e fascination which everything connected with this punishment, or
the object of it, possesses for tens of thousands of decent, virtuous,
well-conducted people, who are quite unable to resist the published
portraits, letters, anecdotes, smilings, snuff-takings, of the bloodiest
and most unnatural scoundrel with the gallows before him. I observe that
this strange interest does not prevail to anything like the same degree
where death is not the penalty. Therefore I connect it with the dread
and mystery surrounding death in any shape, but especially in this
avenging form, and am disposed to come to the conclusion that it
produces crime in the criminally disposed, and engenders a diseased
sympathy--morbid and bad, but natural and often irresistible--among the
well-conducted and gentle. Regarding it as doing harm to both these
classes, it may even then be right to inquire, whether it has any
salutary influence on those small knots and specks of people, mere
bubbles in the living ocean, who actually behold its infliction with
their proper eyes. On this head it is scarcely possible to entertain a
doubt, for we know that robbery, and obscenity, and callous indifference
are of no commoner occurrence anywhere than at the foot of the scaffold.
Furthermore, we know that all exhibitions of agony and death have a
tendency to brutalise and harden the feelings of men, and have always
been the most rife among the fiercest people. Again, it is a great
question whether ignorant and dissolute persons (ever the great body of
spectators, as few others will attend), seeing _that_ murder done, and
not having seen the other, will not, almost of necessity, sympathise
with the man who dies before them, especially as he is shown, a martyr
to their fancy, tied and bound, alone among scores, with every kind of
odds against him.

I should take all these threads up at the end by a vivid little sketch
of the origin and progress of such a crime as Hooker's, stating a
somewhat parallel case, but an imaginary one, pursuing its hero to his
death, and showing what enormous harm he does _after_ the crime for
which he suffers. I should state none of these positions in a positive
sledge-hammer way, but tempt and lure the reader into the discussion of
them in his own mind; and so we come to this at last--whether it be for
the benefit of society to elevate even this crime to the awful dignity
and notoriety of death; and whether it would not be much more to its
ad