s
a poor compliment to Paradise. Or did he simply use a pious, impressive
form of speech to awe the spectators, and give them the notion that he
had as much traffic with God as any African mystery-man or Mohammedan
dervish?

The middle one of these three theories fits in best with the general
sentiment, or at any rate the working sentiment, of Christian England.
Some brutal, drunken, or passionate wretch commits a murder. He is
carefully tried, solemnly sentenced, and religiously hanged. He
is declared unfit to live on this planet. But he is still a likely
candidate for heaven, which apparently yawns to receive all the refuse
of earth. He is sedulously taken in hand by the gaol chaplain, or some
other spiritual guide to glory, and is generally brought to a better
frame of mind. Finally, he expresses sorrow for his position, forgives
everybody he has ever injured, delivers himself of a good deal of highly
edifying advice, and then swings from the gallows clean into the Kingdom
of Heaven.

The grotesque absurdity of all this is enough to wrinkle the face of a
cab horse. Society and the murderer are both playing the hypocrite, and
of course Society is the worse of the two, for it is acting deliberately
and methodically, while the poor devil about to be hung is like a hunted
thing in a corner, up to any shift to ease his last moments and make
peace with the powers of the life to come. Society says he has killed
somebody, and he shall be killed; that he is not fit to live, but fit
to die; that it must strangle him, and call him "brother" when the white
cap is over his face, and God must save his soul; that he is too bad to
dwell on earth, but it hopes to meet him in heaven.

Religion does not generate sense, logic, or humaneness in the mind of
Society. Its effect on the doomed assassin is simply horrible. He is
really a more satisfactory figure when committing the murder than when
he is posing, and shuffling and twisting, and talking piously, and
exhibiting the intense, unmitigated selfishness which is at the bottom
of all religious sentiment. The essence of piety comes out in this
tragi-comedy. Personal fear, personal hope, self, self, sell, is the
be-all and the end-all of this sorry exhibition.

A case in point has just occurred at Leeds. James Stockwell was hung
there on Tuesday morning. While under sentence of death, the report
says, he slept well and ate heartily, so that remorse does not appear to
have injured hi