Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1911. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.
There are not a few in New Zealand who regard capital punishment as a brutal and totally unjustifiable process of expiating crime. The late Count Tolstoi looked upon it as barbarous, and in. Continental countries a strong movement has grown up in favour of the abolition of the •gallows. Mr A. C. Benson, a son of the late Archbishop Benson, recently published in the London Times a vigorous protest against the grimness and repulsiveness of hanging; "Now that the dreadful and tragic case of Dr Crippen is 'finally closed," he says, "a 1 case which, it is,.horrible to reflect, has given to thousands of peopleythe keenest excitement, and, I venture to add, en-? joyment, 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 and humanity can have regarded without a sense: of: horror: the dreadful prolongation of the frightful business, or reflected un-
' moved 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 cannot help thinking that at all events a condemned man 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 awful 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 pos:sibie for a thing- soj'jhhuman, 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." ,
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Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10146, 24 January 1911, Page 4
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363Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1911. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10146, 24 January 1911, Page 4
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