"DISCOURAGEMENT" AS A CAUSE OF MURDER.
PROBABLY the most curious poisoning case of recent times,— certainly one even much more curious than the wholesale poisoning in the North of England, so far as the latter is at present known to the public,—is that of Mrs. Lydia Sherman, of Con- necticut, United States, whose confession fills a good deal more than one whole page of the New York Herald of the 13th January. It appears that this woman, though only convicted of murdering her third husband,—and that under circumstances thought to be for some inscrutable reason attenuating, BO that she was condemned not to death, but to imprisonment for life,—has confessed in full to eight murders by arsenical poisoning ; the victims being her first husband, Mr. Struck, a carriage black- smith, and afterwards a policeman ; four of her own children ; her third husband, Mr. Sherman, and two of his children. Her second husband, Mr. Hurlburt, died with similar symptoms of arsenical poisoning, but she maintains that it was not with her knowledge at all events, that he got the poison, and as it seems somewhat arbitrary for a woman who confesses to eight murders to stick at confessing a ninth, it is just possible, though for a reason we shall presently state hardly likely, that in this instance she may have been only the occasion of the death, and not its cause,—Mr. Hurlburt having possibly confounded some of his wife's arsenic with powders of his own with which he was accustomed, as she says, to guard against the acidity of his beer. But the curious part of the confession is, that Mrs. Sherman always Ines the same phrase, "discouraged,"—i.e., Yankee for "dejected" or "depressed,"—to describe the state of mind which induced her to commit murder. Time after time she repeats that she was greatly 'discouraged' at the thought of her husband or her children being a burden to her, and that under this sense of discouragement she quietly put them out of the way. Only on the first occasion does she attribute the crime to external sugges- tions. She asserts that a police officer suggested to her to put her first husband,—who had taken tO his bed, and was apparently suffer- ing from softening of the brain,—out of the way, and recommended her to try arsenic. But as there does not appear to have been the slightest motive for his suggesting such a crime, as there is no hint even of an intrigue, or of any further relation between him and the woman he is said to have advised, we cannot believe this part of the story ; a bad man would not have given very dangerous advice by which he was to take no profit, and, of course, a decent man would not have given such advice at all ; so that the falsehood, if it be one, throws grave doubt on her assertion of being innocent of the murder of her second husband, and makes it seem not unlikely that this apparently arbitrary disavowal of guilt was due to some inex- plicable association which made it more painful to her to confess this than any other crime. It seems that to this husband she was indebted for a substantial bequest in the way of property, and this, while it adds to the probability of the murder, may have rendered her lees willing to avow it. It clearly was not in this case "discouragement "—the motive uniformly pleaded in every other,—which led to the murder, if murder it was. There was no pretence for fearing that Mr. Hurlburt would be a great burden to her, either pecuniarily or otherwise. He had enriched her. and left her better off than she had ever been before in life, One of the worst parts of the story of Mrs. Sherman's confession is that, after making it, and talking a good deal of horrid rant' about her conversion and reconciliation to Christ, she declared herself very happy indeed, which she had, she said, never been before in life, and accompanied her declaration with what the New York Herald's reporter calls a kind of "festive titter," which went through her whole frame and gave her an appearance of real enjoyment. The chronic " discouragement " which had led to her eight or nine murders had now apparently for the first time ceased. It is another curious feature of the case that the woman seems to have lived a regular and quiet domestic life till she was nearly forty, and only to have begun her course of murders at that age, when her first husband's brain began to soften and she first became "discouraged." After that every little discouragement led to new murders. She put two of her children, a daughter and son, out of the way,—the son "a beautiful boy, who did not complain during his illness," —from " discourage- ment " at the prospect of having to support them ; then a third son, nearly grown up, was murdered from dis- couragement at the prospect of a long illness in which she might have had to support him ; then a second daughter, some what of an invalid, the care of whom kept her occasionally at home, was murdered, out of discouragement at the prospect of "a hard winter ;" her third husband she dosed with arsenic in his drink, she says out of the wish to sicken him of drink,--a very unlikely story for a woman so experienced in the fatal effects of arsenic ; and his two children,—the baby, and a daughter who had shown great attachment to her murderous step-mother,—she apparently poisoned solely to get rid of small domestic annoy- ances. She seems to have had a calm, kindly manner popular with men, and not exciting any suspicion among the doctors, who, like our English country surgeons in the recent case in the North, uniformly ascribed the arsenical sickness, to the woman's own great surprise, to gastric fever, except in one case, that of her eldest son, a painter, in which it was ascribed to "painter's colic." Under this calm, easy manner she seems to have concealed one of those cold and callous hearts to which the prospect of inconveniences or annoyances of any kind immediately suggested that they were most likely to be radically removed by removing the persons who caused them. The interest of the perpetually recurring phrase she uses to describe her motive,—" discouragement,"—is not so much that it appears to have been really her chief motive, as that it was almost certainly the state of feeling by which she excused to herself her wonderfully cruel and reiterated murders. In confessing her state of mind when about to murder her eldest son, she remarks that she now knows that her deep feeling of discouragement was "not much of an excuse, but I felt so much trouble that I did not thiuk about that." To her own mind it evidently palliated the enormity of her guilt to reflect that she had no heart to encounter the troubles and annoyances before her if she had allowed her husbands and children to go on fretting her by their demands for attendance and help. What could she do in that dejected state but just slip them quietly out of the way, by mixing "half a thimbleful of arsenic" in their tea or gruel ? If she had had more energy, more hope, more life, she thinks there would have been less excuse for her. As it was, the temptation was too severe ; she subsided into murder, as it were, through sheer fatigue of mind at the thought of the many troubles before her if she hesitated about it.
The grim peculiarity of the case is this curious assumption that murder, instead of needing positive passion or other powerful in- centives of some vulgarer kind to account for it, is, as it were, the natural resource of feebleness and languor of temperament. If you don't feel up to fighting your way through difficulties, the natural man suggests to you, as Mrs. Sherman evidently thinks, not to droop and die, or at worst to put an end to yourself, but to put an end to your sources of human anxiety, as you would to gnats or hornets, by extinguishing their life, not your own. You see your eldest son, who had contributed a good deal to your support, sickening, and becoming not only a pecuniary burden, but a probable cause of fatigue and fret for weeks to come, and the natural recourse of the imagination is to the most convenient mode of finally silencing all these importunate demands. The woman, by her own account at least, never seems to have thought of murder till some inconvenience arose to her from the person whom she proposed to murder. She had no insane or morbid delight in the process. It was not till it occurred to her that but for little Ann Eliza's claims on her time she and the elder daughter Lydia would make a good income together, that she gave little Ann Eliza arsenic to clear her out of the way. It was not till she found that her little step-son, Franky Sherman, very inconveniently for her, would neither get quite well nor die, that she found it advisable to put an end to the hesitation of Nature by giving him a very decided impulse towards the grave. There does not seem to have been any murderous eagerness in the woman. It was simply that she felt it the most natural resource when she wanted to remove a cause of friction. A husband or child caused her low spirits, and the only way to remove the weight on her spirits was to make the inconvenient husband or child disappear. No account of the psychology of murder more ghastly can well be suggested, and yet it does put very strongly before us one element in moral evil to which attention is too little drawn. The -common concep- tion of the most hideous forms of moral evil is a conception of something due to the excess of passion, or self-will, or love of wealth, or ambition, or some other not necessarily ignoble motive,—only ignoble when it comes into collision with and overpowers other far nobler impulses. But we forget too much that in all these cases what looks like the superfluous energy and excess of some quality which, in moderation, we do not despise but perhaps even admire, almost always implies also an immense deficiency in the power of sympathy, in the capacity for entering into the life of others. And it is less the apparently active motive, than the deficiency of some other much nobler motive, which really causes the temptation. Ambition, however high and overween- ing, would seldom lead to crimes of this kind, unless there was such a slowness and poverty of sympathy with the victims of our evil deeds that the weight in the other scale were wanting. After all, it is far oftener want of sympathetic life than excess of egoistic life which tempts to these crimes. And in this wretched woman's case we have the most perfect illustration that the most dwindled nature, the nature not of most passion, but of least, is the one of purest evil. A creature whose languor is the destruc- tive element in her, who murders to save herself from a little worry, who gets rid of her daughters and sons as she would of troublesome midges, and first finds out when she is convicted that low spirits are not sufficient excuse for a habit of murder, is the most terrible warning that human imagination can conceive of the wholesale destructiveness of pure, unadulterated self-occupation—of the fierce scourge which moral nothingness, —refined, as it were, to a sharp invisible sword-edge for the slaying of others,—may become for the more positive life with which it comes in contact. Cease to care for any one but yourself, and, though you have not life enough to want for yourself anything positive, though your only real desire may be to rid yourself of in- convenience, you will become, by virtue of the very grinding away of your nature, at once more destructive and far more danger- ous than creatures of larger passions with something left in them on which the sense of guilt and fear may act. Mrs. Sherman, with her titter of recovered happiness and her murderous "dis- couragement," seems to us a sort of parable of the truly negative and yet sweepingly destructive character of pure evil,—of that climax of calm deceit and deadly purpose to which dwindling sympathies and torpid desires may rise, when they have shrunk into the keen, intangible, invisible knife-edge of purely passive self-love.
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