The Express. — 1850-07-15 (London, England)

DONOVAN. Ile began life as a pugilist—was, throughout his career, a low drunkard (though, according to hie brother's evidence at the inquest, a quiet and honest man when sober), and showed in his brutal behaviour towards his wife, that oebased state of moral feeling which is the most disheartening result of protra debauchery. Yet this man, bru'e as he undoubtedly was, as regards all moral sentiment, deliberately preferred the halter to the hulks. It is clear, therefore, that Norfolk Island had more terrors for him than the scaffold of the old Bailey. These two melancholy instances rmy well induce those gentlemen who side with Sir GEORGE GREY to reconsider their verdict on capital punishment. The rules of oar prison', which expressly guard against , suicide; which enjoin the removal of all instruments that may enable convicts to commit self murder, sad compel the vigilant supervision of the turnkeys, are only so many powerful arguments against the scaffold. That men fear death only as children are afraid to go in the dark, is one of the wisest sentences that Lord Ream penned. The experience of a thousand years goes to prove that there are many fears which master and overwhelm that of death. Perpetual solitude, irrevocable shame, life-long slavery, have greater terrors for most men than that mystery which hangs over all, whether criminal or I saint. Oar religion would teach us to regard the closing passage of our lives with gladness; our laws would paint that final hour only as the malefactor's heaviest doom. What says the malefactor in reply ? The scenes of the scaffold will remind us. He mounts the steps, for the most part, firmly. He is told to !fellers that he is going before a tribunal infinitely more merciful than that which ham doomed him to die ; he believes the teacher, and resigns himself quietly to his fate. Nineteen times out of twenty the world doses upon the doomed murderer in this fashion. In the prison he is regarded in the light ef a martyr. His crime is forgotten in the awe attending his doom. In the eyes of his fellow-prisoners, the halter has sanctified his memory : be is no longer a vulgar felon. The frequent attempts at suicide which may be set down in the history of our prisons (and a return of which would be a most useful and powerful document in the hands of the abolitionists) have not boa noticed in their true light. The lesson they should have taught has not been conned. No particular isterest has hitherto attached to these hapless suicides. Just as it is necessary that a person of distinction should have suffered by some abuse or some dangerous habit, before we may reasonably expect the remoral of that abase, or that a check will be put upon that habit, so in this instance gaol suicides have not excited the attention of the legislature, because no criminal of mark has yet been numbered with them. But now that two criminals have lain violent hands upon themselves within A hours of each other, and that one of them was a fallen gentleman, perhaps the import of these examples may suggest itself to the houses of parliament. They teach nothing if net,l that a sense of shame, a fear of degraded labour and rigid confinement, are as repulsive to the criminal mind, as the premature consummation of the mimes end of all of us. All who would approach this terrible phase of criminal experience must be prepared to thro w aside those prejudices of society whM have set the criminal apart from his fellows, as a Greaten who has nothing in common with the rest el mankind. They must rather be prepared to admit with Dr. JOHNSON and the good BOZZHAAVE, that they have never met with a crime which they might net commit themselves=—that is to say, that they are sensible of a common nature, with even the most abject of their fellow-creatures. This benevolent view of guilt more merely =ducts to a tree theory