The Express. — 1846-10-24 (London, England)

ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. A public meeting, numerously and respectably attended, was held at the large room of the Royal British Institution, Cowper-street, Finsbury, last evening, on the subject of the abolition of capital punishment. Charles Gilpin, Esq., took the chair, at half-past seven o'clock, and stated at some length the objects of the meeting. The legitimate ends of punishment were the safety of society, the reformation of the offender, and restitution, where it was possible, to the individuals who had suffered by the criminal's offence. Two of these objects were lost sight of by capital punishment. It could be no satisfaction to the friends of a murdered man, nor could it lead to the reformation of the offender to cut short his thread of life, and send him, prepared or unprepared, into the presence of his Judge. It also failed in the third object--the security of society, as was clearly proved by criminal statistics. If it was necessary that the criminal should repent, why shorten the time which God would give him—which infinite mercy would extend? (Hear,) The punishment of death was also irrational ; profeasing to teach a reverence for human life, it showed how rapidly and how easily it could be taken away,— it taught persons to do no violence, and perpetrated itself the greatest violence, setting also an example of retaliation and revenge which it condemned in theory. It raised a blood-stained criminal into a hero, in a majority of cases. It it were not for the punishment of death, where would be the morbid sympathy which caused the words, the actions, nay, the very looks, of the murderer to be regarded with intense interest—which sent his portrait (through the medium of the pictorial papers) throughout the country, and made it familiar at the fire-side of thousands of virtuous families? (Hear, hear.) He further objected to capital punishment on account of its Irrevocable character ; human beings were all fallible, and who but his Creator could judge of the guilt of a man who was launched into eternity protesting his ianocence ? (Hear, hear.) His friend, Jonathan Dywood, had amid, that at one assizes at Exeter he felt convinced that six innocent men had been condemned to death ; and there were numbers of similar cases familiar to every one who to"k an interest in the subject. (Hear, hear.) Mr. Alderman SIDNEY bore testimony to the brutality which, as sheriff, he had witnessed at executions at Newgate, and stated that in every instance where 'he had conversed with criminal condemned to die, he found that they had been in the habit of attending public executions. (Hear, hear.) He was convinced that every spectacle of that kind hardened niimberless human beings, and taught them to be familiar with the spilling of blood. (Hear.)—Mr. EDWARD Mutt. contended that although the punishment of death was recognised under the blosiac economy, it was utterly incompatible with the character and doctrines of the divine founter of Christianity. As t the sympathy with great criminals which the press was constantly calling out against, he was convinced that the public did not sympathise with the criminal, but with the man. There would ever be greater sympathy with a person whose life was about to become extinct—whose life was, at the time of such sympathy, possessed, and shortly to be extinguished by th s hangman—than with the unfortunate man whose life had already been taken away. (Hear.) It was the humanity of society which was constantly protesting against death punishment. (Hear.) Abolish capital punishment, and substitute anything, however severe, for it, and the " morbid sympathy" complained of would die away at once.—Mr. SINES contended that crime had increased since the amelioration of the criminal code, and quoted from the last return made Di the Heine-office to show that the crime of rape had very greatly iuereased since it had ceased to be a capital offence. The speaker proceeded to contend that it had not been sufficiently proved that society would be safe if capital punishment was abolished.—Mr.