TWO " VERY BAD MEMBERS OF 'SOCIETY." 1TR. HUMPHREYS, the
Coroner, in hearing the remarkable VI evidence bearing upon the suicide of the poor girls on Thursday night in the Regent's Canal, Haggerstone, declared that the two witnesses, Catherine Boose and Mary Anne Fox, who had conversed with them before theyleaped into the water, who had taken the purse and the few pence transferred to them by the suicides, and who had gone home after their -death in the hats and jackets of the deceased without giving the alarm, were " two very bad members of society." Certainly the circumstances were strange enough. Two young girls out together at midnight see two young women standing on the bridge of the Regent's Canal, one of whom is known to one of the girls from having dealt at her father's vegetable stall. The latter asks what she is doing there, and the young woman confesses that she and her friend are going to drown themselves together. She gives her acquaintance a photograph of herself, entreating the girl to convey it to her father, of whom she appears to be very fond, adding, as if she were dwelling affectionatelyupon her likeness to her father, " and when you see him . you will see me." The suicides also give the witnesses an empty purse and 4d., remarking that it is no use taking that with them into the water. They take off their hats and jackets, and begging the girls who are looking on not to mention their fate till the next morning, clasp each other closely and leap into the water together, in which attitude the bodies are found the next day. As the fatal leap is taken, a man who is passing by exclaims " Good God !" but the girls who are looking on, having previously made no effort, even by their own account, to dissuade or hold back the suicides, now make no effort to give the alarm or obtain help ;—that "they were frightened " being their only expressed reason. Being "cold," as well as frightened, they put on the hats and jackets put off by the suicides, and go home, where their new clothes attract attention, and when given into custody they tell the tale. On exami- nation they make no pretence at all of having urgently dissuaded the young women, or of having attempted to get assistance. It is on their own evidence that Mr. Humphreys called them " two very bad members of society." And undoubtedly, two good members of society, in the sense in which we ordinarily speak, they clearly were not : that is, they put no practical obstacles in the way of a crime ; they appeared to take no interest in saving the life of their fellow- creatures ; they showed no sign even of passive horror at the tragedy ; they only appropriated what was offered to them and left by the suicides ; they were quite willing to comply with their request to conceal, till all chance of rescue was over, the act which had been done. In short, they acted precisely as they would have done if the empty purse, and the 4d., and the hats, and the jackets had been placed at their disposal by some gener- ous giver without any tragic reason for surrendering them. They took what they could get, without showing any sign of horror at the desperate act which was the condition of their getting it.
What seems to be the most probable explanation of this con- duct? Beyond the statement that the girls were "frightened" and "cold " after the suicide, they themselves give no reason either for what they did not do or what they did do. Are we to sup- pose it was pure selfishness,—the actual bribe of the empty purse and 4d., and the prospective bribe of the clothes which the unfor- tunate suicides were taking off, —that kept them so passive and acquiescent? Or was it rather, in any degree, sympathy with the purpose of the suicides, fear of the world and its miseries, respect for the courage which could throw them peremptorily off, abso- lute insensibility to any moral cowardice or any religious faithless- ness in the act, and a half-feeling that the last wishes of those who had gone to meet death so unhesitatingly were sacred, which kept them dumb ? And was it the mere natural impulse to use that which was useful and warm, and no longer wanted by any one -else, which induced them to put on the bats and jackets left by the suicides ? Of come, in such a case as this, the real state of mind of the witnesses, from whom the Coroner elicited so little, must be -quite conjectural; but it seems to us most likely that neither the one answer we have suggested, nor the other, is exactly the true one. Probably the girls were overawed at seeing their :acquaintance and her companion so quietly leaving messages for their relatives, enjoining upon them not to give the alarm till the next day, and disencumbering themselves of needless dress for their last plunge. What ignorant person -could be otherwise than somewhat paralyzed by passing an acquaintance at midnight who was coolly making his or her dis- positions for leaving the world without embarrassing interference from others ? Then there would probably be a keen and very over- powering curiosity to know whether they would really act as they proposed, whether they had the courage and will to do so, and what it would be like if they had. Ignorant girls would be overawed by hearing the mere resolve of others to do what they themselves would be so little able to imitate, and would feel themselves in a -certain sense in the presence of superiors, whose range of action was at least altogether beyond their own and scarcely intelligible to them. We can, indeed, scarcely understand how they could fail to feel the physical impulse to cling to them and draw them back at the last moment, when they realized the full danger, saw the dark water, and the girls "cuddling each other" in order to break the loneliness of the last struggle. But when the Coroner calls them "two very bad members-of society" for either not feeling or not yielding to this impulse, and not giving the alarm in the agita- tion of the moment, he should remember how much goes to making -a good member of society, in his sense, and how completely the elements he assumes may be absent from such minds as those of the girls he was rebuking. A good member of =society, in his sense, must have a general feeling that life is good, that a condition of extreme misery is not often lasting, that the law which brands suicide as a crime is wise, that we often -need protection-against ourselves, that every man should be prepared to sustain the law, as well as to give help to others in critical cases, in short, must have a value for human society and social relations generally, and a keen sense of the responsibilities belonging to a place in such society, nay, even something more, a moral and -religious horror of quitting his own post without a summons, and hence, of course, a strong impulse to deter another from hastily -doing so. Is it possible to attribute feelings of this class to igno- rant girls? Is it possible that such as they should have had any -sense of obligation to human society and of the dangers involved in -letting people act on their own sudden impulses to undermine it ? They had not been taught, probably, to feel that hope is the nate- .ral state of mind, despair the unnatural. They had not, above all, had any culture for those sensitive sympathies which compel you to substitute yourself in the place of any one sufferer, and to feel for him or her as you would feel for yourself if you were rushing '•on the same fate. We believe that sympathy, tender sympathy, in the ills they have actual knowledge and experience of, is even -commoner among the ignorant poor than among the most educated of the wealthy classes. But, undoubtedly, their -minds are less elastic, more stiff than those of more educated -people, in adapting themselves to ills and sufferings of which they -have no actual experience. Had the young women been shivering with cold and famishing for bread, instead of contemplating a -desperate medicine for some inward pain which the girls who met them could not understand, they might not improbably have been ready enough at sympathy. But when they saw them well-dressed, not quite without resources, not even without -friends to whom they were sincerely attached, for the pho- tograph sent by one of the suicides to her father was proof enough of her not being alone in the world (and the other girl sent a similar message to hers), and still calmly resolved on death, it is quite conceivable that they were without a clue to the sort of -sympathy needed, that they had scarcely any conception of the grounds on which they ought to have protested against the violence they were going to do themselves, and to have attempted to prevent their success. To assure them that happiness would probably return agahr if they were patient, would have been difficult to girls probably lost in amazement at their voluntarily surrendering such sources of happiness as property and warm clothing in order to prepare for a cold and dreadful death. To persuade them that, happy or unhappy, their life was not their own to throw away, would clearly have involved a far higher conception than would be conceivable in one out of a hundred such girls as these. To reason that society would be injured by the practice of suicide and the despair which prompts it, would have been still more beyond them. They might, indeed, have had a physical instinct prompt- ing them to save life, and it is at the absence of this that we moat wonder. But we do not see that, beyond this instinct, any bene- volence such as very ignorant girls like these would feel, would have prompted them to arrest the suicide. What they valued most, the warmth and the clothes and the coppers, these women had utterly despised and voluntarily surrendered. How should they have felt that they would be the better " members of society" for compelling them to take back what they cared so little to keep ? But surely the girls should at least have instinctively sympathized with the unconscious friends of the suicides, and tried, for their sake, to prevent it or to save them ? Should not the mere name of the father of Jane Hayekx, for instance, who was to receive the pho- tograph of his drowned daughter, have stirred them to prevent this suicide ? On that side we can find little excuse for them ; for, undoubtedly, they might have felt all but instinctively that they would deserve the reproaches of the survivors for not interfering to save them or give the alarm. Still, it is quite conceivable that the awe, and suspense, and curiosity, and eeriness of the situation might have occupied them till after the fatal plunge, and that then they may have feared to be accused, or at least strongly censured, for not acting sooner ; and that in this ignorant fear for themselves the better feelings prompting an alarm may have been overborne. That they should have put on the clothes thrown away rather than leave them there, seems altogether natural. Altogether, though we are far from thinking the witnesses of this tragedy good members of society, we are disposed to think the evil in them is as much chargeable on " Society " as on themselves. We are sure that an educated magistrate whose whole grasp of legal and social and moral and religious obligations gives him a completely different view of such a suicide as this from any that could be taken by two half-clad ignorant girls, shivering with awe and wonder and unconquerable surprise that good clothes and money should be willingly resigned and death preferred by any acquaint- ance of theirs, is quite incompetent to judge how far their badness as members of society is due to culpable individual selfishness in them, and how far to the apathy which springs from the leaden pressure of physical wants, and a complete deficiency in all the higher elements of social experience. His hasty opinion that they ought to have been " ducked," themselves, for their apathy, may suggest indeed a penalty calculated to make them more alive to the legitimate expectations of others in future, but seems to pro- ceed from a condition of magisterial resentment far beyond what the tragic facts of the case can justify.
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