摘要：‘We very seldom attend the public executions of criminals’, wrote Edward Smith Hall of the
Monitor newspaper in Sydney, New South Wales, in March 1827, ‘because we have found
that we experience on such occasions more of the feelings of horror than of sympathy’. But
this time, he continued, when ‘we raised our eyes to view the five men who suffered on
Monday last … we could not look up at the victims trembling on the fatal scaffold without
weeping’. The crowd, too, were murmuring, said Hall, ‘some asking “what are they hanged
for – do they suffer for sparing men’s lives?” and others, “is this the way to reward
humanity?”[1]
