SIR,--As I once had the honour to drive you down to Parliament, and as I found you such an affable gentleman, with no pride at all in you (I say nothing about the sixpence you gave me over your fare), I make no bones at all in writing these few lines to you, about your motion for private hanging. I see by the newspapers that you want to make a law to hang inside of the gaol, in a snug and quiet way; and not to have the show in the open street. Pardon a cabman’s boldness, but really, Mr Milnes, you can’t have thought of the shocking consequence of your measure, if so be it had been carried out. What! make a law for private hanging! With one bit of parchment destroy what I’ll be bold enough to call one of the chief amusements of the people! Sir James Graham knows better than this; for he generally contrives to have an execution on Easter and Whit-Monday, just by the way of an early whet to the appetites of the holiday-makers. First the Old Bailey and then Greenwich; Mr Calcraft, the hangman--and then the fire-eater and the clown. Your bill, sir--do forgive my boldness--was very rash, and not at all just. They’ve taken away bear-baiting and duck-hunting and dog-fighting from what they call the lower orders, and now you’d deprive ’em of their last and dearest privilege--you’d, with one dash of the pen, rob ’em of their own public gallows! And you call yourself a friend of them people, Mr Milnes--a stickler for their ancient sports and pastimes? I don’t wonder that for once something like shame came over Parliament--that not forty conscientious members stopped to listen to you--and that, in a word, you were “counted out.” I have said your bill was unjust, shamefully unjust, unless you can prove to me that there was a clause in it to what they call indemnify the housekeepers in the Old Bailey for their loss of vested interests, seeing that they make no end of money by letting their windows at a popular hanging. Why, a Hocker’s worth any money to ’em; for it’s odd how hanging brings down the pride of some of the upper classes, many of the nobs enjoying it quite as much as the lower orders, only that they give one or two guineas--according to the beauty of the murder--for comfortable sitting room. If the men they call the six clerks were indemnified, surely you would not rob the tradesmen of the Old Bailey. But it really is shocking to see how a mere member of Parliament will set himself up against a clergyman of Newgate! Didn’t the Rev. Mr Davis preach that the whole use and beauty of hanging was to be found in making it public? According to him, if it was possible to hang a man where all England might see him strangled, why, all England would certainly be the better for it. I’ve no doubt that the cause of so much crime is in the smallness of the Old Bailey, that will only accommodate such a few! Why shouldn’t the gallows be erected on Salisbury Plain, with cheap railway excursions from all parts on hanging days?