The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-30 00:00:00

Zit aiult

LO DOLT, WEDNESDAY, DEC. 30, 1863.

The aeei .
sion arrived at by the right hon. the
:Home St.to
tary, in regard to the wretched criminal
TowNixe
' appears to us to be one likely to prove in
the highest degree alarming in its consequences.
• As constituting ,„t itself, now that it has been defi-
nitively announced
a fearful precedent ,it holds out
a frightful prospect
(like Towei7f immunity to any future
criminals
1.1) of the blackest dye well
imaginable. A more brutal, a more dastardly
murder—a murder more
deliberately done in cold
blood—than that perpetrated by the hands
of this miserable man
• owhere to be
found mentioned among all the cruel deeds
recorded in the Ne wgEkte
Calendar. The
murderer, GEORGE VICTOR Towel
Ley, a mani of
education, a man even of ability, and, op to
the date
of his crime, enjoying among those who vas
w him a
reputation for refinement, though the deed, ,t
blood
itself proved the refinement to be only a tetoe,
merit of cruelty—has, by what appears to na amour
weak concession on the part of the authorities,
answer to a maudlin local clamour for a respite,
been allowed to escape from the penalties of the
law, to the weight of which he had been most
justly declared to have rendered himself amenable.
It is not that we would be understood
to be here arguing in any way out of a sanguinary
yearning to see vengeance done upon this wretched
man, according to the old pitiless dispensation of
the Mosaic code—wherein an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life, each in its
turn, was, as a rule, regarded as indispensable.
All we are here desirous of insisting upon, in
the instance of this educated assassin, this gentle
murderer, is that while other condemned con-
victs are brought to the gallows and inexorably
hung by the neck there until they are dead, for
deeds of blood in no way worse of their kind, in no
wey done ,itt,
• more atrocious deliberation, justice
should not be Outraged by the flag= inconsistency
of allowing this 3 perpetrator of a crime of double
bleakness and triple
infamy to escape from a punish-
ment to which lesser criminals are, as already in-
sisted upon, pitilessly doomed to lie the death.
The particulars of ToweeE.i.B
crime need here
no sort of recapitulation.
It was a murder as
coolly thought out and planned
88 any mur-
der that was ever perpetrated, previously
to the date of its perpetration, not a suspicion, had
been entertained in regard to the tiara_
of the man
now declared to be non corn/Jos mends, a criminal
lanatie, a homicidal monomaniac. Hie eonteluct
upon the occasion of the murder never gave 'let one
who saw him, or spoke with him, an impreissiet,
that he was deranged. Throughout his loaf and

J

atient trial by a jury of his fellow-countrymen—
ionest, intelligent, and impartial Englishmen (we
at least may be allowed to speak of them thus,
seeing that the trial is long since over, and that
we never had any brief in this case confided
to us)—honest, intelligent, impartial Englishmen,
who were sworn to do this miserable man justice—
throughout the whole of the long and patient trial
of TOWNLEY for the murder of Miss GOODWIN, we
say, the jury were in no way brought to believe,
nor yet was the judge upon the bench who di-
rected the verdict, and who pronounced the sen-
tence, led to believe, that the prisoner at the bar
was an irresponsible agent—that he was mad, or at
any rate so far touched with madness as to be irre-
sponsible. After the trial has been completed,
after the verdict has been delivered in by the jury,
after the sentence of death has been pronounced
upoa the condemned criminal by the lips of the
Judge, then, but not until then, a morbid agitation
is set on foot in the county tainted by his pre-
sence, an agitation most morbid of its kind, as it ap,
pears to us, the promoters of which agitation are
bent upon persuading the authorities to do for this
man of education, this reputed gentleman of refine-
ment, what it would be utterly preposterous to have
attempted doing for an illiterate mechanic or a horny-
handed agricultural labourer. The endeavour has
been just now successfuly carried out. Miss GOOD-
WIN'S murderer has received a respite. Commissioners
of lunacy have examined into the state of the mind
of GEORGE TOWNLEY. They have presented their
report to the Home Secretary. It is subsequent to
the receipt of that report, and, of course, quite ob-
viously consequent upon it, that the criminal has
been reprieved. All the regular forms have been com-
plied with—we don't doubt that in the least. Neither
do we for one moment doubt that any single
one among those who have in any way
whatever, directly or indirectly, had a hand
in bringing about this result, namely, the
reprieve of TOWNLEY, upon the eve of
his execution, has acted otherwise than from
motives the most unimpeachably conscientious.
Yet, while saying this quite frankly and un-
reservedly, we say, also, nono the less frankly,
none the less unreservedly, that we look upon
the whole transaction, we look upon the whole
of this morbid interference with the course of
justice, as not only most feeble in itself, but as cal-
culated to prove also, in its consequences, and in
its character as a precedent, nothing less than most
calamitous.

Great strides have been made in shipbuilding of
late years for augmenting the size of our ships of war,
which has led to the construction of some splendid
specimens of naval architecture. Despite the in-
cumbrance of their ponderous armour-plating, the
Warrior, Black Prince, and their fellow leviathans,
are handsome vessels, but they are all wanting in a
most important requisite, namely, free ventilation.
All steamers are more or less likely to be hot below
from the presence of the furnaces and the boilers,
and in iron-plated ships the impossibility of ventila-
tion‘througle the sides below the batteries is a great
drawback. Many attempts have been made, with
more or less success, to neutralise this, by creating
draughts. by means of fans and hollow masts ; but
for all this the unfortunate stokers and firemen on
board, of many of our ships pass a portion of their
existence in a semi-roasted state. In the late trial
of the Hector, at Portsmouth, notwithstanding that
it is almost the last of our iron frigates launched,
was specially designed by the Comptroller of the
Navy, and is, we believe, to be one of the ships
which he promised should cclipe all ships afloat,
the temperature during the runs over the measured
mile in the engineers' and stokers' quarters was ex-
cessive, notwithstanding that the day was cold.
The following are the temperatures taken during
the first run :—On. deck, 46 deg. ; engine-room,
fore part, 75 deg. ; middle part, 72 deg. ; aft, 76
deg. Stokehole, Ist run—Forepart, 70 deg.; middle,
117 deg. ; aft, 100 deg. 6th run—Fore part, 76
deg. ; middle, 130 deg. ; aft, 107 deg. If this is
the atmosphere that our engineeers are to be sub.
jetted to merely during a trial trip in cold weather,
what are they to expect when the ship is in action ?
and, instead of pure air being forced down between
decks, smoke and sulphur will be added to their
already close atmosphere. It is high time that the
Admiralty bestirred themselves in this matter. We
do not wish to detract from the merits of Mr. REED.
He has undertaken to remodel our navy, and to turn
out ships which shall in fact combine economy in
construction, great speed, and immense strength.
We cannot compliment him on the performances of
the Hector at her recent trial, seeing that the
Royal Oak and Warrior both excel her in speed—
the former by more than a knot an hour,
while the ventilation is most faulty. Great
allowance must be made for the archi-
tect when he is trying experiments to find
out the most advantageous mode of constructing a
ship to carry heavy guns and impenetrable armour-
plating; but as the ventilation throughout our ,
steam navy is very defective, why should not the I
Government offer a prize worth contending for, for
a plan which should render the ventilation of
steam ships a reality and not an idea? We believe
that much of the excessive heat experienced on
board our ships is occasioned by the fact of having
the fires facing each other, so that the stokers work
in a narrow passage with some dozen or more fires
on each side of them. Now, were the boilers so
arranged that the mouths of the furnaces faced the
coal-bunkers on either side of the ship, time and
labour would be saved, and the health of the fire-
men not endangered. This may be one otep in the
right direction, bat we doubt not that many other
improvements may be made if proper encouragement
h given to engineering talent and enterprise by the
Government. We read with horror of the suffer-
"‘ r the unfortunate victims who perished in the
w- hole of Calcutta, without thinking what is
the state
Of the stokeholes of our own men-of-war,
especialll
Interesting just at the present time.

There is 11,-------------t
counting for prejudice. When once
it takes root 1.4 men's
minds no argumeqt seems
capabie of uprooting it, and no efforts can induce
the predetermineotol,t
convinced against their will.
D,"
The notion that has
- %lied in regard to the send-
ingto West
Australia has been so
that at last it has .
deeply
gain the day, and to prevail against the dictates of
of a timely
rootede°l2v convicts
ts
revolt "en allowed to
a wise prudence, and the eugge,tio_. . .
foresight. It is d that such a
abandoned„i
project should have been rice it pro-
greatly to be regretted
peat in.
it also
mised so well for the furtherance of th„, , .
terests of those concerned, and
promised to
confer essential service on those at borne, by relow,
ing to another sphere the unfortunate beings vho,
left on our shores, would infallibly have returned to
their old courses, and exemplified the state of that
man whose latter end was worse than his begin-
ning. A letter to the limes of yesterday very pro-
perly takes up the question, and points out some of
the fallacies of those who so vehemently support the
opposition to the project of Western Australia being
selected as the receptacle of our convicts. The writer
very truly declares that one authenticated instance
of an escaped convict committing sericus crimes at
Adelaide or Melbourne would go further to support
the case than all the high sounding declamations
I that have been uttered against the idea, There