The Sun. — 1860-04-10 (London, England)

PETTED MURDERERS.  In referring to the proceedings preliminary to the execution at Bedford of Joseph Castle, for the murder of hiS wife, the Hertford Mercury says . We publish the details for the purpose of entering our protest against the treatment which this profoundly egotistical murderer experienced at the hands of those in whose custody he was placed. It is long since we have read anything so thoroughly disgusting as the record of the daily life of this petted inmate of a condemned cell. We have always been opponents of the punishment of death, on the ground that it is unauthorised, brutal, brutalising, useless ; but if we had ever looked with favour on the gallows as a social defence or a moral teacher, our faith in its efficacy would have been shattered by the arguments which are presented in the treatment of Castle. Here was a man convicted of the murder of his wife under circumstances of extreme atrocity. The crime was not the result of sudden passion ; the murdered woman was not struck down by an angry blow, which did injury beyorpl the inlen t of him who delivered it, nor was the crime regretted. The murder was deliberate, premeditated ; and from the time of its commission to the last moment of life the law allowed him the murderer had no thought except for himself. While he had yet days to live, he was only intent on what he should eat and drink, and selfishly and morosely sensitive if the pleasures his sensual appetite demanded were not furnished on the instant, and without objection. Even when his sands were nearly run out, and while the hammer was yet ringing upon the bolts ' of the gallows, he was solicitous only about himself. He had no regrets, and experienced no repentance, so far as the report discloses. For his wife, sleeping the sleep of death in the bloody shroud he had wrought for her with guilty hands, he had no sorrow. She seems rarely to have occurred to his mind ; and the heinousness of his guilt appears to have been wholly unfelt. He grew restless towards the last, but gave utterance to the language of terror rather than of grief and self-abasement. But this phase passed away, and when the hour appointed for the execution drew so near that the unexpired minutes might be easily counted, and the decent feeling of the officials suggested that the man who was appointed to die should be aroused from his slumbers to confront the awfulness of his position— the murderer petitioned for a little more sleep, which "he thought would ease his mind." It is not for us to question that in his latest moments better thoughts were given to him ; or that hope, who never bars her golden gates, opened them to him in his extremity—if perchance the self-seeking roan, in the dread tumult of the death-hour, sought peace through repentance. Our object is—without repeating the recital which appears elsewhere— to indicate the fact that throughout his imprisonment and after his condemnation, Castle was brutally sensual, and selfishly indifferent to everything except the gratification of his appetite, and to his own personal danger; and that it was upon this man the officials of the gaol lavished their sympathy and regards in such a manner as to make condemnation to death rather a thing to be desired than avoided by that class of morbid egotists which furnishes us with murderers and suicides. It naturally suggests itself to one's mind as most proper in the case of a murderer that, after his condemnation, whether he be sentenced to be hung or to be imprisoned, as little notice should be taken of him as possible. He should receive the prison allowance of food, and the visits of the chaplain. For all else he had better be kept out of sight and out of mind. It is utterly revolting that a man convicted of the worst of crimes should be feasted and petted till his mind is overwhelmed with a sense of his own importance. There is no conceivable reason why we should feel more interest in the murderer than in the pickpocket, whom we relentlessly consign to hard fare, the treadwhcel, and forgetfulness—really nothing, except the fact that he is doomed to die. That probably is the explanation, and in itself constitutes a strong argument against a punishment which dcvelopes, even in a gaoler, the kind of sympathy which boardingschool girls used to feel for the villains of the sickly romances they read. But while the penalty of death remains, let us summon to our assistance enough of common sense, if not of hardness, to carry the law into effect with as much dignity and decency as is possible under the circumstances. Let us cease to fatten murderers for the gallows as oxen for market the and to conciliate their humours by giving them option of roast fowl, or beef and plum pudding. Justice should be stern, though not cruel; and she makes one doubt whether she be not a counterfeit when she unites the functions of the restaurateur with those of the executioner. Certainly much harm is done by the imprudent sympathy of her ministers for those whom she has doomed to die the death ; and perhaps the Beechwood tragedy, so closely following on the heels of the disclosures of the discipline observed in the county gaol at Bedford, may to some extent have been caused by them. To desperate men, foiled in their unlawful pursuits and with the fear of a renewal of vulgar imprisonment before, them, the honours accorded to Castle, and the observation concentrated upon him, may have been too powerful a provocative to crime, which being as heinous, and to a similar titling them to equal indulgence might be regarded as enovation.  M. Philip Taglioni, the author of many ballets applauded by the Parisians, and father of the celebrated danseuse, has recently, notwithstanding his advanced age of 83, undergone the operation of couching for cataract. On the third day after, on removing the bandages, the patient had the happiness of again beholding the countenance of his daughter,