23 DECEMBER 1871, Page 9

CRIME WITHOUT SIGNS.

IF Crime did not usually involve a very great disturbance of the character, a general effervescence which acts as a sort of buoy to mark its moral site and warn us all of our dangers, it is exceed- ingly difficult to conceive what it might not achieve before there would be any real fear of detection. Crime always springs either from vindictive passions which usually make a stir of themselves and are pretty sure to call attention to the subjeots of them, or selfish passions likely to be signalized by extreme vanity or conspicuous covetousness, or some other principle of human nature too active to avoid general observation and scrutiny. To take an instance, only on Wednesday a man was charged before Sir R. W. Carden at Guildhall with not only robbing little children of their clothes and parcels, but with beating thentlbr crying at their loss, and Sir R. W. Carden certainly thought the charges so far proved that he would have committed the man for trial at once, had not the police wished for a remand to see whether graver charges could not be brought against him. Now here we have a remarkable case of the sort of action which we have called a buoy that serves to mark the position of secret criminality. The irritation which, if the charge he true, the robber felt at the children's grief and its manifestation was so groat that he could, not help incurring a considerably increased danger of publicity by indulging his temper ;—temper of this kind in a criminal, being, of course, like the rattle of the rattlesnake, one of the greatest safe- guards to the public against violent crime. But in the case we mentioned last week of the man who was condemned by Mr. Justice Grove for five proved cases of arson, committed solely for the purpose of getting the half-crown offered for early information of a fire, and who was supposed to have committed the same crime thirty-six times for a like motive,—and in the case of the French peasant, Joseph Lemettre, of Andresselles, near Boulogne, who is being tried in the Assize Court of the Pas de Calais for twenty- seven crimes, comprehending arsons, robberies, and several mur- ders, said to have been extended over a series of seven years (186441), between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, some of which, including complicity in a murder, lie has con- fessed,—there is no trace of this kind of safeguard, of auy outburst of noisy or ostentatious passion, of any rattle of the snake, to put mankind on their guard. Joseph Lemettre was, indeed, so quiet and well-conducted in outward demeanour that even at the very time at which, as is now believed, he set fire to and destroyed his employer's crops, that employer was so convinced of his integrity and good conduct that he de- clined to dismiss him, and kept him near him till his death. Nor does it seem certain that even now, in 1871, this singularly well-behaved criminal would have been detected in his crimes, but for the circumstance that in the war of last year Lemettre was absent with the army as a conscript, when it was immediately noticed that the series of crimes with which for years this village and its neighbours had been terrified, suddenly ceased, a circumstance which suggested to the inhabitants, on one of the most simple of the principles of the inductive philoso- phy, that the effect having ceased, the cause must, in all probability, have ceased too, that is, must have been con- scripted for the Army ; whereupon Lemettre began to be suspected,. and on his return, the crimes beginning again, ho was closely watched and detected in an attempt to rob the house of a priest. Now the crimes with which he is charged include three murders, and two attempts to murder which all but succeeded, as well as a great number of robberies of all sorts. A. man who could live for • seven years,—and those the seven years between the ages of 18 and 25,—with so much guilty and bloody thought and contriv- ance in his brain, and so little appearance of violence in his outward demeanour that it was his absence, by the relief it afforded, and not his presence, by the dangers it caused, that drew suspicion down upon him, is worse than an unbuoyed torpedo in the risk he causes to the society to which he belongs. The evidence as to the prepossessing simplicity and frankness of his demeanour even now, after a seven years' course of deadly crime, is indeed perfectly startling. And there is something of the same ground for wonder and alarm in the case of William Anthony, who went about setting places on fire that he might earn half-a- crown for every building of whose danger he could give early in- formation. That seems to have been a strictly business-like pro- ceeding, hardly involving anything that could be called passion„ though it certainly involved also so singularly complete an in- difference to the severe troubles of his neighbours, that one would not be in the least surprised at the same person's committing murder for five shillings a head, if there were an equally good chance of keeping the matter quiet. Of course the man may have been scrupulous in selecting insured houses, and have argued with himself that the insurance companies were legiti- mate objects of plunder, but on this point we have no evidence. At any rate his guilt, whatever it 'was, was of that exceedingly still kind which, in spite of a tremendous destructive- ness, gives no signal of its existence ; and close beside us in Frauce we find a man, and a very young man, who can maintain a demeanour entirely prepossessing and unruffled for seven years, during a course of singularly base and cruel crimes,—for in four out of the five cases of murder, or attempts to murder, it seems that the criminal's first course was to render his victim insen- sible, by those heavy and agonizing kicks delivered between the legs, which always maim and utterly disable, and usually cause faint. ing fits. And in this man's case, be it remembered, the mere love of gain and love of self will not account for the earlier crimes, though it will for the cruelty of the process by which he disabled

his victims before murdering them. The first two or three crimes committed against the property of the master who so thoroughly trusted him, must have been crimes of a revenge so secret that he never even gave his master reason to think that he had incurred his servant's resentment. He got nothing by the destruction of the property of his master and his master's neighbours, except the pleasure of seeing them suffer, and perhaps the secret delight of feeling that he wielded a great power against them, although they were Unconscious of it ; and one, at least, of the murders was prompted apparently by the same motive, and not by avarice. Now, vindictive passions can rarely indeed manage to run com- pletely beneath the surface ; they are especially liable to betray themselves ; and when they are found strong in the character of a man who gives no one any suspicion of their existence, and that during the hottest period of youth, they certainly contribute to make a true infernal machine of mischief,—a machine buried quite out of sight, and doubly charged with destructive forces, with the insati- able impulse of an omnivorous avarice and the savage rage of a deadly revenge.

There is something very alarming in the spectacle of chronic destructive forces of so fearful a kind as these, being kept so completely out of sight,—giving even no danger-signals intel- ligible to the majority of them, amidst whom the lives of these formidable persons have been passed from their youth upwards. And it cannot but suggest to one the question, what the interior of these lives which contain so much that no one for a moment suspected, may be. Cau it be that William Anthony pursued hie trade of firing buildings and giving early alarms of the fruit of his own work, without any protest in his own mind against the hideous treachery of which he was guilty in obtaining a reward for the infliction on those who paid it of an enormous injury ? Is it barely conceivable that he can have gone about his business without any feel- ing of shame lively enough to risk his betraying himself to his companions, or to the people whom he was plundering of thousands of pounds for the sake of his miserable half-crown P And what are we to think of the interior of Joseph Lemettre's mind during his seven years of successful incendia,rism, plunder, and murder? IIe is affirmed expressly to have been a lad of ex- tremely regular external habits during the first two years of this career, and, indeed, he must have been so, to prepossess his first employer so strongly in his favour as to make him disregard en- tirely some very suspicious circumstances. He must have shown

• patience, diligence, and groat simplicity, while he was hatching in his heart revenges, robberies, and murders. If there had been any fierce struggle, such as one would suppose inevitable, between the two natures, it would have rendered itself visible in some form,—in moodiness, sullenness of outward demeanour, an avoidance of the society which brought home to him most keenly his own treachery. If there were no such struggle, and the whole heart was rotten to the core, how did the super- ficial varnish of external frankness and simplicity manage to keep itself so completely predominant in his face and manners, as for some years to disarm suspicion in the presence of an unparalleled series of frightful and alarming crimes ? One could just conceive that there might be so perfect a unity of villainous intention in a very bad man's mind as to exclude all conflict, all division of the mind against itself. But how such unity of villainous purpose could help impressing itself in some way on his manners and features,—how an ignorant peasant lad could be so accomplished a hypocrite as to impress his neighbours favourably while his whole heart was absorbed in plunder, revenge, and blood,—is as puzzling as it is alarming, He was repeatedly one of those liable, from the circumstances of the case, to suspicion, but was never sus- pected. In all his deeds of violence and cruelty he seems to have preserved that extraordinary cheerfulness and composure which aro the principal and very rare conditions of success. It would seem as if he remained undiscovered chiefly because he was never agitated, never boastful, never gave any involuntary signs of dread or guilt. Can it be, then, that such a one should be with- out either fear or vain-glory, with the secret knowledge in him that his hand was against every man, and that he was, in some sense, triumphant in his iniquitous crusade ? Nothing seems to us more perplexing or alarming than this,—that without even the aid of careful culture and art, men should not only be able to silence their own consciences, but to do so without giving any sign to those around them, either in their countenances or otherwise, of their war against all morality and all society,—should have come to think the most trivial gain to themselves far more than an equivalent for the ruin, and even death of others, without even an air-bubble rising to the surface to betray them to the world. The classes called 4 dangerous ' are risk enough to any society, but they are no danger at all in comparison with a class, if it could be conceived, only one-tenth of theirs in number who, with habits of action fatal to all society, could mingle amongst other classes as William Anthony and Joseph Lemettre appear to have done, unsuspected, and unbetrayed by themselves. No doubt the government of God would never permit the existence of such a class at all ; and such rare individuals as these can only be allowed in order to make the more conspicuous to our minds the strange beneficence, and all but universal cogency of the law which compels dangerous men to put out involuntary danger-signals, warning the bettor and often also weaker part of society, to stand on their guard against them.