SOCIETY AND THE SYKES CASE.
THE "Sykes case," which ended on Tuesday evening after a trial which lasted five days, was a bad case which- ever way it is looked at. It was only a civil suit instituted to try the authenticity of certain bills, but according to those who attacked those documents, Lady Sykes, wife of Sir Tatton Sykes, lord, according to Domesday Book, of thirty- four thousand acres in the Yorkshire Wolds, and herself a cadette of the great Bentinck family, had written her hus- band's name without authority in order to raise £13,400, which she needed to pay off debts, incurred chiefly, it was suggested, on the Stock Exchange. It is right to remember that Lady Sykes was not represented by counsel, and has not, therefore, been adequately defended, but this was the view apparently accepted by the jury, who found that the bills were valueless —which they could not have been if Lady Sykes had, as she asserted, seen her husband sign them—and by the Judge, who ordered all documents to be impounded in order that further proceedings might be taken. On the other hand, according to those who defended the authenticity of the bills, Lady Sykes had only persuaded her husband, alleged by them to be a feeble- minded old man whose memory had failed, and who seemed to his children's tutors almost irresponsible, into signing the bills which were wanted, because, having spent many thousands— her enemies said more than £100,000—in excess of her large allowances, Lady Sykes had borrowed the sum in question from a moneylender, who charged her at the rate of 80 per cent. per annum. This was Lady Sykes's own story, dragged out of her while she was stating that she was quite on friendly terms with her husband, whom she had advised if he appeared in Court to pat on a great-coat, because otherwise the draughts might hurt him! A more sordidly discreditable snit was never heard in a Court of Justice, but we do not know that it proves so much as is asserted against the existing condition of society. Society does not to-day make, or excuse, spendthrifts like Lady Sykes any more than it did at any other period. There were plenty of female gamblers a hundred years ago, and if there were not plenty of wives who were suspected of forgery—scarce articles, let us hope at any time—there were doubtless plenty who took advantage of their husbands' weakness, or age, or eccen- tricities to obtain money to which they had no right. The change is not in any increased proclivity to crime, but in the enormous publicity given to every such charge, and in the astonishment, the irrational astonishment, created by the fact that while the world has been so advancing in intelligence indi- viduals within it have remained as bad as ever. There is no reason why they should not remain. Intelligence by itself will not teach morality, and all that the progress of the ages does for persons like Lady Sykes is to make them more impatient of the monotony of regular life, more desirous of larger sums to waste, and more apt in discovering the means, licit or illicit, by which if you belong to wealthy people money can be raised. That curious figment of the philosophers' that if all the world were instructed, crime would cease to exist is a mere invention, the truth being that certain forms of crime, forgery for example, cannot be com- mitted by the ignorant or the stupid, but require for their success a certain amount of cleverness, of knowledge, and of cool reflection and self-control. Poor people do not forge huge bills, but we venture to say that false certificates of character, false testimonials, and false claims for small amounts will increase in almost an exact ratio with the education from which we expect so much that education cannot secure. Nero, whose crimes seem to have excited a quite peculiar horror even in his own Pagan world, was probably the most intelligent person in his own vast dominion, and great criminals in our own day have not infrequently been persons distinguished by a certain intel- lectual grasp and acumen. There is nothing in culture, taken by itself, to prevent crime, except the increased fear of consequences, which is often found to be accompanied by an increased confidence that those consequences can by pure cleverness be evaded.
We believe that society as a whole has become better, said not worse, during the century now expiring, and that the opinion to the contrary which we often hear expressed is based partly on the unjustified expectation that discoveries in electricity will purify mankind—Nero was the first person 'who ever used an eyeglass—and partly on the preposterous and injurious attention now bestowed upon anything in any way abnormal. If we made a study of cripples only, we should believe half the world was crippled. Lady Sykes is not the product specially of this age, but the newspaper report of the trial in which she was a discredited witness, is. A good deal of the " audacity " which now amazes and shocks the old is nothing but misplaced frankness, over-conscious of the dis- position formerly dominant to conceal anything unpleasant, and is good or bad according to the tendency of the frank- ness to increase the evil—as it does upon most sexual subjects —or to diminish it, as it does upon most subjects connected with the desire for gain. Our fathers quite rightly thought it immodest to say many things which are now frequently said ; but they also quite wrongly thought it immodest to confess to poverty, or to a wish to get into a different rank in life. Some, at least, of the present habit of self-advertise- ment, which annoys because of its vulgarity quite as much as because of its inherent badness, is due to what we may describe as indiscreet independence and individualism, which reveals itself with a certain carelessness of more refined opinion. No man in our day has ever advertised himself like Napoleon, whose countrymen, till he fell, did not count that vulgar quality in him for sin, but who in our day, which we account so favourable to vainglory, would be generally disbelieved because of his braggart ways. We all condemn, as the special vice of our time, the kind of worship paid to money, and forget the adulation that a century ago was offered to rank and power, and the baseness of the subserviences to those who, like "Long Tylney Welles- ley Long Pole," had ought of patronage to give away. Even the passionate desire for excitement, which is the true cause of half the evils we see in modern society, has its good side. We notice the hundreds in whom it displays itself in an appetite for extravagance, or frivolity, or in- cessant gadding—a real feature of our time upon which we should like to hear Messrs. Cook's experiences—or, it may be, in a smaller number of cases, in vice ; and forget the thousands of cases in which the same thirst develops the desire for knowledge, or philanthropic activity, or energy in political pursuits. We believe ourselves that the power of acquiescing in monotony is essential to good work, to serious thought, and to self-improvement ; but we cannot honestly say that the older forms of that acquiescence tended entirely to good. The still water very often putrified, and the still heart grew as impenetrable as stone. The new generation is restless to a degree that makes the old one doubt whether there is anything in it; but quicksilver is not a wicked metal because it rises or falls with the slightest decrease or increase in atmospheric pressure. Modern interests are probably much too various for the healthy discipline of mind, but after all it is among the readily interested, and not the inert, that the best are to be sought. He who would understand the social movement must beware of giving too much importance to exceptional cases, and remember that the worst Emperor who ever reigned—at least those who suffered from him thought so—was reigning just at the moment when Christianity began to be formidable from the number of its proselytes.
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