The Sun. — 1850-09-18 (London, England)

CHRONICLE.—The Europa steamer, which brought the last American mails, left the people of the United States, particularly the inhabitants of New York, in a perfect phrenzy of excitement—distracted by conflicting emotions, like Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, or (if they will pardon the simile) like the donkey of the metaphysicians, who was unable to make up his mind which of the two bundles of hay to begin upon. Jenny Lind had arrived, and Professor Webster had been hanged. If Lord Brougham (as was once anticipated) had cotemporaneously lauded with his new pamphlet in his hand, they would have gone mad outright, and Mr. Disraeli would no longer have been able to boast that he is the only living politician in either hemisphere whose warmest (if not most discriminating) admirer is shut up in a lunatic asylum. But the ind-fatigable ex-Chancellor richly merits a triumphant entry to himself amongst a people who have so largely benefited by his enlightened labours in his own peculiar field of Law Reform ; and, for the moment, they have enough, and more than enough, to occupy them. Mr. Cooper's last novel, "The Way of the Hour," was composed for the avowed purpose of reforming the administration of the criminal law in the United States ; and he draws a startling picture of the mode in which juries are alternately tampered with through the instrumentality of professional agents, and misled or prejudiced by the lowest class of newspapers. Webster's case, however, had attracted too much attention in the old world to admit of the employment of these indirect influences, even assuming them to be in constant operation as described ; and the greatest pains appear to have been taken by the tribunals and authorities to impress the European public with a favourable opinion of American justice. The verdict, in our opinion, was fully supported by the evidence ; but the Governor and Council are said to have hesitated as to the execution of the :sentence until the second confession, in which the accused admitted the act of killing, but declared it to have been entirely unpremeditated and the result of sudden passion. In the first confession he had maintained his entire innocence, and a strong feeling had been got up in his favour upon the strength of it. Yet all who are conversant with the workings of the human mind under analogous circumstances, will agree with us, that very little reliance is to be placed upon self-exculpatory revelations at any time, and that the hope of inspiring belief in a pretended confession will often cling to the hardened offender to the last. If a manslayer, to whom the fact of killing is brought home, could shake off the guilt of murder by a frank acknowledgment of all except the premeditation or the motive—to convict by presumptive or circumstantial evidence would be an impossibility, for it would be always open to the alleged murderer to say that the pre-existing intention to kill had been given up. The execution was what is called private. It took place in the yard of the gaol, in the presence of two or three hundred spectators, police officers and others, required or invited to attend. But the Boston correspondent of the New York Herald (whose letter we printed at length yesterday) states, that several of the neighbouring houses commanded a view of the yard, and that the windows and roofs of some of them were packed with persons of both sexes and of all ages. "It grieved me," he adds, "to see ladies and young girls manifest their morbid curiosity in this way." On the other hand, it gladdened him to be able to say that three of the houses so situated were shut up, and that on -thedor of one of them was posted a bill to this effect : "Not at home. Opposed to capital punishment." Whets some tender-hearted moralist once requested the interference of the late Lord Ellenborough to stop an assize ball, and alleged the impropriety of dancing whilst trials of life and death were actually pending, he growled out, " Why should not any fools who like it dance and fiddle now as well as at otber times ? There are always people going to be hanged somewhere." The inhabitants of New York are entirely of the Learned Chief Justice's opinion, and they differ, moreover, very materially from Lord Ashley as to the degree of strictness with which the Christian day of rest should be observed. So soon as the Atlantic steamer, known to carry the Swedish Nightingale and her fortunes, was descried