The Express. — 1867-10-16 (London, England)

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 Government than to their own energy, but not their sirtenses. Nevertheless, the law considerately provides 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 executions are our games, and the convict sentenced to strangulation in the streets is as strictly condemned 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 gallowsfoot 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, rathunting, and similar amusements are now, in great part, under legal ban. Their patrons and practitioners 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 report 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 torture 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 Horsemongerlane at ten. The English murderer Wiootss and the French murderer BORDIER were despatched with short interval between. The superior attraction of the entertainment in the Borough appears to have drawn away the populace from the spectacle 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 London crowd more strongly than the commonplace brutality of the burly English ruffian. The courtesies of the situation were observed on both sides. The murderer, like an actor playing a conspicuous part, bowed, from the top of the scaffold, twice to the crowd, " and a good many of " the people assembled cheered and clapped their " hands." The exhibition was thoroughly theatrical 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 attended 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 notoriety of a public death The flattered vanity of " drawing " a larger crowd than was ever assembled on a similar occasion too probably for the moment absorbed any more healthy feeling. A very different and even more repulsive scene