Page:The punishments of China.djvu/12

, possessed by representations of this nature, arise from the sensation of security, which they produce in those bosoms that heave upon a tract of the globe, where they are protected from being torn by lengthened agonies; where a person's innocence is not estimated by his mental or corporeal powers of enduring pain; where tyranny, fanaticism, or anarchy, cannot exercise their demoniacal propensities for cruelty; where capital punishment is only instituted and permitted as a necessary link in the chain of social order, to deter the evil-minded from committing outrages against their fellow-creatures, and to debar the offender from the power of perpetrating farther wrong. These intentions are fully answered by publicly depriving the malefactor of his existence, which is effected, in England, in a manner the most instantaneous and least sanguinary, that a compassionate people could adopt; and whose natural intrepidity is farther manifested by this attention to the pangs of suffering humanity.