The Express.
London, England, 1867-10-16 00:00:00

BRITANNIA.

Evesivs, BREAK RI "T NUT BEND. M. S. Lane
American Alinatrels : Japanese Tommy: and Jtu p -Orator
Wem and Mim E. Wen, Nigger Delititatura Wita TIIk
BLUtiAR'S PETITION.

HIGH MATTA AT LOSDOS DRIDGIT.
TWO DAT —Womble, .th. 31m.... —Afternoon, Th. 50m.
Tirllonow—Mornthog. 210 m.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16.

Tim English people have very few of those
spectacular amusements which are provided freely
in some continental States. They have their
thanks less to the action of the Govern-
ment than to their own energy, but not their sir-
tenses. Nevertheless, the law considerately pro-
vides them, at irregular periods, with spectacles
which may comliare in the wide-spread interest
they excite, and in their humanizing effect with
the wild beast c,,rnbata, and the gladiatorial fights
of the Roman amphitheatre. Our public execu-
tions are our games, and the convict sentenced to
strangulation in the streets is as strictly con-
demned ad Itulltni as the Roman malefactor. If he
be not butchered to make an English holiday, an
English holiday is made of his butchery. Thousands
of eager eyes are strained towards him as he
makes his last appearance on any human
stage. Connoisseurs in the morbid pathology of
the human mind watch look and gesture with a
sensitive appreciation of shades of feeling which
is almost artistic ; and the habitues of the gallows-
foot interchange or store up critical comparisons
on the actor before them, and previous performers
in the drama on which Mr. CALCRAFT drops the
curtain. If the recreations of our very lowest
classes partake, as they notoriously do, of a savage
character—if, as the French sarcasm has it, the
English invitation to amusement is, generally, in
substance if not in words, " Let us go out and
" kill something ;" if to see animals worry and
destroy each other is a specially British pastime,
perhaps the fact is not wholly unrelated to those
brutal and brutalizing punishments of which
public strangulation is a surviving relic.
Cock-lighting, bull-baiting, badger-drawing, rat-
hunting, and similar amusements are now, in great
part, under legal ban. Their patrons and prac-
titioners are obliged to seek the shade. Like the
early Christians, they meet, when they venture to
draw together, with closed doors, and under the
terror of the law. Even artistes of the eminence
of Mr. James MACE are unable, as our police re-
port of to-day shows, to exercise their peaceful and
orderly calling, or to pursue their preliminary
studies, with that security of person and quietness
of mind without which perfection is unattainable.
In all these prohibitions the law has acted on the
fact that displays of physical violence and tor-
ture are debasing to those who witness them ;
and that to relish them is the sign of a mind
naturally vile or degraded by vicious practice. In
maintaining the custom of public executions, it
violates its own rule in its most critical and crucial
application.

Yesterday was a great day for the patrons of the
gallows and the amateurs of death in London.
Mr. Causarr, like some versatile actors, had two
engagements, following close upon each other,
in different parts of the town. Re was at
Newgate at eight o'clock and in Horsemonger-
lane at ten. The English murderer Wiootss and
the French murderer BORDIER were despatched
with short interval between. The superior attrac-
tion of the entertainment in the Borough appears
to have drawn away the populace from the spec-
tacle provided for them in the City. English
audiences have generally a preference for foreign
over native talent ; and they seem to carry the
habit into their appreciation of murderers. The
sentimental and egotistic French criminal, with his
crude philosophy of fatalism and unbelief, and his
perverted rather than blunted natural feeling,
appears to have piqued the curiosity of a Lon-
don crowd more strongly than the common-
place brutality of the burly English ruffian. The
courtesies of the situation were observed on both
sides. The murderer, like an actor playing a con-
spicuous part, bowed, from the top of the scaf-
fold, twice to the crowd, " and a good many of
" the people assembled cheered and clapped their
" hands." The exhibition was thoroughly thea-
trical and thoroughly French. It is satisfactory
to learn that the unhappy man appears before
his death to have been brought by the situation
itself, or by the ministrations of those who at-
tended on him, to a sounder state of moral and
religious feeling than that in which he had lived.
But who can hope that the awakening of this
better mind was helped by the parade and noto-
riety of a public death The flattered vanity of
" drawing " a larger crowd than was ever assem-
bled on a similar occasion too probably for the
moment absorbed any more healthy feeling.
A very different and even more repulsive scene