THE DEATH SENTENCE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 23, 28 January 1911, Page 12

THE DEATH SENTENCE.

MR. A. C. BENSO-N'S PROTEST. In a letter to The Times Mr. A. 0. Benson, son of the late Archbishop Benson and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, makes a protest against "an act of such grim and repulsive brutality as an execution by hanging is bound to be." "Now that the dreadful and tragio case of Dr. Crippen is finally closed," he says, "a case which, it is horrible to reflect, has given to thousands of people the keenest excitement, and, I venture to add, enjoyment, may I say a few words to deprecate the hideous drama which has been enacted since the unhappy man's condemnation ? "No one in the world who has any touch of compassion aud humanity can have regarded Without a sense of horror the dreadful prolongation of the frightful business, or reflected unmoved upon the ghastly alternations of hope and despair, and the hideous anticipation of the last shocking moment, with all its publicity, its sickening mechanical details. "I caflhot help thinking that at all events a Condemned irtan should be able to choose both the time, within a fixed limit, and the -manner of his death; and that the resources of medical science should be employed to make that death as swift, as quiet, and as painless as possible. If a prisoner in the solitude of his cell might be allowed to swallow a potion, or be done to death by an anaesthetic, death would at least have some touch of privacy and decorum about it. But the av/f ul ceremony and the disgusting apparatus of violent death seem to me utterly barbarous and mediaeval. "I wish I could feel that the compassion and generosity and dignity of all just and kind English hearts would find such expression as would make it possible for a thing so ihhuman, so disgraceful, and so ghastly to be relegated once and for all to the class of horrors with which society has bravely and wholesomely dispensed."

He— Why does the maid deolino to clean my coat with benzine? She — Since tho chauffeur jilted her she can't stand the smell of it.