The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-02-07 00:00:00

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Eiberpoot -=otattbarb,l

TUESDAY MORNING, FEB. 7, 1854.

ST_RE_ET ASSASSINATION-ITS
PUNISHMENT - FALSE PHILAN-
TH_ROPY.

W3IILE philanthropists and legislators appear
to vie with each other in lightening the punish-
ment of crime, or in moderating the more repulsive
features of its character, unfortunately the objects
of such well-meant solicitude seem equally bent
on pursuing the dictates of their lawless desires.
Till within a recent period, the over-severity of
our criminal code afforded a never-failing topic on
which real or simulated humanity might expend
its eloquence. The legislature, yielding to the im-
portunity of that tenderness of heart, which, uncom-
promising in its efforts, was instant in season and
out of season, removed nearly all the death-
punishments from our statute books ; retaining,
however, death as the punishment of murder—the
highest crime known to our moral sense—the
most severely condemned by Divine and human
institutions. Such a relaxation in our penal awards,
it might have been thought, would amply con-
tent even the most fastidious advocate of gentleness
and moral suasion. Those whose sense of moral
duty, whose tenderness of heart were so excitable,
would naturally, it might have been thought, bow
to that highest of all injunctions, " Whoso
shedeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
shed." Whoever so reasoned would have reasoned
vastly wide of the truth, as that is practically
developed by every day's experience. By a per-
verted form of reasoning, and exercising a senti-
mentalism which usurps the functions of judgment,
juries refuse to give validity to even the Divine com-
mand ; and, by them, men, whose hands are
stained with murder, are declared perpetrators of
less heinous crimes, that they may escape the
punishment of death. By the exercise of such
jugglery the common-sense perceptions of men
are bewildered, the majesty of the law discounte-
nanced, the sacred obligations of justice perverted,
and the command of Heaven itself set at nought.
For what purpose, let us ask, are all those sacri-
fices of duty and violations of justice called into
operation ? To avert the doom of condign punish-
ment upon some wretch, whose savage nature and
brutalized delights induce him to draw the assassin's
knife against a brawling brother whose misfortune
or mistake it has been to excite his insensate and
dangerous wrath. To see " mercy sweeten justice"
is, indeed, an elevating, an ennobling spectacle ;
not so to see a sentimental mawkishness pervert
its streams or poison its pure waters at the fountain
dead. Is all the sympathy of well-meaning enthu-
Siasm to be denied to the victim and lavished on
the murderer ? That a felon may escape his
richly merited fate, is society to be disorganised,
`lna every man's safety to be imperilled ? Dis-
claiming as heartily as even the wildest of those
sentimentalists can do, or wish to do, every desire
to familiarise the people with sanguinary exhibi-
tions, we cannot tamely acquiesce in a decision
which, confounding deliberate assassination with
manslaughter, seeks to soften, even in murder, the
most revolting features of its guilt.
We have been led to these remarks by the alarm-
ing and increasing frequency with which the com-
monest of street brawls, or the most ordinary ebul-
litions of drunken frenzy, find their termination in
recourse to the knife. Scarcely a week now elapses
in which such deplorable terminations of common-
place quarrel do not require to be dealt with by
'OW magistrates. Within the brief period of four
months our streets have witnessed the foul assassi-
nation of three victims, while numerous individuals
have received wounds, the non-fatality of which
seems little less than miraculous. It is but a night
or two ago that a band of savage men, and disso-
lute women, inflamed by evil passions, and mad-
dened with drink, traversed a portion of our
thoroughfares, avowing their resolution to stab the
first white man they should meet, and redeeming
their demoniac pledge by plunging a knife into the
bosom of a man, unfortunately attracted to his own
door by the noisy orgies of those murderous fiends
a man who had not spoken to them—whom they,
in all probability, had never seen. So lately as the
afternoon of this day sen'night, a young man en-
gaged in a street riot, presenting no uncommon
features to mark its seriousness, beyond the tragedy
in which it terminated, was recklessly butchered in
open day. Such appalling occurrences may well
make us pause, and inquire whether we are inhabi-
tants of a civilised land, boasting of the protection
afforded in it to property and life, or have been un-
consciously transported to some barbarous shore,
where the benign influences of Christianity and
the blessings of civilisation are alike unknown.
While forcing this inquiry on us, with painful and
startling urgency, these instances also significantly
point the necessity for adopting some mode effec-
tually to check the evil.
In connexion with this alarming subject, we are
reminded of the remarks made by Mr. POLLOCK,
on a late interesting occasion, relative to the mis-
directed and dangerous education acquired by
criminals in the pursuit of their nefarious calling ;
and the conviction is painfully forced upon us that
such baneful lessons are retrospective as well as
initiatory—that the reckless desperadoes of society
are as sensitively alive to the amount of punish-
ment accorded to their misdeeds as they are
studiously cunning in the mode of perpetrating
them—that they perceive and estimate the leniency
bestowed on their position and circumstances,
" with a learned spirit of human dealing." If so,
how awful the conviction that, in dealing leniently
with a deliberate assassin, we are unintentionally but
surely abetting the dreadful crime of murder. Every
one conversant with the practice of our criminal
courts is aware of the readinesi with which a cul-
prit can and does calculate the amount of punish-
ment the law decrees to certain forms of crime.
How often must such a one, in even a limited ex-
perience, have heard a criminal say " 1 can only
get three months," or, " two years," as the case
may be for such or such an offence ; meaning, by
that, the term of imprisonment beyond which the
law will not allow the judge to punish him. Can
any one be so besotted as believe such dangerous
knowledge confined to punishments inflicted for
,offences against property alone ? Who will believe
that the dastardly assassin has not calculated the
chances of escape with his own worthless life, ere
he plunges the cowardly and murdering steel into
the bosom of his unsuspecting victim ?

THE BOARD or TILADE.—In consequence of the increas-
ing duties which have hitherto occurred in the railwayde,
and mercantile marine departments of the Board of Trade,
it has been found necessary to separate the several branches,
and their operations to distinct public offices.
The to
The statistical department is to be under the management
of Mr. A. Fonblanque, assisted by Mr. Drummond Oswald.
The Board of Trade at present comprehends the general,
statistical, mercantile, marine railway, and the arts and
sciences departments.
"'ADMIRALTY SURVEY OF THE BALTIC.—The Admi-
ralty have appointed Mr. Peter Wellington, master R.N.,
to commission the Hecht, steam-sloop, and with half a
dozen other masters of the royal navy and a competent
complement to proceed to the Baltic, to make careful
surveys and soundings of the approaches.
..A. DISAPPOINTED SUITOR.--The Madras Athenceum
states that a native suitor was committed one day last
month by the Chief Justice for contempt
rath
er novel • of court, under
against certap.cumstanees. He had brought an action
the verdict wasnoPersons, which was unsuccessful, and when
to cut his throat
ouounced he took out a knife and began
instantly seized, before all the public. Of course he was
off to gaol for the atte - Clans.
and sir Christopher Rawlinson sent him
of authority which willatat° perpetrate a felony, "an act
native notions as to what ad to
confuse still further the
man may do with his own."