the pity of other men will not reach; we only degrade the general tone of manners in going down to improve them. They are enemies to life, outcasts to the first law of nature, deniers of the privilege of breathing, spoilers of the organs of existence and continuance, The universal voice of humanity says, "Away with them!"

Moreover, the same profound abhorrence of such wretches, which makes it necessary for the living to put them away, requires also that they should be deprived of life in some ignominious mode, some form of death which shall express that they have placed themselves without the pale of humanity, and are to be treated as aliens to the race. This is necessary, because the crimes which they have committed are so unspeakably pernicious, it is proper that the whole force of the human character should be exerted to prevent their recurrence. The reason should condemn them, the fancy recoil from them, and the pride scorn them. All that can spring from the deepest determination to wipe out such stains from humanity, or express the universal strong disgust which they inspire, should be brought to bear against them. Mankind are bound to affect towards them the manners of loathing and horror.

To affect, we say, for we are all aware that we are such weakly organized creatures, it is more owing to circumstances than to original difference in power of control that we do not ourselves fall away into crimes. One feeling, therefore, with which we regard our fellow-men who have rendered themselves dangerous to life, is that of compassion. The blood stills in our veins as we look at them; if they are of those that we have known, our tears flow fast for them. "The pity of it" almost persuades justice to break her sword. But to yield to these feelings is to yield to death. We must strive (for it is best for the health both of our body and soul that we should do so) to feel as if it were far beyond the limit of possibility that we ourselves could be tempted to become spoilers or destroyers. We should steel ourselves against pity as we should against grief for the dead; both are natural impulses, but "that way madness lies; let us shun that." Or to take another sentence from the same speech of Lear:

"When the greater malady is fixed, The lesser is scarce felt. Thou'dst shun a bear.

But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea,

Thou'dst meet the bear i' the mouth."

If we familiarize our hearts to compassion for murderers, we learn to palliate the crime, and are more likely to become such ourselves--to say nothing of the unquietness thereby forced upon us by the added sense of insecurity. Both these and every effect of encouraging this natural weakness tends directly against life-against simple naked life. And how much more against the refined life, the tranquil freedom, gladdened by homefelt delights, the pleasures of intercourse, contemplation, and the beautiful arts! It is plain that the bear must be met "i' the mouth." We must overcome sympathy for what is directly against life. Hence the same considerations which have been urged as showing the necessity of keeping up the distinctions of manners in social intercourse apply here with the strongest force. It has been shown that the best mode of bettering others with the least inconvenience to ourselves requires that we should keep in our station, and elevate them by example. But when we come to killing, the series ends. We cannot better killers, because it is too great an inconvenience to have them about us. In other words, the lowest form of existence, mere Life, is bound to preserve its elevation, and not communicate with Death. It is enough to tolerate maiming and wounding on the same level with life, that is, the common orb; but to manifest towards murder any other feeling than is implied by putting the committer of it out of the way in some ignominious mode, is yielding too far in those who would keep alive to those who would make dead; it is an extension of levelling which amounts to social suicide.

But there are always in every society plenty who from ignorance, self-confidence, or other infirmities, are constantly, with no consciousness of a bad purpose, lowering the standard of refinement. Indeed, with our best endeavors we all come far short of what we can fancy of true greatness. The world wears upon our nerves, and breaks us continually down, so that the great poets, artists, and scholars have much ado to keep us above the low forms of sensual enjoyment. And it is upon

these extreme limits of the social scale, where the line must be drawn with so much boldness and firmness that all who are of sound mind may see it, that the general downward tendencies most universally fasten. That men should be sent to prison for stealing moves the sympathies of but a small class; the crime is so common that the majority have often suffered from it, and the treatment due to it (the manners of honesty towards dishonesty) seems none too severe. But when a man is hung like a dog for a crime which touches not one family out of thousands, the sympathies of a larger number prompt them to exclaim at once against the severity of the punishment. They do not consider the nature of the crime, the measure of its guilt, or the consequences it involves. There are not a few who hold the blessing of life so cheaply, that they are willing to go down and cast pearls before assassins and ravishers. They would have creatures men shudder to think of kept among us to breathe this air of summer, and walk upright beneath this blue canopy as if mankind were composed of isolated individuals, each of whom was omniscient and capable of restoring the dead to life. For the extension by society of these privileges to such criminals involves the assumption of no less powers.

But we are considering the subject only in a single point of view. After what we have above remarked respecting the necessity of affecting towards crimes which touch life, manners which express the most extreme aversion and horror of which the mind can conceive, we must not here rehearse and argue against the common views of pitiers of the hanged or to be hanged, since if the considerations we have urged do not sufficiently instruct them upon the point, it were better that we should leave them to other teachers. We need but remark how very much temptation there is to yield to the impulse of pity when the punishment is so severe; and then it will be quite enough for us to propose a means of lessening this temptation so far as regards the compassion excited by the fancied pain of strangulation.

The office of Jack Ketch is, as it should be, little envied; Heaven forbid that we should write a line tending to render it a whit more desirable. Still, it has its de

grees, and if any one's relatives or friends were sentenced to be hanged, he might be excused for preferring to have the criminal suffer under the hands of an experienced artist, rather than undergo unnecessary torture from those of a bungler. So far sympathy might lawfully extend. Suppose, gentle reader, our political opponents were to suffer (as some of them appear to deserve,) (and plainly it would be better for the country that they should)-it would be well when 'twere done it were done quickly; and to that end we might cheerfully, in the delay which would be necessary for their repentance, subscribe and import an operator from Tyburn. Still, it would not be well to have the punishment of death inflicted with too much apparent kindness, or with any the less ignominious accompaniments than those which surround it already. The object should be to make it not only death, but death abhorred and despicable.

But must it be made more painful than is absolutely necessary? If so, at what limit must the infliction of pain cease? The answer will be, at just that which is required to render the death fearful and shameful. But is not the apprehension sufficiently terrible, coming in the midst of life, and surrounded with all that is revolting? That this is the received opinion in the present state of manners need not be argued. It is conceded to irrepressible pity that the greatest criminals should be hanged as kindly as possible.

But we have often thought what a horrible moment must intervene between the cutting of the rope, which the criminal cannot but hear, and the dislocation of his cervical vertebræ. The time is long enough for him to say in words-" I hear the axe; I am going!" of pure mental torture. Those who know how much suffering can be compressed into such a brief instant, may be pardoned for wishing both to save him the agony, and deprive those who have the bad manners to argue against the death penalty, of one suggestion by which they operate on the nerves of others. If there can be any mode devised which shall spare the death-sentenced this moment, the bare imagining of which makes the seated heart knock at the ribs

66 Against the use of Nature,"

and which shall also leave the execution all its infamy, then certainly (or at least so far as concerns the considerations derived from manners) it ought to be immediately applied in practice.

Either so, or we should hang them up in rough old fashion, steeling our nerves against pity with the insensibility which characterized the time when gibbeted skeletons shook their chains on every common and lonely highway in merry England. But though that was an age of much health and strong sense, it was not a time of general refinement, either in mind or manners. Or at least, it would hardly be thought a change for the better, were society now to relapse into what it was in the days of Smollett and Fielding, or even a period considerably later. That we have grow more sensitive in some respects does not prove that the age is degenerate or effeminate. In a word, with all respect for the simple vigor of the olden time, one may now cease to venerate all their usages, and consider what they would have done, situated as we are.

-a journey which some of the very spectators of his exit may envy him the privilege of making so soon. All that is left of him is a senseless carcass, which it is fittest should be used for the advancement of a science whose object it is to save life and mitigate pain.

It seems that this could be accomplished with all the manifestations of abhorrence which it is necessary for the health and refinement of society to maintain towards the most heinous crimes. All might be the same as now, except such a contrivance that the criminal might be seated ere drawn up to the beam. As for the actual pain of death, the present mode is little more awful, save in the horrid instant preceding it, which is not physical but mental torture. The prevailing opinion among the medical profession is, that the pain of dying is mere loss of consciousness, which those who faint easily have often experienced. A gentle loss of consciousness against a sudden one is all the difference between an easy and a violent death. The pain of hanging, or probably the worst tortures, is nothing to what is undergone in fevers.

If we have a right to hang a man at noon-day on the 15th of September, then it follows that we have a right to give him CHLOROFORM at noon-day, and hang him immediately afterwards, while under its operation. The time that his soul is in abeyance, neither dead nor alive, is so inconsiderable that it need not be taken into account. On that score, therefore, there can be no objection.

By this means we avoid for him, not only the pain of the actual killing, but the agonizing instant of certain apprehension. The sponge is applied to his nostrils, and all that he is aware of is, that he sinks calmly (perforce) into a sleep, out of which he is to awaken on the other shore of the river of death; in

"The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveller returns ;"

petition in the Liturgy, to be delivered "from sudden death;" and it seems a shame to deprive a fellow-being of life, however necessary it may be to do so, and howsoever just his doom, by a mode which we instinctively desire to be delivered from, when we have another at our command. We surely ought to have more compassion for the worst of men than for a dog; and any of our readers who reciprocates the attachment of one of those affectionate creatures, if he should be obliged to destroy him, would hardly deny poor Tray a few sniffs of the magical ether. If he would, he ought not to have a dog of any kind; and a man unworthy the esteem of such large-hearted creatures as Maida or Bevis, never ought to have his fire-side graced by the presence of a Charlotte or an Alice.

Moreover, the necessity of preserving social health, which demands the penalty of death for sinners against life, demands also that the penalty be inflicted with no avoidable torture, either bodily or mental, The infliction of any such torture is unkind.

THE biography of the public man who has sought rather to be useful than to be voiced in the popular din or in party excitements, is, for the greater part, to be read in quiet measures, a regular policy, laws too soberly cast to beget a strife; and not in those things of agitation, to have borne a part in which, enables men to serve themselves, but seldom to accomplish any good for others. The fame of civil life seems, in truth, to spring best out of those questions which have been barren of everything but contention; and it is rather the public passions than the public services of the day which bestow reputation and power on the living politician. Herein Renown would seem, for the time, as ill-judging as Fortune herself: falsely, however; for if the politician of the hour's passion win the noisier, the legislator achieves the more durable name; and, writing it deeply upon the permanent form of things--upon systems which, besides that they preserve themselves, the nation will not let die-cannot well be forgotten. Anticipating all this--as it is the good task of cotemporary history to do, when it can-we are about to give such memorials as we have been able to collect of the life of a living man, whose long public labors have been as useful as they were little ambitious; and who will live as much in certain lasting parts of our public policy as others have vainly attempted to do in contentions, the eager but short-lived memory of which, fades continually before fresher ones, themselves, happily, soon to be forgotten in their turn, however much each, for the moment, imagines that it is long to fill the world's eye and be its wonder.

SAMUEL FINLEY VINTON was born at South Hadley, Massachusetts, on the 25th September, 1792. His parents were of that excellent class, the upper yeomanry of New England, whose intelligence, whose morality, whose religious habits, whose industry and thrift make them a population not equalled by any in the world, except the Scottish and Swiss; whom they

greatly resemble and perhaps exceed, in the characteristics which are common to them all. He was the eldest of many children; his father a substantial farmer, at ease in his "circumstances, as far as they can be whose ease is the gift of frugality and personal toil.

We do not learn what the youth's earlier education was; but it was, no doubt, that of his condition-nay, of nearly all conditions in New England at that timethe education, we mean, of the old Common School, that admirable popular system which has bred up lawyers, physicians and merchants, for so large a portion of this Union. We need hardly add that the system is one eminently practical, eminently adapted to the wants of New England; if it were not practical, she, the least fanciful of countries, would long since have done with it; if not what she wanted, she would soon have had what she did want.

Whether, however, that there the prevailing competency bestowed on nearly all by universal thrift and the extreme subdivision of the land, be narrow, or that the habits of the people enforce upon all, from childhood, a participation in bodily labor, it is certain that this system of schooling mixes with itself long and frequent intervals of work on the farm or at the trade. Which is to be considered the vacation, we of a Southern region cannot well judge. We may imagine, only, that it is the book or the field, according as the pupil's muscle or brain predominates and invites him to this or to that. At any event, the institution must afford a sort of Spartan holiday, where the discipline at home was purposely so secure that an actual campaign appeared to the youth a relaxation.

Of a frame originally feeble, young Vinton did not well support, though always full of industry and prompt to every duty, the fatigue and exposure of rural toil in that rigorous climate, and upon that illiberal soil. Though he shared, up to his sixteenth year, his father's occupations, he was evidently unfit to make them the suc