Pardon me, sir, but there never was such a mistake as to think to do away with the wickedness of hanging by making it private. In the first place, if to see a hanging is no warning to the beholder, do you think that to hear or read of a hanging would do all the good of an example? Does what men see, or what they hear, stir ’em the most? But let us suppose that a man is to be hanged inside of Newgate. Why, the penny-liners that get their sops in the pan out of the condemned cell, why, they would write all sorts of pretty things, all kinds of interesting stories about the last minutes of the criminal, and so the curiosity of the town would be more agog than ever. The picture newspapers that publish the murderers’ portraits--those family papers for the instruction and amusement of the younger branches--would give half-a-dozen pictures where they now give one. The secrecy of the thing would give a flavour to the whole matter. And now, suppose that a rich man was to be privately hanged: a banker, we’ll say, or, saving your presence, even a member of Parliament. Well, we know how unbelieving is man. There’s thousands of people who would never sleep quietly in their beds, for the thought that the said banker or member was never hanged at all, but was smuggled out alive in a coffin, and shipped abroad. Every year or so, there’d be a letter in the newspapers from somebody who had seen the banker somewhere in the Backwoods, where he had married one of the Chactaws, and got a family of ten children. No, Mr Milnes, private hanging won’t do; the people aren’t to be cheated out of their pleasure after that fashion. Besides, Mr Milnes, all hanging’s a bungle. The gallows is condemned, marked to come down; timber by timber it’s loosening, and it’s no use trying to keep it together with small corking-pins. No, Mr Milnes, it will better become you, be more like your kind good-natured self, to give a pull to the planks, to bring the whole machine to the ground, to make it a thing of the past, like the bonfires that burnt witches,--and for the hangman thrown out of work, why, small retiring allowances have been given to worse public servants.--Hoping, sir, that you’ll excuse my boldness, I remain, your obedient servant, JUNIPER HEDGEHOG. _P.S._--You know my number, sir, and I’m always in Palace Yard. LETTER XIX.--_To Isaac Moss, Slop-seller, Portsmouth._ DEAR ISAAC,--Sir Robert Peel has stood your friend; and if you’ve only the money, and the freedom, and the luck, you may be Lord Mayor of London as soon as you like. You can’t, as a Jew, sit in Parliament as yet; but time goes round, Isaac, and I shouldn’t wonder if some day that was to come. Only think if a Jew--an hon. member for Whitechapel--was some day to find himself alongside of a Colonel Sibthorpe; for every Parliament has its Sibthorpe, just as every spring has its green geese.