The Sun.
London, England, 1849-11-14 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS

FROM THE MORNING PAPERS Or THIS DAT.
TlMES.—Yesterday this metropolis witnessed the
most awful act which the necessities of justice or of
self-preservation can impose on a sovereign State.
We performed an act of judicial slaughter.
Dreadful as the circumstances of capital punish-
ment always must be, revolting as are its details, and
beyond all former example the horrors both of the
crime and the closing scene in this instance, yet they
are all tolerable compared with the thoughts sug-
gested by a too curious scrutiny. Through its con-
stituted organs the whole people yesterday cut short
the visible being and the moral course of two miser-
able creatures, born with immortal souls, doubtless
once innocent and loving, with the hidden germs of
the highest virtue and the loftiest attainments, yet
both cast out, as it were on the dunghill, and the
" particle of divinity " within them sent we know
not where, quivering and fleeting on its unknown
journey to the presence of Him that gave it. One
may almost take refuge in the odious spectacle from
the overwhelming responsibility of the act, and con-
sult peace of mind by a blind faith in the Exkutive,
and its sacred vocation. The most morbid conscience,
however, will derive some consolation from the un-
frequency of these scenes. It is not thirty years
since one might walk out any Monday morning be-
fore breakfast and see half a dozen poor wretches
dying the death of dogs for petty thefts committed in
hunger, or trifling injuries done in a drunken affray.
Capital punishment is no longer the normal award for
a legal crime, not even for an ordinary murder, but the
mark by which we designate what is portentous and
horrible. When deeds have been committed that
would seem to pollute the earth, then we purge the
land, and hang up the guilty authors before the Sun
in the sight of God and the people. While every
circumstance of horror and atrocity is accumulated in
this crime, it seems to silence all doubt as to its
punishment by the examples to which it naturally
directs us. In the almost sacred antiquities of our
own national annals, as we read them in the inspired
pages of our great dramatist, there is just such an
instance. Had Maria Manning been possessed with
the insane thought of following Lady Macbeth in her
insatiable cupidity and ambition—in her atrocious
conceptions, her undaunted soul and her unflinching
nerve ; in her dominion over a sottish and a cowardly,
husband, in her treachery to her guest, in the com-
placency with which sho could behold her victim,
in the vigour with which she could smite him " as
an ox in the shambles," and perhaps also in the
steadiness with which she could encounter her
doom, she could not have played her part with truer
feeling of its character. The revelations of this case,
especially if we may trust the confessions of him whc
was the "weaker vessel" of the two„ add probability
to the tradition, and prove how truly Shakspere could
describe, and how little he exaggerated. Maria
Manning drugged both her victim and her tool for
weeks together. The grave was dug a month before,
and shown with a sort of secret triumph to its future
occupant. All that time she daily counted the gains
of the speculation. That no happy charcteriitic
or timely adornment might be wanting to
the deed, the scrip and shares of familiar
railway lines are mixed with the transac-
tion ; brokers are brought into the witness-box, who
testify in the same breath to the signature of the
accused and the depreciation of shares. Mrs. Manning
made haste to slay her man, and realise, for the mar-
ket was falling. Herself intriguing and jealous, she
played on the vanity and the desultory passions of a
male flirt by promising him a meeting with a fair
young stranger at her table. With the usual as-
cendancy of unscrupulous wickedness, she made a
lodger, who was all but a stranger, write falsehoods
at her ready dictation. Such is Lady Macbeth
on the Bermondsey stage. As for the thing who
was her husband, but not a man, one hardly ven-
tures to speak of him, lest we should make him
out too base even for punishment; but no reality
or fiction can equal what he tells us of himself.
He found O'Connor moaning upon his grave,
whereon he had fallen. " I never liked him well, and
I battered in his skull with a ripping chisel." So for
a wife whom he did not love he battered in the skull
of a poor moaning wretch, whom he did not like well.
No wonder he could not sleep in the house when his
wife had gone. Yet he could " rise and take posses-
sion." Shakspere's is not the only page illustrated
from the native horrors of a little street in the lowest
of our suburbs. It is Ahab and Jezebel to the life—
Jezebel the daring foreigner, the profane unbeliever,
as Maria Manning now seems to have been ;
the ready arguer, the greedy aggrandizer, the
forger, the intriguer, the resolute, the painted and
attired even unto death. When we think of that
tremendous chapter in the inspired history of Pro-
vidence we may conclude it no unwarrantable
presumption in a Christian people, and a ruler that
beareth the sword, not in vain, to snake this wretched
pair walk over their own graves to their doom, even
as they had done by their own victim. A great
novelist, whose knowledge of the human heart and its
workings under the infinite varieties and accidents of
modern life, needs not our praise, has sent us a letter
describing his impressions on witnessing the execu-
tion. His language excites our admiration, but not
our surprise. The scene is doubtless the most horrid,
and apparently the most hardening, that can be ima-
gined. We are not prepared, however, to follow Mr.
Dickens to his conclusion. It appears to us a
matter of necessity that so tremendous an act as a
national homicide should be publicly as well as
solemnly done. Popular jealousy demands it. Were
it otherwise, the mass of the people would never
be sure that great offenders were really exe-
cuted, or that the humbler class of criminals were
not executed in greater numbers than the State
chose to confess. The mystery of the prison walls
would be intolerable, for, besides mere curiosity,
popular indignation would ask to see or learn the de-
tails of the punishment, the fact of its ignominious
character, and the bearing of the criminals. Nor do
we think it altogether fair to infer the real feelings,
much less the abiding impression, of the spectators
from the horrid, hysterical mirth produced by a
night's exposure, an immense crowd, and a long
suspended expectation. Few of us ever choose to
confess deep emotion, and men often hide the deepest
feeling with the wildest excesses of manner and lan-
guage. They who would bury themselves under the
earth if they could, when they cannot escape the
public eye will sometimes belie their mental strug-
gles by the most frantic exaggerations. Hamlet was
never so mad as over the grave of Ophelia, when the
scene recalled all his natural melancholy, all the
miseries of his life, and the horrors of his preter-
natural mission. In the rude multitude yesterday
ns
congregated before Horseonger-lanei t Gaol
than there
might Mr.
might be no nearer approach to Hamlet
Dickens himself, yet what we say ila
strTeeof the great
majority of minds, and not the less true Of thei mostat
undisciplined.
CHRONICLE.—The execution of the miserable
beings who divided the guilt, if they did not partici-
pate equally in the actual perpetration, of O'Connor's
murder, has added the closing scene to one of the
Ilackest and foulest tragedies which have been enacted
in this country within the memory of man. Frederick
George Manning had made a detailed statement, pro-
fessedly by way of confession, to the chaplain of the
gaol, a few days before. his wife died without a sign
of contrition—obdurate to the last—steeled to her fate
by the indurating influence of that infidelity to which
she had surrendered her soul. " I have no soul," she
had once said to her husband. " After we are dead
we are like a lump of clay, and there is no more thought
of us ; and I shall never have to suffer hereafter for
murdering that man." In this belief she lived—with
this awful delusion resting on her mind, she died.
The confession of the male prisoner supplies the
very few links wanting to complete the chain of
circumstantial evidence of which we were already in
possession. The short interval which elapsed between

)) 2 77(

_ ..q ti iv
4
i
the time when O'Connorkis seen on Lnaots-eb:idge
=Mild Mrs Manning's apAtance at his lodgingkie;nove
----)unted for. He went, it seems, from -the 'spot
,ne're he was last seen alive, straight to Minvetsplace;
and in twenty minutes after he entered the hause he
had Leen deposited in his,,bloody grave. Whether
the share of Manning himself in the transaction was
what he declares it to have been, and no more, is a
secret known only to the lllaker of us all. But that
he was justly condemned and justly suffered a mur-
derer's fate, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt.
His
own admissions, indeed, prove that, if not
strictly his wifes accomplice, he was, at best, her tool.
A slave to her reckless, violent, and domineering
temper, he seems all the while to have nursed a lurk-
ing resentment against the author of his own dis-
honour. For many weeks before the fatal Thursday,
he knew that her mind was brooding incessantly
over the atrocious design. He scarcely ventured on
a faint remonstrance, whilst the whisperings of Satan
gradually gained possession of her soul, and the
project matured itself in her imagination. A month
at least before the deed was done she had confided to
him her settled determination to kill the man whom
he was receiving in his house from day to day on
terms of too familiar intimacy. Again and again,
when all was prepared, he was ready to afford a
sullen, but treacherous, hospitality to the doomed
victim, without even whispering a word of warning
in his ear; and when a casual circumstance had pre-
vented the commission of the crime, he was ready
once more to enact the part of the friendly host
towards the mnn whom his wife was lying in wait
to murder. He was privy to the purchase of
the pistol by which O'Connor met his death, and he
bought the crowbar, which was found the other day
at Lewes, with the clotted blood and hair of the dead
man's scull still sticking to the iron. He witnessed
the digging of the grave which yawned before the
feet of his unfortunate guest as he descended the stairs
followed by his paramour, and into which he fell, by
her hand, a lifeless corpse. He even helped to extin-
guish the last remains of life, by battering the mur-
dered man's head with a ripping chisel. He assisted
in huddling the body into its receptacle, where it might
never hare been discovered had not a slight appear.
ance of dampness between two of the stones of the
kitchen been detected by the se arching eye of
one of the officers of justice. lie did not refuse his
share in the miserable booty for which his guilty
partner found, when too late, that she had sold her body
to the hangman, and her soul to the Powers of Dark-
ness—although she herself afterwards, as if to
till up the measure of her iniquity by a baseness
the most contemptible, filched from him even this
paltry recompense of their common sin. If we turn
away from the male criminal with sensations of
loathing and disgust, we cannot gaze upon the woman
without the deeper emotions of execration and horror.
The murderess of her paramour, she has also—if her
partner in guilt has not left the world with a lie on
his lips—been, as far as in her lay, the murderess of
her husband too. If, as his tale—corroborated in no
small degree by the more than masculine violence of
her character—would lead us to believe, she, and not
he, was the actual assassin, she must have deemed it
at least within the range of possibility that a full con-
fession from her might save his life. But no! Dog-
gedly and cruelly silent, she turned a deaf ear
to his supplications, and (lid her worst—and that
with success—to drag him with her to the
gallows. Yet the blackness which rests upon her
memory is such that it could scarcely contract
a deeper dye even from this additional stain. The
annals of crime do not record a case of wickedness
more unredeemed, more revolting to all the feelings
of our nature. She had, as she herself said, " the
nerve of a horse." She " thought no more of shoot-
ing O'Connor than if it had been the cat on the wall."
She thanked " God " that the crime was consum-
mated, while her hands were yet reeking with the
blood of her victim. The cold-blooded and relentless
barbarity with which the murder was plotted and
executed—her immovable self-possession when con-
fronted with the ministers of justice—her bursts of
uncontrollable ferocity when withdrawn from
the public gaze—all combine to realise in
Maria Manning the ideal murderess of our
childish imaginations—a character darker than
any novelist would venture to pourtray—the vulgar
Clytemnestra of the Newgate Calendar, with all the
masculine fierceness of her prototype, but differing
from her in that she did for lucre what the other dared
for the gratification of the less sordid passions of
revenge and lust. We often hear it said, that in this
age of civilization, when the habitual pressure of
external restraint in a thousand different forms curbs
the free play of our natural impulses, man is alike
incapable of great virtues and of great crimes. If
the earth no longer numbers among her children
heroes or saints, she is also, we are told, rid for ever
of those great criminals who, in their own genera-
tions, were the scourges of God. The remark is trite
and partly true ; and yet we are startled, now and
then, by cases which bid us distrust the varnished
surface of modern society, and which seem to indicate
that our boasted civilization has done much less
than we imagined to extirpate the animal fierceness
that burns in the blood of the untaught savage.
Within the last two years there have been scenes at
Paris, Frankfort, Messina, and Prague, to which the
Jacqueries and peasant-wars of the middle ages could
scarcely furnish a parallel. And how would the in-
mates and guests of certain very stately houses hare
started with horror, could they have been told that
under the exterior of Marie Roux, the Swiss maid—
the attendant of gentle, highborn, and virtuous ladies
—lurked the hyena-like nature which temptation has
revealed in Maria Manning! Such cases, when they
occur, may at least teach us the solemn lesson, that no
artificial restraint, to external atmosphere of conven-
tional morality, can be relied upon as a substitute for
those habits of practical religion which can alone pre-
serve untainted the issues of the heart.
HERALD.—The mind feels a kind of relief when
it comes, at last, to what is apparently the end of the
Manning and O'Connor tragedy. The whole history
was one so utterly wretched, vile, and debasing, as
only to recal to recollection the haughty exclamation
of the Sultan of two hundred years back, when in-
formed of some European war, " Well, and whether
the hog eats the dog, or the dog the hog, how does it
concern me ?" The three parties concerned were so
nearly matched in moral temperament, or rather in
moral degradation, that all sympathy is entirely out
of the question. The criminals have been publicly
hanged, not because much pity was felt for their victim,
but because the public safety requires that " the
murderer shall surely be put to death." This thought,
however, leads to another to which we feel inclined to

give expression ; and which, if true, is of some mo-
ment. A strong argument may be framed in opposition
to the system of capital punishments. Many good
men feel, and are prepared to maintain, that no one
is entitled to take away life, and that to haul a human
being out upon a scaffold, and there publicly to
strangle him, is sure to do more injury to the mind
and morals of the people than it can do good. With
this view of the question we do not agree ; but we
are ready to admit that a strong case might be made
out for a change in the law. While, however, men
of sense and benevolence would be found on different
sides on this question, we believe that the public
would, if polled, be all on one side on another ;
namely, that the chief desideratum is a fixed, in-
telligible, and durable system of some kind. Shall
we startle our readers by expressing our conviction
that the two depraved wretches who yesterday
suffered the first part of the punishment due to their
crimes at floremonger lane, were grievously injured
by one of the kindest and best intentioned men living
—we mean by the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey?
To explain such a charge, we must recal to our
readers' minds the unquestionable principle—that
weakness in Government, and especially in the admi-
nistration of justice, is often as harmful in its results

as wickedness. What the public needs, and what
even every criminal has a right to demand, is an
intelligible and consistent principle of action. Even
the murderer has a right to know what he has to

expect. Now, our charge against Sir George Grey
—as amiable and well-meaning a Home Secretary as
England has known in our day—is, that under the
vague and uncertain system he has latterly been
pursuing—no man—no murderer even, can possibly
tell what he has to expect ! Take an example or
two, which recur forcibly to the mind. 1. Some
months since a wretched girl, a servant maid, evi-
dently given up to the worst propensities, was accus-
tomed to frequent the parks, and there she made the
acquaintance of a soldier, from whom she did not
receive money, but to whom she was accustomed
to give money. When her purse was emptied
he neglected her. Infuriated by his neglect, she
purchased a pistol, and deliberately, after hours
and days of premeditation, she murdered him. She
was tried and convicted. Of her guilt there was not
the slightest doubt. But the senteuce was never
carried into execution. Since then, a wife has poisoned
her husband,—not rashly or in anger, but by slow
degrees, and by a murder protracted through several
days. She, too, is spared; for her the punishment of
death is thought too severe. Still more recently, a
youth having seduced an innocent girl, decoyed her
into a secluded spot in the shades of evening, and there
cut her throat, to save himself the expense of main-
taining an illegitimate child. For this vile creature,
too, the ill-used prerogative of mercy steps forth ; and
he also is snatched from the hands of the expectant
hangman. Now what is the consequence,—the in-
evitable consequence ? The Mannings, feeling that
each and all of these cases were of far deeper
turpitude than their own, never could bring
themselves to believe that they would have
to suffer. Hence the fourteen or fifteen
days that were granted them for repent-
ance were rendered useless ; for their minds
never once realised the fact of their approaching
execution. Each day only witnessed some new de-
vice, some new plan for calling forth the prerogative
of mercy. And thus our really benevolent Home
Secretary managed to do them the greatest injury in

his power, by wholly diverting their minds from that
which ought to have been the one subject of contem-
plation, and leading them to wander, restless but full
of hope, in quest of an ignis fatuits of expected par-
don. Now we repeat once more, that what is most
wanted is a settled and intelligible system. This is
needed for the protection of the public ; it is also
needed for the sake of the criminals themselves.
When a poor wretch has once brought himself into
the predicament of deserving to die, the best service
that say mast ca render him, is to lead or force
him to fix his eye solely on that eternity to which
be is hastening. But, such is the natural love of
life, that, so long as a hope of escape is allowed to
exist, it is not possible for the poor creature to think
of aught else than the desired pardon. Now Sir
George Grey's system, or want of system, seems to
us to inflict this cruel injury on all present or future
murderers—that, after such cases of unexpected and I
unintelligible escape as we have alluded to, it is
vult for any man to feel certain of dying. None,
oowever atrocious their crimes, will believe otherwise,
but that "if proper efforts are used, they may be
saved." And hence all, even the worst, will die, at
last, unwarned. They will die without being
thoroughly assured, until the rope is actually about
their necks, that their fate is at all decided.
Nor ought the safety of the public in general to
be wholly left out of view. In cases of deep-seated
jealousy or revenge, we need some strong deterring
cause to prevent the man of evil passions from im-
bruing his hands in his rival's blood. But an un-
certain, fluctuating, unintelligible system does not
furnish such a deterring cause. Even a code from
-which capital punishments were wholly excluded
might be more protective than the present. For
such a system, to be tolerated at all, must provide
some good secondary punishment. And a punishment
which, without taking life, was really a heavy one,
would have more power in checking crime than a
system like the present, which threatens death, but
scarcely ever inflicts it. At the present moment the
public are not protected. There is the nominal pu-
nishment of hanging, indeed, and upon such people
as the Mannings it may sometimes be allowed to take
its course. But when, for one such infliction of the
law there are three or four remissions of the punish-
ment, the murderously-disposed looks at the average
of the whole, and decides that he will gratify his pas-
sions, and then—take his chance I

INTERESTING NEW BIOGRAPHICAL WORK.
Just ready, 2 vols., post Bvo., 10s. 6d. each, bound,
LIVES OF THE PRINCESSES
OF ENGLAND.
From the Norman Conquest.
By MARY ANNE EVERETT GREEN.
Editor of the "Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladles."
Henry Colburl, Publisher, 13, Great Marlborough-street.
Orders received by all Booksellers.

THEATRE ROYAL, HAYMARKET.
Mr. B. Webster, 6ele Lessee and Manager, Old Brompton.
THIS EVENING,
Will be performed KING LEAR. King Lear, Mr. 3facreadY;
Edgar, Mr. J. Wallack ; Earl of Kent, Mr. Stuart; Cordelia, Miss
Reynolds.
To be followed by an original Farce called THE GUARDIAN
ANGEL. Mr. Dulcimer, Mr. Keeley; Moggy Snag,gs, Mrs. Keeley.
To conclude with the successful and laughable Farce, called an
4LIRMING SACRIFICE. Bob Ticket, Mr. Buckstone ; Susan
Sweetapple, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.
Due notice will be given of the appearance of Mr. and Mrs. KEAN.
The Box-office is under the direction of Mr. I. T. Archer.

r Eat. UOYAL, ADELPIII.
Under the direction of Madame Celesta,

TEAS EVENING,

Will be performed THE SONS OF MARS.
To be followed by an entirely new Extravaganza, entitled DO-
MESTIC ECONOMY. John Grimly, Mr. Wright ; Mrs. Grumley.
Mrs. F. Matthews.
After which a new Farce, entitled A lIIRD OF PASSAGE. Mr.
C rry Chick, Mr. Wright; Mr. Chaunt Ginger, Mr. rani Bedford ;
Mr. Charles Pusher, Mr. Boyce; Ernest Hopeful, Mr. Worrell; Mrs.
Waters Rummer. Mrs. Frank Matthews.
To conclude with a new slippery sketch called MRS. BUNBURP3
SPOONS. Mr. Iliztbury Barnes, Mr. I'. Bedford ; Bob Twinks,
Mr. Wright ; Job Smith, Mr. 0. Smith ; Mrs. Banbury, Mrs. F.
Matthews; Mrs. Highbury Barnes, Miss Brooks.

ROYAL LYCEUM THEATER.
Under the Management of Madame Vestris.
Sole Lessee, Mr. Charles Mathews.
THIS EVENING,
Will be performed METIIINK I SEE MY FATHER,
To be followed by BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
To conclude with a comic drama, called A PRACTICAL MAN.
Dress moxe., 55.; Upper Boxes, 4s. ; Pit, 23. ; Gallery, ,s. IVo
t. ftnv part of the house.
All applications for rrivate Boxes ;nest be made to Mr. Allcroft, 15,
New Ildnd-street.

PRINCESS'S THEATt:E.
Mr. J. M. Maddox, Sole Lessee and Manager.
THIS EVENING,
Will bo performed a new Opera, entitled CHARLES THE SE-
COND.
To be followed by a new Extrayaganza, entitled THE FIRST
NIGHT.
To conclude with a new comic Ballet called DANCING MAD.

AS L KY'S ROYAL AMPHITHEATRE.
Proprietor, Mr. W. Batty.
Immense hit I Moncrieff 's New Pedestrian and Equestrian Ex'ra-
vaganza of Mr. E riggs in the " Pleasur s of Housekeeping and
Horsekeeping,' having been received with roars of laughter and
shouts of approbation, will be repeated every evening until further
notice.