution, and find matter for comment in the exit from the gaol of certain stonemasons who have been at work inside the prison walls.
At half-past nine exactly a four-wheeled cab drives rapidly up the street, and pulls up at the door of the New Inn, immediately opposite the Court house. The cab door and the inn door open simultaneously; from the former descends a man, who inters the inn, the door of which is again immediately closed upon him, while the cab drives off. In two minutes this man emerges from the inn and makes for the gaol. He is an elderly man, with white hair and white beard, broad and thick-set, and dressed in black, with a peculiar tall hat, and carries a small carpet bag in his hand. This is Calcraft, the hangman. As it were intuitively the little crowd becomes aware of this, a whisper runs round among it that the bag contains his “tackle” of pinioning straps, &c., and the blackguard boys, excited beyond bearing, spring to their feet and start in pursuit. The man, taking no notice and looking doggedly before him, crosses the road, and getting close to the gaol railings, half slinks, half shambles along till he reaches the gate which opens at his approach and closes behind him. Five minutes afterwards another man issues from the inn and makes for the gaol—a tall, thin, wiry man, with a keen eye, with his cheeks and part of his forehead closely shaved, dressed in a velveteen shooting coat, loose trousers, and billycock hat, and looking like an acrobat who had donned his private clothes over his professional costume. The little crowd does not know this man, though he is almost as notorious as the other. He is Smith, of Dudley, the hangman of the Birmingham district, who hanged Palmer, and who occasionally assists Calcraft on great occasions.
At ten o’clock the representatives of the press, who have been provided by the authorities with proper credentials, are admitted into the prison, and are first ushered into the round-house, a building in the debtors’ division, where the turnkeys on duty pass the night. It is fitted with a desk and benches, is glazed on all sides, and overlooks the front court and several of the exercise yards. Several of the warders are here, and from them one learns that the prisoner passed a quiet night, sleeping from half-past ten till half-past four, but that the extraordinary equanimity which he had hitherto displayed is failing him now, and that he is beginning to “break down.” This conversation is carried on in a low whisper; the silence of the place is singularly oppressive; and this, combined with the knowledge of what one is about immediately to witness, renders this period one of the most painful suspense. There are five hundred prisoners within the gaol, but one might as well be in the City of the Dead for all one hears of them, the only sound, the jingling of the warders’ keys, grating on the ear. A little excitement is caused by the hurried entrance of a warder from the direction in which the prisoner is known to be, and his equally hurried disappearance bearing some brandy in a tumbler, but the silence sets in afresh, and one is reduced to watching two little knots in the fore court. One of these consists of the under-sheriff (who is deeply affected), the medical officer, and a nonchalant person in a wideawake hat, who is said to be the governor, but who takes no part in the proceedings, and who is poking up the ground with his walking-stick in a very degagé manner. The other knot is formed of Calcraft, his assistant, and two of the warders who are chatting together. At twenty-five minutes past ten the party—consisting of four reporters of the London journals, six from various local papers, a carpenter who is in attendance lest his service should be required in connection with the arrangements of the drop, and a warder in plain clothes who has been sitting up all night with the prisoner—is summoned from the round-house and ushered into a narrow vaulted ante-room, whence, after five minutes’ delay, they are led through a narrow passage into the presence of the gallows.
There it stands, erected under a shed at the further end of a small yard some thirty feet square, the old square gallows formed of two uprights and one crosebeam, and whose form has been familiar to us from woodcuts and description for years, only in this instance it is painted buff instead of the ordinary dead black. The uprights across have iron supports fixed into the wall, and in the crossbeam there is a hook, immediate under which stands Thomas Wells, with the rope round his neck. There is no built scaffold; the drop on which the prisoner stands is flush with the ground, and the public (if the little representative party can be so called) is placed behind a barrier breast-high, yet so close to the prisoner that they can see every movement of his face, and hear every word he utters. He looks a mere youth, short, yet strongly built. He is dressed in his railway porter’s uniform of velveteen, with the company’s initials in red on the collar, and in his waistcoat, just above his pinioned hand, wears a small flower. He evidently knows little of anything of what is going on around him. He is absorbed in prayer—his face, of a livid hue, is upturned, and his eyes are looking upwards. Standing by him, the chaplain, the Rev. W. C. F. Sugden Frazer, reads, in a voice broken with emotion, the burial service. Suddenly the prisoner begins, in a low, thick, trembling voice, to sing a hymn—one, as we afterwards learn, which he has been recently repeating in his cell—and continues to sing it after Calcraft has pulled the cap over his face, and the chaplain has shaken hands with him—is singing it when, at a signal from his superior, Smith pulls the bolt, and then, with a sickening rattle, the drop falls, Calcraft standing behind, and, as it were, guiding the falling figure. In our belief, life was not wholly extinct for three or four minutes after the falling of the drop. It is usual on these occasions to speak of the movements of the limbs as being “merely muscular,” in this instance there was scarcely any muscular contortion, but there were undoubtedly deep respirations and other undeniable evidence that asphyxia did not immediately happen.