Essays on the punishment of death / [Charles Spear].

Charles Spear

Date:: 1845

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the punishment of death / [Charles Spear]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

34/258 page 30

can be too great for such a wretch ! is the exclamation which bursts from almost every lip. The sentiment is worthy of the unlovely doctrines which produce and cherish it. A more benevolent system would excite a different feeling. What can be done to reclaim the unhappy offender? What means can be taken to enlighten his mind, and meliorate his heart? What discipline is best adapted to his mental and moral dis¬ order ? What will lead him back to virtue and to hap¬ piness most speedily, and with the least pain ? Such is the feeling of the mind enlightened by the generous doctrine we have endeavored to establish. Could it but enter the heart of every legislator; did it but guide the hand that constructs the cell of the poor captive; did it apportion his pallet of straw and his scanty meal; did it determine the completeness and the duration of his exclusion from the light of day and the pure breeze of heaven; did it apply his manacles, (if, disdaining to treat a human being with more indig¬ nity than is practised towards the most savage brutes, it did not dash his chains to the earth,) what a dif¬ ferent aspect would these miserable mansions soon assume ! What different inhabitants would they con¬ tain ! Prisons would not then be the hot-beds of vice, in which the youthful offender grows into the har¬ dened criminal, and the want of shame succeeds the abolition of principle, but hospitals of the mind, in which its moral disorder is removed by the application of effectual remedies.’ That Capital Punishment has no good moral effect by way of example, will be shown in the essay on the Influence of Public Executions. A very able writer has given us the following defi¬ nitions of punishment and revenge. According to his

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