THOMAS PETERSON GOUDIE. T HE intellectual interest of the" Gondie case,"
that is, the heavy forgeries on the Bank of Liverpool, consists, we fancy, to the majority of men wholly in the figure of the principal criminal. There was nothing interesting in the
method of the crime itself, which was simply a series of forgeries concealed by false entries,—a method exposed in some Court or other almost once a month. But here was a quiet young Shetlander of the steadiest habit of life, without ordinary vices, without ambitions, without taste for luxury, who lived like a poor bank clerk, and did his six hours a day of monotonous work with unfailing assiduity, yet who all the while was stealing on a colossal scale—the total reached 2160,000—for the benefit of others than himself. He never had 21,000 of the money for himself, never accumulated any board, never made any preparations for flight, though he had evidently thought over that ultimate necessity, but at the instigation of blackmailing sharpers quietly went on forging as if that was part of his regular duty. It is suggested that he was a coward, and continued forging merely to avoid exposure of his first offence ; but his conduct at the last was that of a very cool person, who did not care particularly when the end, which from the first was inevitable, arrived. He could have defied his blackmailers at any moment if he had chosen by simply threatening to "give them away" to the police, the course which when arrested he at once pursued. There was nothing to prevent his taking a great sum and bolting, and he never attempted it, but went on dully from month to month stealing, stealing, stealing money which, as an old Yorkshire woman once said, "gave him nowt, not even wickedness." He is quoted as an illustration of the passion of gambling ; but except at first he never really gambled, his confederates never allowing him to win, a fact which must have been patent to him from their letters. The only possible explana- tion of him, to our mind, is that he was an exceptionally stupid and unimaginative person, with the fondness for dull excitement which such persons often display, and who found it in the forgeries themselves, in the danger he ran, in the way he was getting the better of the Bank, in the contrast between the little he received and lived on and the great sums of which he disposed, between himself as the humble bank clerk and himself as one of the most successful of criminals. His re- payment for his danger was, while the game lasted, the con- sciousness of power, a feeling akin to that enjoyment in• a control like that of a deity over the issues of life and death to which several of the great poisoners have confessed as the moving spring of murders from which they reaped no sort of personal advantage.
We believe that state of mind to be not uncommon, and we should like to know whether, in the opinion of the captains of education, the dull or the intelligent are the more likely to turn criminals. The old judgment was for centuries, perhaps from the time of the dwarfs and giants downwards, against the intelligent. The stupid were considered the simple or the innocent, a belief which Scotch country folk still express when they speak of idiots, and which is embedded in the old confusion as to the meaning of " seely " (silly) as implying both blessedness and want of brain. The word " knowing " even now is not among us a word of praise, but is penetrated with an underlying suspicion. Townsmen who knew much were considered likely to be rogues, while rustics and yokels who knew nothing were accounted necessarily honest,— a prejudice which, we believe, still lingers, especially among Londoners. Judges used always to accompany a sentence on an intelligent man with a regret that he had so misused his powers, and implied thereby—no doubt among other things— that had he not been intelligent he might have escaped the dock. Thirty years ago the old belief exercised most im- portant political influence, part of the dull and shame-faced resistance to general education springing from a rooted belief that it would develop in the poor greed, slyness, and indifference to the Eighth Commandment. "I didn't expect much of her," said a lady to the writer about a nursemaid, "but I didn't expect her to steal. I thought she was sure to be honest, for she couldn't read." We are not certain, indeed, whether the old belief does not linger still in some quarters, though few like to express it; whether the distaste for popular education, which undoubtedly still survives, is entirely based on the feeling of the employer who likes servants to be machines, or on that of the worried payer of rates, impatient of so many peremptory demands on him for the benefit of others. There is, we suspect, a widespread impression that if intelli- gence is diffused among the poor it will be used for evil ends, that to "open their minds" is to make them more com- petent for evil, and that, though it must never be whispered aloud, the obscurantists, if they spoke out, would have a great deal to say for themselves.
• On the other hand, there is much evidence that the obseurantists are in the main without justification for their faith. The ignorant races are by no means innocent races. Life and property are safer in Scotland than in Sicily, and though race and creed may be in part the causes, still the latter at least must be one of the results of comparative intelligence. Crime, more especially violent crime, seems on the whole to diminish with the spread of education, though it must be admitted that in some countries, especially France, there are ugly breaks in the completeness of the evidence. The stupid are often cunning, and there is in the ignorant a disposition towards violence, which the late Mr. Hutton, a keen observer of mental peculiarities, always traced to a con- sciousness of mental weakness, and its resultant, a wish to manifest strength in some direction, and so preserve self- respect. The educated are naturally better aware of conse- quences, and are, simply because they have been trained, less liable to be carried away by those fierce waves of excitement the causes of which are still not completely traced. A Southern mob composed of persons who really know little more than the beasts of the field is capable of becoming at a moment's notice a crowd of atrocious criminals, a phenomenon constantly witnessed in the Anti-Semitic outrages. The drunken rough, too, is more disposed towards outrage than the drunken gentleman, because the latter retains more completely some relics of intelligence. The evidence of those engaged in education is, we believe, nearly unbroken in the same direc- tion. They tend, no doubt, slightly to dislike the stupid, who give them so much more trouble, and yield them no reward; but their experience is that of deeply interested observers, and they, as a rule, say that the intelligent among their pupils, and especially that class of the intelligent—it is only a class —which likes to be instructed, are, on the whole, morally the better, are less influenced by the wish for excitement, and more disposed to dislike evil for its own sake. The stupid of both sexes have in them, they say, a latent tendency both to vice and crime which is not readily explicable, though we should explain it as we have done in the case of Goudie, the
forger, by dulness m Imagination, and a consequent pleasure in anything which makes them feel more fully alive. That is, we suspect, the ultimate source of that sense of pleasure in crime which undoubtedly exists in a majority of criminals, or they would be fewer and much less readily detected and kept down. (We are not denying, be it understood, that there is in some few natures a moral twist or devilishness which seems to be unconnected with either stupidity or intelligence, and which one would fain hope—though the evidence is so imperfect—has its ultimate origin in some structural defect or want in the brain that renders them incapable of mentally seeing straight. It seems so impossible, God being just, that they should be created extra bad and yet equally responsible.) You can do nothing, the teachers aver, with the really stupid, because advice makes no impression, and punishment as often as not awakes that desire for continuousness of conduct which rules more or less all mankind, and is as much the obstacle to reformation as the spirit of resistance itself. We should on the whole, we think, give our verdict against the stupid ; but the subject has never, that we can remember, been completely worked out by the experienced, and the evidence of history is most perplexing. There is one striking bit of testimony to the superior morality of the intelligent in the dislike of Athens to the arena when Rome, which was far worse educated, held it to be the most sovereign of delights, and hardly gave it up under Christian teaching; but, on the other hand, the Southern races of Europe and some races of Asia have decidedly more subtle brains than the Northern peoples, and are worse. There are many who believe, indeed, that the inclination to crime is independent of intelligence—do not the majority of Christian teachers maintain that view P- and there are many grave facts on that side, such as the history of Napoleon, who was undoubtedly the greatest visible intellect of the last century, and probably its wickedest, certainly its least moral, man; but we are un- willing to believe that careful and more extensive observa- tion will confirm this view. It would so terribly reduce all hopes from that cultivation of intelligence which the white world is at last slowly, but pretty heartily adopting as one of its first objects. The first, we fear, is more comfort, and that from an increase of appliances, not from an increase in the fortitude to do without.
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