THE RECENT POLICE CAPTURE.
IF the police have caught the Mnswell Hill murderers, as they evidently think, they have performed a great public service. There could hardly be a greater danger to the community than the diffusion of the idea almost universal in the East, and general in the wilder States of the Union, that the burglar or robber who has the audacity to add murder to theft is comparatively safe from the law. It is quite natural that criminals should think so, for their terror is of witnesses, and if all the witnesses are dead their chances of escape seem to uneducated men indefinitely multiplied. Who is to reveal their identity to the police, or satisfy the jury as to the facts P They are, we believe, mistaken, as we shall presently try to show; but they are very likely to think otherwise, and if they do, they Rill not long be checked by the kind of hesitations which the public attribute to them. The horror of murder which Englishmen suppose even habitual criminals to entertain, proceeds, we fear, mainly from their dread of capital punishment, and if the dread were removed by frequent acquittals for want of evidence, we should find, we believe, that the "horror" would speedily dis- appear. It is not found to exist among criminals of our own race in the Western States ; it did not display itself among pirates, who were simply burglars by sea ; and in this country it is probably due much more to the prevailing civilisation than to the instinctive conscience. Burglars, footpads, garrottere, and the like are usually very bad and callous persons with some physical courage or hardihood, and if they could kill with safety we should be reluctant to trust to their internal objections to killing. Those objections do not prevent the wholesale murder of children for ten-pound notes, such as is alleged by the police in the Dyer case, nor did they some years ago prevent the long series of Sheffield murders for breach of Union rules. There are plenty of men in London who would commit a murder a month if fairly assured of safety ; and the existence of even a hundred such men amongst five millions would be a terrible aggravation of our social miseries. If we mistake not, the criminal class, especially the ticket-of-leave men, are already resorting to bloodshed much more frequently than of old, the dislike to suicide is decreasing in them as in every other class—Fowler, it is quite conceivable, when he reached for the revolver, in- tended to shoot himself as well as Inspector Marshall—and if they were encouraged by impunity in a few notorious cases we might witness a startling " epidemic " of murderous crime which would not only decrease public security but brutalise all connected with the administration of the law. Our country- men who dwell in cities rendered as safe as drawing-rooms do not realise what their temper would be if murder became common, or if they had serious reason to fear that violent and painful forms of death might come upon them in their own quiet homes. The frightened Briton takes to a revolver very readily ; nor will we trust juries to be very discriminating when murder is once recognised to be an ordinary or a frequent cause of death. We wish, therefore, every success to the police, even though we hold that a habit of murder would not in the long ran prove a defence for the criminal class. Logically, as we have said, the burglar or highwayman who kills ought to be safer than his comrade who does not, because he extinguishes evidence, but, as a matter of fact, in a highly organised community this is not the case. In the first place murder increases not only the number of his enemies, the whole population objecting to that particular crime as they do not object to any other, but it develops enormously the energy of the trained police. In every country the police become from the nature of their duties unconsciously tolerant of minor crimes, and while they do their duty, do it with the feeling that an occurrence has happened which is forbidden by law, but which must be expected to happen whenever cir- cumstances are favourable. Parse-snatching, for instance, the great crime of the streets of London, strikes them as the most natural thing in the world, and they feel no more animosity to the snatcher than revenue officers feel to ordinary smugglers. It is their business to catch the snatchers, and they do catch them whenever they can, but they are not greatly stirred, and would probably regard the total extinction of pecuniary crime with something of the feeling with which a lawyer regards the simplification of law. Such simplification is quite right and most commendable, but if it goes on what is to become of me? Murder, however, wakes up the police to real energy. They not only hate it like the rest of mankind, but it affronts their professional instinct, and induces them to pursue "clues" with an assiduity and per- severance, and, indeed, with a sharpness of intelligence, which in the case of other crimes they would not display. That special energy on the part of the police, who are ubiquitous and who warn each other, tells terribly against the murderer, as does also the alarm which the energy produces among those upon whom he has to rely for aid and shelter. The half•criminal class do not want to fight the police on such unsafe ground, or to share in a special odium which personally they have done nothing to incur. If the burglary on Muswell Hill had been burglary simply, the police would have heard, we fancy, little truth about that lantern, even if they had been stimulated enough by the crime to make such minute inquiries about its history. The public readiness to help the police also must be of much assistance to them, especially in a way not often noticed, the absence of any readiness to give the criminal warning. There are whole classes in every country who, with- out being actual criminals themselves, look upon the police with unfriendly eyes, and will give a pursued man every help they safely can, unless he is a murderer. Then they hold aloof or join in the hunt, hoping in that way to conciliate a body with which hereafter they may come into dangerous contact. And, lastly, we can hardly doubt that, callous as such criminals become, murder, especially the murder of a woman, does confuse and bewilder them, does give to their idea of the necessity for escaping at once an overmastering force. The popular notion that "murder will out" has, we fear, but a slender foundation, but it is true that a mur- derer is more apt in his excitement to leave a trace of his identity behind him than an ordinary criminal. He either drops a handkerchief, or he loads a gun with a tell- tale piece of newspaper, or he makes, when arrested, some remark showing that he anticipates the charge, or he does some act implying absolute desperation. Seaman's drop from the roof in Turner Street would scarcely have occurred to a mere thief, nor would Fowler's mad resistance to the officers sent to arrest him, though the motive in the latter case may have been a desire not to escape but to commit suicide. A kind of stupidity comes upon the murderer, who, moreover, we should say from observation of a multitude of cases, is much more haunted by the desire to confess than any more vulgar criminal. The cause of that feeling is one of the mysteries of the human heart, but we are satisfied that it exists, and the truth probably is that the heavier the crime the greater the momentary relief from confession, which gets the criminal rid of what to him in his excitement is the torturing necessity of seeming calm, and inventing stories, and generally acting a part. The kind of bewilderment pro- duced by the crime itself is always against the murderer, especially if he is an uneducated man whose emotions are at once simple and strong.
Do criminals, then, in their own minds always regard murder as the supreme crime, separated by some law, as of nature, from all others? We are not sure. A good deal of evidence has been adduced to prove the theory, especially the frequent occurrence of voluntary confession, and we should fancy that in this country some such opinion had, by the steady operation of a separate and supreme punishment for the crime, become fixed in most minds. That, however, is not the experience either of the Irish, or of the French, or the Western American police, and we should fancy the feeling of the criminal class upon the subject varied in every country with the degree of general respect for life,—a Chinese criminal, for example, not feeling the emotion at all any more than a Thug does. There is, too, a difference in this respect among criminals, produced either by the actual method of the deed or by the difference of temperament which prompted the selection of that method. Murderers who have used the knife or the bludgeon, or the revolver or poison, seem to feel different degrees of emotion, diminishing in the order in which we have arranged the methods, until the poisoner appears to feel none at all. If that is true, as we believe it to be, it suggests that it is the victim's suffering rather than his loss of life which affects the criminal,— a fact, moreover, frequently mentioned in public con- fessions. The difference is, too, curious in another way, for the special emotion raised by the use of the knife must bear some untraceable relation to a fact mentioned by so many naturalists, the inexplicable horror or dis- gust produced in all the domestic animals, including even the cat, which is a beast of prey, by the presence of blood. We should question, however, whether, as a rule, murderers for gain feel murder to be a transcendent crime, more especially if it is one which they have committed often. Certainly we should not trust for safety in any degree to that emotion in their minds, and are heartily glad to believe that in all the three recent tragedies, the Muswell Hill case, the Turner case, and the Reading case, the police think that they possess clues sufficient to make it probable that the gallows will have their due. The world is getting civilised inch by inch, but we have not made progress enough yet to dispense with deterrent penalties. Shall we ever ?
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