NEW NAMES FOR OLD VICES.
THE tendency of the age is to find excuses ; to persuade ourselves that an action which at first sight looks detestably bad is in reality not one which the community ought to punish severely and swiftly, but one for which we should try to find "extenuating circumstances" ; to persuade ourselves, in fact, that black is seldom anything more than at worst dark-grey, and that in some cases it is white to all intents and purposes. If a financier organises a gigantic swindle, or a clever woman ruins a hundred men, no vindictive punishment follows; it is decided to be inconvenient to prose- cute, or men find themselves laughing that there are still so many fools in the world. If a woman kills her paramour, or a man in a passion stabs a nagging wife, the first thought may be of the rope, but the second is of a petition to the Home Secretary. Last, if the marriage-tie is broken—especi- ally in high places—there is an immediate tendency to invest with a mist of romance and pretext-finding what is nothing better than weakness and vulgarity.
Is the tendency good or bad? Perhaps the best way of answering that question is to take two or three instances of crimes fresh in everybody's mind, and to see what kind of judgment has been passed on the criminals. Take first what are known as the Bootle murder and the City stabbing case. The Bootle murderers were two young servant girls, employed by an old woman with a bad temper, a sharp tongue, and the drink habit. One night they waited until she was asleep and then deliberately smothered her with pillows. Charged with murder in the dock, they appeared absolutely indifferent to the seriousness of the crime they had committed, and laughed and giggled throughout the proceedings, only showing any symptoms of fear when they were actually con- demned to death at the Assizes. The act of which they were found guilty revealed brutality and callousness sufficient, it would certainly have been thought a hundred years ago, to justify the setting in motion of the law that " whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed"; yet the people did not ask that these girls should suffer capital punishment. Instead, it was pleaded that such a crime could only be due to want of education and a proper sense of re- sponsibility, which is as much as saying that it was the community's fault, not the girls', that they did not realise what murder means. "They did not know what they were doing." That, also, was the plea advanced on behalf of Emma Byron, the woman who a few weeks ago stabbed to death a brutal drunkard with whom she had been living, and whose affection the poor creature thought she was about to lose. Both the Bootle murderers and Miss Byron were eventually re- prieved; but the point to notice is the immediate expression of the feeling—indeed, the insistence—on the part of the public that they must not be hanged. That expression of opinion amounts, if you look at it closely, to a denial of the rightness of capital punishment. In these particular cases we do not question the wisdom or the humanity of the Home Secretary's decision ; but if the people decide that they are only going to hang men and old or ugly women, you come perilously near the doctrine that before a woman commits a murder she must look in the glass.
To take, however, a less gloomy, or rather, a less ghastly, instance of an offence against a community's laws than these two cases of murderers reprieved. When, the other day, the Crown Princess of Saxony left her husband and her father's Court to live in a Swiss hotel with a French tutor, she broke a Commandment which no civilised community can dare to disrespect. Yet she has hardly been condemned for doing so. It is true—or it is said to be true—that she has received a number of letters threatening vengeance on her for having disgraced Saxony ; but men who write threatening letters of that kind are not, as a rule, men to be reckoned with. The attitude of the general public has been sympathetic. First, she was a Princess, and the average man, snobbish, or sycophantic, or educated on fairy-tales, or intensely loyal to a reigning house, likes Princesses. Probably she was beautiful, perhaps she was persecuted; in any case, she must have been hedged in and trammelled with the etiquette of centuries of Court life ; what wonder that a spirited young woman tried to break free ? That seems to have been the general verdict of the public. " Considering the circumstances, she did not commit adultery ; or if she did, let us call it by some other name, and take off our hats to a woman who had the pluck to break chains which hurt her." Such an expression of thought amounts to holding the opinion that a girl situated in a middle-class walk in life, when she deserts a dull, or even a cruel and wicked, husband for the first man who tempts her, is guilty of a vulgar crime ; but that a Princess, urged by the same impulses as a woman below her in the social seals, merely has conceived a romantic attachment which is, in fact, rather interesting than anything else. The crime itself is merely re-named. People forget that the vulgarity which smirches a Royal name and that which brands a middle- class woman are the same. In the mass they have not, or if they have it, they are not capable of expressing, the masculine power of concise definition possessed by Dr. Johnson.
There is the case of the Humberts, just arrested in Madrid after a long and successful career of what may best be described as straightforward swindling. Madame Humbert was a woman who looked at humanity at large and asked herself the question : " What will men believe ?" She decided, quite rightly, that men will believe what is on the face of it incredible. She made up her mind to work on that tendency for all it was worth. She imagined a will leaving millions of money to an heir under absurd conditions, and she had the wit to see that such a will ought to be, and in ordinary life would be, disputed. She therefore conceived the notion, after inventing an eccentric American—the likeliest testator to be accepted by Frenchmen—of having the will disputed by imaginary nephews. The validity of the will of Crawford, the " mad " American, was therefore formally con- tested in the names of two of Crawford's nephews in a Court of Law. There was no will and there were no Crawfords, but because the imaginary will was disputed people readily accepted the extravagant idea that there was a will. The will was supposed to be locked up in a safe, and on the strength of the empty safe Madame Humbert found dupe after dupe prepared to lend her millions ; or if those who lent her money were not all dupes, at all events they thought enough of her business capacity to believe that it was worth while risking the sums which they placed in her hands. And now that it has all been found out, what is the result ? A few men have been made angry; ten or a dozen men, it is said, ruined by their credulity, have killed themselves ; but most men have only laughed. The day after it was discovered that the Humbert business was nothing more than a colossal swindle there were Continental papers which affirmed that Madame Humbert was not only the most talked-about, but the most popular woman in Paris —or rather, out of it. Hardly anyone thought first of the crime which Madame Humbert had committed; few besides those personally connected with them considered the cases of the wretched men who have taken their lives; rather from the great majority there came a howl of tolerant laughter that such things could still happen. Even Madame Humbert's protest that she was the victim of a conspiracy was almost seriously considered, while there have been doctors who have pronounced the solemn verdict that the woman suffers from
delusions, and is, in fact, insane. It is a remunerative kind of madness that results in the acquirement of over a million pounds of other people's money.
" Truth," wrote Plato, "is the right assignment of names." Murder, swindling, and adultery are ugly words, but no nation has ever been, or ever will be, the better for using pleasanter synonyms for crime. " The nakedest, savagest reality is preferable to any semblance, however dignified,"— Carlyle's fierce insight would never have admitted pleas of uncontrollable impulses, intolerably grinding etiquette, money-coining delusions. That is not to say that it is always and in every case a bad thing for men to make excuses for other men's crimes. It is surely a good thing that we should realise the limitations and the frailty of human nature; that we should not judge, lest we be judged; that there should always be room for the self-criticism : " There, but for the grace of God, goes Richard Baxter." But it is, and it must be, a bad thing when behind any condonation of wrong- doing there is the slightest suspicion of snobbishness, as in the tolerance of the viler sins of Princes ; or when in the tendency to gentle criticism there can be traced comfortable assumptions that a lenient judgment of this or that failing— possibly our own, still unsuspected by others—will become the rule rather than the exception. Finally, it must always be bad when the keynote of criticism and judgment of a crime is laughter. That is the case with the Humberts, and to some extent with the affairs of the Crown Princess of Saxony. When men begin to laugh at particular instances of wrong- doing, they are not very far from doubting whether after all it matters that wrong has been done.
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