THE LAST PUBLIC EXECUTION IS MICHAEL BARRETT – C W Lee’s Diary

Within the week just past, an event has taken place our social history which will mark off the future more definitely than ever from the past- The object for which have so frequently pleaded has been achieved. The last public execution has taken place. Henceforth we are to have no more public strangling of terrified convicts. The area of the prison is for the future to the scene of the stem vindication of justice. There is to be no more national education of city Arabs to die game.” The gallows, as public institution, has been erected for the last time. We hail the advance as indicative of the progress of our age in refinement. There is something repelling in the very idea of deliberately taking away life, even though it be that of a criminal who has wilfully forfeited it. And, although we are not advocating of sentimental and whining morality, still we are not averse to removing those circumstances which make public executions so disgusting. There is not an Assize town or city in ‘England that is not more or less familiar with them, and their occurrence is nearly always marked similar features. There is the same motley crowd, who have waited for hours to see a fellow-creature “swung off; ” the same ribald jests and half drunken remarks; the same pseudo-religious demonstrations bordering still more nearly upon blasphemy. The smell of blood has drawn all together—it is a public sight. The great and dread lesson it was intended to teach has been thoroughly wasted. It was thought to suppress the people with the sacredness and value of human life, and, behold, it has familiarised them still more with its deliberate taking away! The excitement attendant upon seeing a man die follows the crowd through the day. There is more work to be done. Beer-houses must be resorted to, where the recent spectators can compare notes as to their several opinions of the recent event.

 

Dissipation has taken the place of industry and order, and all this has been brought about by an occurrence which it was deemed would keep the people still more rigidly in the right path!

 

We say nothing of the miserable object whose solitary death has been the nucleus of so much vice. We forbear to analyse the feelings of a wretch who goes to bis great account with the shrieks and curses of vast multitude ringing in his ears! Thank Heaven, all these degrading circumstances have been seen and beard for the last time! That in an age famous for its public charities, its large minded educational institutions, its broad Christian toleration, and its general progress in everything that constitutes civilisation—there will be no Upas tree erected in our midst to cast its blighting shadow over the public weal! solemnity due to the forcible carrying out the law will henceforth be sacredly kept. An appropriate awe will be thrown around the last dread sentence, which will be far more effectual for good than the spectacles hitherto given to the public have been. Conservative though we Englishmen naturally are as relates to our public institutions, yet there will be few us, and none are educated and refined enough to appreciate the change, who will regret it. Anything that has a tendency to check the good work of educating and refining the people should be thrust aside, and there have been few objects with so hardening and debasing tendency at the public Gallows!

 

The execution of Michael Barrett, on Tuesday, for the murder of those persons who lost their lives through the Clerkenwell outrage, will thus have a double interest attached to it for the future. His being the last public execution will servo to stamp the diabolical outrage which led to it upon the public mind. Henceforth it will have an historical association, socially and politically. The long-suffering and forbearance of the judicial inquiry, the release of one prisoner after another to whom the crime could not be clearly brought home, the clear conviction of Barrett himself, and the subsequent respites whilst his alibi was further inquired into—all these will prove to posterity the sacredness with which we regard human life, albeit is that of a convicted murderer. And, finally, the fact that all the set-up excuses failing, the law rigidly took its course, will also prove that Justice did its sacred work, unaffected by any sentimental cant. It seems fitting that the due punishment of so outrageous a crime should be the last displayed in public. Crime reached its climax of horror and contempt of the law in this event. The criminals who may hereafter have to pay the penalty of the law, will tinder different circumstances.

 

The new Act for private execution within the walls of the prison will be in force whenever the next extreme sentence is carried out. That this is a step in the right direction everybody will admit. Even to the criminal it will be more merciful, for death will now be shorn of many of those horrors which hitherto have made public executions so degrading. There will be no longer an incentive for a convict to carry out on the scaffold the wickedness of his life, and, by dying game to show his contempt for the law even in his last moments. task will be far easier for prison chaplains to prepare the convict’s mind for the dread change about to come over him. Hitherto, the ministrations of religion have savoured greatly of a farce. The beautiful service of the Church has been read whilst the ears of the criminal were dinned with executory cries.

 

The bravado of the culprit was so much encouragement for others to die likewise. We cannot but feel thankful that so disgraceful institution has come to an end in our own time, never more to be restored.

BNA©NORWICH, SATURDAY MAY 30th 1868