on whether, in any other country
than England, a class of traders could be found corresponding with our
hawkers and bawlers of last dying speeches, who congregate with their
lying wares around the foot of the gallows, watchfully waiting for the
commencement of the death-struggle, to them the signal of commerce, and
then at the precise moment of horror, unanimously exploding from their
hoarse throats "a full, true, and particular account, for the small charge
of one half-penny." The meanest mud-lark in all Gaul, the infamous and
mal-odorous _chiffonier_ of Paris, would recoil with disgust from such a
species of traffic, the prevalence and prosperity of which at such a time
among the lowest orders of London, testify perhaps more than any other
single fact to the degraded state of the popular feeling in reference to
death-punishment by the hands of the hangman.

Second, to the influence of the hangman, and the scene in which he figures
in the production of a degrading and disgraceful estimate of the terrible
solemnities of justice, is that of the press. What the Old Bailey or the
Horsemonger-lane exhibition is to the uneducated spectator, the
broad-sheet is to the uneducated reader; and it requires no great
discrimination to recognize in the publication of every minute particular
of deeds of violence and bloodshed, looking to the avidity with which such
details are seized upon by the public, one of the most fruitful sources of
demoralization and crime. The wretched criminal whose language, looks, and
deportment are chronicled as matters of general importance, becomes first
an object of interest, then an idol to those of his own class. If, as we
know to be the case, men are led by the force of example to the commission
of suicide, why not of any other species of crime? If a fashion may spring
up, and prevail for a time, of leaping headlong from the top of a monument
or the parapet of a bridge through the publicity given to such acts by
means of the press, how shall the exploits of the felon or the assassin
escape imitation when made the subjects of a far more extensive and
pertinacious publicity, and paraded as they are before the world with all
the importance they can be made to assume? There can be no question but
that this practice of pandering to a morbid taste for a detestable species
of excitement results largely in engendering the very crimes which certain
public writers find it so profitable to detail at such length.