PUNISHMENT OF DEATH.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 1123, 27 July 1865, Page 6

PUNISHMENT OF DEATH.

(To the Editor of the Uaily Times)

Sic—l beg, with your permission, to redeem the promise I made to answer several of the arguments of your correspondents who differed with me concerning the convict Whitehead's case. I need not, now that his sentence has been commuted hf the Governor, allude farther to it than i to say, I did not found a plea for him on any other ground than this—that the circumstances of his crime shewed that he had not betn guilty of a cold-blobded premeditated murder, and that the fatal blow had been struck in a moment of irritation orphrensy. I do not justify his conduct at all, but I maintain-that if the punishment of death, ia. to be retained, it should only be carried,out'on criminals guilty of atrocious murder, and not on a man whose act rather bordered on manslaughter than muider, and whose crime .will be sufficietly atoned for to society by a life•long imprisonment. I thinly no line of argument absurd but one. Every man has a right to his own opinion; and, as truth has many sides, it 6f{en happens that grains of the precious metal may be found on both fides of a question. On that account, I accord to every opponent toleration for his statements, and I respect a man for holding by convictions which are the result of his own idosyncrasy. We are all digging for the truth, and while some are more fortunate than others in securing a large- nugget, there are smaller scales scattered, abroad in the understanding of eix-ry honest wellconditioned thinker, which it is profitable to have brought to the surface. What would we say to our mincrs, : if instead o/ pursuing their, laborious avocation, a mutual nelp to each other, they forgot the main object of their pursuit, and spent half their day in personally reviling one another. Tliis is the style of argument I think absurd. It is very ea«y to charge your opponent with personalities, or to taunt him with weakness, fake philantbrophy, morbid sentimentality, ignorance, hypocrisy, and such like qualities; but that is no argument. A Billingsgate heroine can outcry the best of us in such a style; and I daresaj' the llesident Magistrate could fell us of several who have come before him who could match any one in vituperation, or epithetical controversy. It required the genius of O'Connell to silence a virago, by calling her a 41 hypothenuse." Let me then suggest that, in this and all other inquiries after the truth, correspondents should avoid consideration of the person who uses an argument, and confine themselves ai closely as possible to the question at issue, which must be either true or false, irrespective of the personal qualifications or position of the disputants. It is a sign of a bad case to abuse the plaintiff's attorney. On the main question involved in the recent correspondence, I avow myself as an advocate for the abolition of capital punishment. There may be, however, a fad expediency in certain conditions of society, which renders it necessary to take away life judicially. The safety of an army in war depends on its thorough subordination in all its parts. The disobedient or turbulent, or traitorous, must be summarily dealt with. So I admit, that occasionally in our social s'.ate, there may be circumstances which operate against the abolition of the punishment of death. Our Scottish ancestors hanged thousands for petty crimes, because they had no prisons to keep them in, or means to maintain prisoners there. A more enlightened ajre builds the prisons, and the sanguinary practice of past times is no longer known. Thus, while I admit there may be exceptional circumstances to which men must bow, I hold, nevertheless?, that it is a duty to obviate these, and to bring about the time when the punishment of death shall no longer be known. We must not cling to it a3 a perpetual necessity—an eternal truth. Abstractly, I am of opinion that capital punishment should be abolished, because— 1. Man has no ri^ht to take away what he cannot give or restore. Many innocent lives have been sacrificed through the imperfect decisions of fallible men. 2. The taking away of life is opposed to the fundamental principle of Christianity— love to man. Such a punishment cannot be said to reform a man, one of the great objects of punishment. It rather partakes of the character of revenge, and is, therefore, inconsistent with truth. 3. It is ineffectual to the end in view— the prevention of crime. If it had answered its pu/pose there never should have been a second criminal after the first was executed. 4. Society at large, through neglect or selfishness, or covetousnes, or imperfect social arrangements, or forgetfulness of duty, is the root and cause of many crimes. I have known young boys who,' by their ability, might have been ornaments of society, become degraded criminals from their being destitute and neglected orphans. We surround men with brutalisiug influences, and then if they commit crime, the natural result of such a condition, we' hang them. Two men were hanged in Linlithgowshire a few years ago for murder. They were colliers, ignorant and uneducated. They were paid their wages on a Saturday night at a public house, where the greater part of their money was epent in bad whisky. 1 staggered home in a half-frantic state, overtook a man, and, without apparently any reason, killed him. They vrere executed. This is a type of many cases where it would be better to remove the predisposing causes thau to hang the unfortunate victims. The novelist says —The worst use you can put a man to is to hang him. If much crime has its origin in our defective social condition —if we thus become, as the Scotch say, art and part, by what logic can yßu justify the taking the life of any criminal ? These are reasons which weigh with me in looking at the Question. They may not appear so cogent to others, nor can I expect that generally the question will be looked at from my point of view. I cannot, on that account, rid myself of my faith. It is part of my being, and I must continue to act upon it, believing the day will come when the scaffold and its accessories will be things of the past; just as •we set* thumbikins, and other instruments of torture, preserved only as historical relics. The reasons also of the advocates of capital punishment appear to me to be urn sound. 1. "He deserves it," is the most corn-

mon reason. If we all got our desserts in this world, many would not see grey hairs who do. When Dr Johnson was told by the lady he was making love to that she had bad a near relative who was hanged, "Pooh! pooh!" said he, "never mind, I had fifty who deserved hanging." Let every one who uses rach a phrase look into his own heart, and like the honest old divine he will find cause rather to thank the grace of God that he has escaped the gillows than any inherent virtue of bis own. 2. "It is the law." Let us see what has been done in name of the law. Men and women during George the Third's reign were strung up at Tyburn by dozens at a time, for crimes now punished by a short imprisonment. I recollect of a man being executed in Edinburgh for a robbery in which be got a few pence, and of a letter carrier hanged for stealing from a letter. Until very recently theft by housebreaking inferred a capital sentence, and I have have had myself, as public prosecutor, in a Scotch county, to crave the Judge to restrict the sentence of the law in a case where a hen-house had been broken into and some fowls stolen 1 If I had not done so, sentence of death must have been pronounced. "It is the law" would justify det-ds we.look upon with horror. To kill a salmon in forbidden time, was at one time, for the third offence, capital. In the terse words of the Scots Act, the offender " shall tyne his Hie." Old women were hanged for witchcraft in Britain andFrancc. At Toulouse, 400 persons were executed for this in one day. Enough has been said to show that the law is undergoing a fi!ent process of amelioration, which it h our duty to foster every way we can. 3. "It is in the Scriptures." Many a bad practice has been sustained by Scriptural quotations. Slavery has had clot qucnt defenders in the pulpit, and the butchery of persons in cold blood has been suggested by sectarian preachers. In the Old Testament the two first recorded murders were not expiated by denth ; and the Great Teacher himself plainly abrogated the law of retaliation, which wns suitable and necessary for a ruder and more severe economy than the new dispensation now leavening the nations with truer and more expanded ideas of our relative duties. I will wind up by a word of authority. The Marquis of Beccaria, in his remarkable " Essay on Crimes and Punishments," strongly argues against the capital sentence being carried out in any case, denying the right, in fact, of Government so to punish; and maintaining, besides, that it is a less efficacious method of deterring others, than the continued example of a living culprit condemned, by labouring as a slave, to repair the injury he has done to society. These views are held by many enlightened philosophers and philanthropists at home, and I feel satisfied that, through their labours, the laiv, which has not yet attained perfection, will, by degrees, be made still more humane than it is. I am, &c, John Batugate.

BLOWING-UP OF A STEAMER ON THE MISSISSIPI, AND FEARFUL LOSS OF LIFE. The Boston Daily Evening Traveller gives the following account of a steamboat explosion on the Missisisipi, by which a loss of life has occurred, such as has never previously been known from a similar accident: — The accounts of the loss of fifteen hundred lives by the blowing-up of the'steamer Sultana, are the most terrible of anything of the kind ever known. The manner in which the soldiers have been crowded into old and dangerous steamers during the war has been fearful. And now, when there is not the necessity that then existed for hurrying them from place to place, no such crowding should have been permitted. It is stated on the authority of Mr Covode, of the War Committee, that the registered capacity of the Sultana was only for 376 passengers, and yet she had nearly 2200 oil, board. This occurred at a time when there were other good boats at Vicksburg, in which some of the paroled soldiers could have been sent home as well as not, but the authorities would not permit this. The Sultana had been in constant use for the last twelve years, and was probably worn out. At Vicksburg she was detained nearly thirty hours by the leaky condition of her boilers'but the officers seem to have taken the chances of getting through safely, and trusting their precious human freight to the doubtful calculation of the boilers holding out till they reached Cairo. The consequences were of the character ever likely to attend such incautiousness What renders this accident the more j lamentable is that the victims were men j who had escaped the perils of the battlefield, had survived the vicissitudes of prolonged captivity, and were indulging in bright visions of happy receptions at home. Life is held too cheaply in this country. Let us hope that with the close of this terrible war there may be an improvement in this respect. The Chicago Times says the accident occurred eight miles above Memphis, and there were 1958 paroled soldiers from the Andersonville prisons on board. ■ The accident occurred when all were asleep except the officers and employes of the boat. The boat had started out from Memphis one hour before, with only enough steam to propel her eight miles during the hour. The first mate, Wm. Kowberry—who, in company with six others, clung to a plank, from which they fell off before they were rescued, from exhaustion, and were drowned —describes the scene after the explosion as terrible in the extreme. He was standing in the pilothouse, and was blown into the river, where were struggling the living mass of drowning humanity, some with limbs broken, some scalded, over which scene the wreck, that immediately took fire, commenced to throw its ghastly glare. No succor was at hand, and only the best of swimmers, aided by fragments of the wreck, could hope to be saved. There were fifteen women on board, but two of whom are known to be saved. Some of the people were borne down as far as Memphis, this being the first intimation that reached that point. A yawl was sent out, and picked up seventeen. j Among the soldiers oa board were thirty-six commissioned officers. The! troops were of various regiments, buti belonged principally to Indiana and Illinois.