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.

    77/258 page 73
    feeling, the intense agony of grief of that wife or mother, when the cold, stiffened body is carried to the dissecting room, or brought to the family for burial ? Who can describe the anguish of that hour? How many such scenes have transpired in our fair world! And who can tell whose lot it may be ? How un¬ certain is human testimony ! How often there may be perjury! How insinuating is temptation! How frail our resolutions ! How liable is he that thinketh he standeth to fall! ‘ Does the reader,’ says a writer, 1 startle at the very suggestion, as among the most im¬ probable of all things ? I can tell him the painful fact, that it happened to myself, several years ago, to call, at a distant place, on a gentleman high in probity, and in personal and relative respectability, and to meet at his house, by accident, another gentleman equally so, who would have both started with horror, and kindled into indignation, had any one then predicted what, nevertheless, has since happened, that the very near relative of the one should actually die by the common hangman for forgery, and the equally near relative of the other should be obliged to fly from his country to avoid the same fate.’ How many are in prison who felt as secure as the most virtuous! £ When I look around upon these men,’ said the warden of the Mas¬ sachusetts State Prison to the writer, £ I often think that I might have been one, had I been placed in their circumstances.’ And even innocence has suffered.* But the mind is overwhelmed at the thought. There the law stands all ghastly and bloody ! There is the judge ready to pronounce the sentence ! There is the cold, unfeeling * See Essay X., on the Irremediability of Capital Punishments. 7
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