A frightful parricide took place at Surbiton on Sunday evening,
Major Thomas Hare having been shot dead by his son, Gordon Horace Hare, who immediately committed suicide on the steps of Major Hare's house there. It was the old. story of a spendthrift son who bitterly resented his father's allowing him only a guinea a week, after he had already run through a great deal of money. It seems that the murderer, who was subject to fits of great excitement, had been taking sleeping-draughts, which he had been warned would affect his brain if he went on with them ; but the Coroner's jury, while allowing no weight to that evidence as regarded the murder, which they found to be deliberate, chose to treat the suicide as due to " an unsound mind." That was surely very absurd. The suicide was in all probability a mere consequence of the murder. Either both acts were committed by a man of unsound mind, or neither; or, if it were necessary to choose one of the two as specially indicating an unsound mind, it was the first, and not the second. We suppose it is the absurd law refusing the -usual solemn burial to a suicide which is not refused to a murderer, that induced the Coroner's jury to draw so very untenable a distinction.
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