Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON HANGINGS. Life for a life ! life for a life ! Is bench and pulpit preaching— But, death by bullet, rope, or knife, Is strangely heathen teaching ; For if to stop a mortal's breath Be horrid murder reckoned, To add to that another death Is surely murder second. What right has man to say to man— "A fortnight for contrition, And then, with all the haste we can, We'll launch you to perdition?" 'Twere better far—it seems to me— More Christian and more thorough, To say that he'd imprisoned be To spend his life in sorrow. ON HANGINGS. 43 If 'tis for punishment on earth,— A life in prison spending, Were sentence of far greater worth, Than speeding on life's ending : And if for punishment in hell,— Ere from the clay 'tis riven, Why with your priests invade the cell, To preen a soul for heaven ? Small chance is there, when all within Is surging agitation, To change a life-long course of sin, And work a soul's salvation : For who the difference fine could trace 'Tween terror and repentance, When glowering in death's grizzly face Beneath a hanging sentence ? I speak not of the widespread harm Called " warning the defaulters,' Of swinging men at gallows' arm, Like soulless brutes in halters ; The dreadful drop, the hooded head— The same for man or woman !— Were fitter for a nation bred In savagery inhuman. That guiltless men have died, we know, Our hanging system under ; And why we still a-hanging go, Is matter for much wonder : 'Twere better that ten guilty wights Should 'scape, remorse to cherish, Than that, beneath the hangman's rites, One innocent should perish. The Power that gave the vital spark, 'Tis He alone should quench it; No other hand should stab the mark, Or from its ...