ABSTRACT
Hath any one of our readers beheld, with unmingled pity and horror, the paraphernalia of a state murder – hath he looked with unsparing eye, on the formality, and heartless manoeuvring, characteristic of royalist government assassins, about to carry into effect the last awful sentence – pronounced on an erring, but it may be, an honest culprit, who hath, by the wisdom of our ancestors and the legality of modern “justice,” been doomed to die? If so, hath he felt with the keen pang of one who can look with sympathy on the misguided actions of a weak mortal about to be hurried into eternity, for an offence which the philanthropic proves to be rather an error of frail humanity than a predetermined crime?
