THE EXECUTION OF THE MANNINGS. (From the Times, October 14.)

New Zealander, Volume 5, Issue 411, 23 March 1850, Page 3

THE EXECUTION OF THE MANNINGS. (From the Times, October 14.)

Yesterday ths metropolis witnessed the most awful act whiah the ntcessitiei of justice or of self-preserva-tion can impose on a sovereign State. We performed an act of judicial slaughter. Dreadful as the circumstances of capital punishment always must be, revolting as are iti details, and beyond all former example the horrors both of the crime and the closing Bcene in this instance, yet they are all toleiable compared with the thoughts suggested by a too curious icrutiny. Through its constituted organs the whole people yesterday cut short the visible being and the moral course of two miserable creatures, born with immoital boui Bj

doubtless once innocent and loving, with the hidden o-erms of the highest virtue and the loftiest attainments, yet both were cast out, as it were, on the dunghill, and the •' particle of divinity" within them sent we know not where, quivering and fleeting on its unknown journey to the procure of Him that gave it. One might almost take rcluge in the odious spectacle from the overwhelming responsibility of the act, and conBult peace of rniud by a Mind faith in the Executive, and its sati ed vocation. The most morbid conscience, however, will derive some consolation from the unfreqnency of these scenes. It is not thirty yean since one might walk out any Monday morning before breakfast, and see half a dozen poor wretches dying the death of dogs for petty thefts committed in hunger, or trifling injuries done in a diunken affray. Capital punishment is no lonser the normal award for a legal crime, not even for ordinary mmder, but the mark bj which we designate what is portentous and horrible. When deeds have beon committed that would seem to pollute the earth, then we purge the land, and hang up the guilty anthoi 8 before the nun in the sight of God and the people. While even? circumstance of horror and atrocity is accumulated in this crime, it seems to silence all doubt as to its punishment by the examples to which it natuiully directs v*. It) the almost sacred antiquities of our own n.it.onal annals, as we read them in the inspired pageb of our great dramatist, there is just such an instance. Had M.nia Manning been possessed with the insane thought of following Lady Macbe'h in her insatiable cupidity and ambition, in her atrocious conceptions, her undaunted soul and her unflinching nerve ; in her dominion over a sottibh and a cowaidly husband, in her tieachciy to her guest, in the complacency with which she could behold her victim, in the rigour with which she could smite him '• as an ox in the shambles," and perhaps also in the steadiness with which she could encounter her doom, she could not have played her pfirt with truer feelings of its character. The revelations of thii case, especially if we may trust the confessions of him who was the " weaker vessel" of the two, add probability to the tradition, and prove how truely Shakespete could describe, and how little he exaggerated. Maria Manning (Urgged both her victim and her tool for weeks together. The giave was dug a month before, and ihown with a sort of secret triumph to its futuie occupant. All that time she daily counted the gains of the speculation. That no happy characteristic or timely adornment might be wanting to the deed, the scrip and bhares of familiar railway lines aie mixed with the transaction; brokers are brought into the witness box, who testify in the same breath to the signature of the accused and the depreciation of shares. Mrs. Manning made hane to slay her man, and realizet for the murket was falling. Herself intriguing and jealous, shs played on the vanity and the desultory passions of a male flirt by promising him a meeting with a fair young stranger at her table. With the UBU.»I ascendency of unscrupulous wickedness she made a lodger, who waa all but a stranger, write falsehoods at her ready dictation. Such is Lady Macbeth on the Bermondsey stage. As for the thing who wai her husband, but not a man, one hardly ventures to speak of him, lest we should make him out too base even for punishment ; but no reality or fiction can equal what he tells Us of himself. He found O'Connor moaning upon his grave, whereon he had fallen. " I never liked him well, and I battered in his skull with a ripping chisel." So for a wife whom he did not love lie battered in the skull of a poor moaning wretch whom he did not like well. No wonder he could not sleep in the house when his wife had gone. Yet Le could " rise and take possession." Shakespeare's is not the only page illustrated from the native horrors of a little street in the lowest of our suburbs. It is Ahab and Jezebel to the life ;— Jezebel the daring foreigner, and profane unbeliever, as Maria Manning now seems to have been ; the ready arguer, the greedy aggrandizer, the forger, the intriguer, the resolute, the painted and attired, even unto death. When we think of that tremendous chapter in the Inspired history of Providence, we may conclude it no unwarrantable presumption in a Christian people, and a ruler that beareth the sword, not in vain to make this wretched pair walk over their own graves to their doom, even as they had (jone by their victim. K. great novelist, whose knowledge of the human heart and its wot kings under the infinite varieties and accidents of modern life, needs not our praise, has sent us a letter describing his impressions on witnessing the execution. His language excites our admiration, but not our surprise. The scene is doubtle»s the most horrid, and apparently the most hardening, that c«n be imagined. We are not prepared, however, to follow Mr. Dickens to hn conclusion. It appears to us a matter of necessity that so tremendous an act as a national homicide should be publicly as well as solemnly done. Popular jealousy demands it, Were it otherwise, the mass of people would never be sure that great offenders were really executed, ot that the humbler class of criminals were not executed in greater numbers than the State choose to confess. The mystery of the prison walls would be intolerable, for, besides mere curiosity, popular indignation would ask to see or learn the details of the punishment, and the fact of its ignominious character, and the bearing of the criminals. Nor do we think it altogether fair to infer the real feelings, much less the abiding impression, of the spectators, from the bonil, hystericle mirth produced by a night's exposure, an immense crowd, and a long «us> ponded expectation. Fuw of us ever chose to confess deep emotion, and men often hide the deepest feelings with the wildest excesses of manner and of language. They who would bury themselves under the earth if they could, when they cannot escape the public eye, will sometimes belie their mental struggles by the most frantic exaggerations. Hamlet was never so m.id as over the grave of Ophelia when the scene recalled all his' natural melancholy, all the miseries of his life, and the honors of his pielernatural minion. In the rude multitude yesterday congregated before Horse-monger-lane Gaol, there jnight he no nearer approach to Hamlet than Mr. Dickens himself, yet what we say is true of the gieat majority of minds, and not lees true of the most undisciplined.

To the Editor of the Times. Sir,— l was a witness of the execution at Horse mongei-lane tbii morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities for doing so, at intervals all through the night, and continuously from day* break till after the spectacle was over. I do not address you on the tubject with any intention of discussing the abstract question of cnpital punishment, or any of the arguments of its opponents or advocates, i simply wish to turn this dieadful experience to some account for the general good, by taking the readiest and moit pubUc means of iidvprting to an intimnvioa given by Sir G. Grey, in the last seision of Parliament, that the Gcvo-nment might be induced to giic its suppoii to a measu.e, making the infliction of capital punis'imcnt a piivate solemnity within the prison wulls (with such pnurantees for the last sentence of the law being u.exoiably and eurely'adniinii*

tered ns should be satisfactory to the public at large), and of most earnestly beseeching Sir G. Grey, as a Eolemn duty which he owes to society, and a respon* sibility which he cannot for ever put away, to originate such a legislative cbaDge himself. I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful ns the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched muideivrs to it, j faded in my mind before the atrocious beaiing, looks, and language, of the assembled spectators. Vlfiien 1 came upon the scene at midnight the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to 1 time, denoting that they came from a concoune of boys and girli already assembled in the belt places made my blood run cold. As As the night went on, screeching and laughmg, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on Negro melodies, with substitutions of " Mrs. Manning" for "Susannah," and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, save a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly— as it did,— it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had caused to feel abhamed ot the face he wore, and xo hrink from himself, as fashioned in the imaue of the Devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, or more pily, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and ihere were no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts, I have seen, habitually, some of the worst lources of general contamination and corruption in this couutry, and I think there are not many phases in London life that could surprise me. lam solemnly convinted that nothing that ingenuity could deviSe to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work •Uflh ruin as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralisation as was enacted this morning outside Horsemonger-lane Gaol ii preseuted at the very doors of good citizens, and is passed by unknown or forgotten. And when, in our prayers and thanksgivings for the season, we are humbly expressing before God our desire to remove the moral evils of the land, I would a»k your readers to consider whether it is not a time to think of this one, and to root it out. I am, Sir, your faithful servant, Charles Dickens. Devoushire.terrace, Tuesday, Nov. \3.

Roman Catholic Church — The Roman Catholic mission in New Zealand bat been formed into a regular establishment. The Right Rev. Dr. Pompallier, who formerly held the office of vicar Aposiolic, with jurisdiction over the whole of the Islands of New Zealand, has received a papal bull appointing him Bishop of Auckland, and the Right Rev. Dr. Viard, who ii at present the head of the Roman Catholic mission there, has received a similar bull, conferring upon him the dignity of Bishop of Wellington. Neither of those Bishops, we believe, is to have any jurisdiction over the other, but both are to be regarded as suffragans, and it is therefore probable that the two new seci will ere long be included within the archipiscopal pi evince of the Most Rev. Dr. Folding. Bishop Pompaher has brought a number of priests with him from Europe, but no final arrangement has yet been made as to where these gentlemen are to be stationed. He is likewise accompanied by several Sisters of Mercy, who ore to form the nu--cleus of an establishment for the education of the poor, and the dissemination of charity throughout the islands. —Sydney Herald.