MIRY ANSELL.
THE arguments which were poured forth in such profusion in order to prevent Mary Anaell from being hanged in- volve some very curious consequences. They really amount to this, that all persons who have insane relatives ought to con- stitute a new aristocracy privileged by law to commit murder— and a fortiori any minor crime—without paying the penalties which all other guilty persons have to pay. Being irre- sponsible for their actions by virtue of some mysterious tendency in their blood, it is most unjust to punish them. They must be restrained for their own good, but they must be maintained at the public expense in a condition which, as compared to that which they would enjoy if innocent, may be one of ease and modest luxury. They are, moreover, to be carefully informed of these privileges by the speeches of counsel, by thousands of newspaper articles all pitying them, and by petitions to the Crown, so that if they have criminal instincts, they may lack no encouragement to gratify them by criminal acts. Their natural fears of the general law are to be overcome by evidence that it cannot apply to them; and their natural consciences are to be dulled by assurances that they alone among human beings are innocent when guilty, because mentally irresponsible. We really are not exag- gerating in the least. Mary Ansell was convicted on indis- putable and undisputed evidence of a murder peculiarly adroit, peculiarly treacherous, and peculiarly cruel. She insured the life of her own sister, an imbecile under restraint, and then to obtain the money, and from no other motive, sent her phosphorus-paste as a kind of sweetmeat to be eaten. The wretched victim ate the mess and died, and Mary, having applied for the money, forged a letter from her mother to the authorities of the asylum begging them to prohibit any post-mortem. Suspicion was excited, inquiry was made, the squalid story was fully revealed, and the murderess was condemned to death. Instantly a section of the Press set itself to save her by alleging that she was insane, or, at least, so abnormal in mind as to be irresponsible. They had no evidence to adduce, except that one mad-doctor considered her a "degenerate," and that several of her relatives had been mad—evidence upon which many of the Royal personages of Europe might be shut up as lunatics— but it was sufficient for the opponents of the penalty of death, for those who cannot bear to have their serenity disturbed by hearing of punishment for any cause, and for sentimentalists generally. Sir Matthew White Ridley was bombarded with appeals, arguments, and menaces, rising as the hour of execution drew near into a shrill intensity of screaming. Fortunately for justice, he was firm. The crime probably struck him as a peculiarly dangerous one, the feeble-minded being always easy subjects both for insurance and for poison ; the Judge, who knew the facts and had watched the prisoner, was opposed to lenity ; and at last the Home Office, after a fresh and needless inquiry into the wretched criminal's sanity, signified in regular form that the law must take its course, and Mary Aneell was executed.
The agitation was a most lamentable one, revealing as it did on the part of a section of the public a callous deficiency of sympathy with the innocent victims of mur- derous attacks ; but there was a worse feature in it yet. At least one journal of wide circulation and good character, supported, we have no doubt, by a considerable number of well-meaning persons, actually propounded the doctrine that no woman whatever ought, under any circumstances, to be executed for murder. An entire sex is to be encouraged to commit the most cruel of crimes, and the one most dangerous to society, by a formal assurance—to be embodied, of course, in law— that it shall never, however guilty, be exposed to the penalty of which it has most dread. Now we can understand, and have some respect for, the position of those who are opposed in all cases to the penalty of death. They seem to us ridiculously illogical, for they often reject the idea of non- resistance, and if it is wrong to kill a murderer, the killing of a wretched conscript who lands in England because he is ordered must be an unspeakable crime ; but still we under- stand them. They say, quite erroneously, that the one execu- tion is in cold blood and the other in hot, and we acknowledge that if the statement were correct there would be a difference. As a matter of fact, the statement is not correct, for we ought to be, and generally are, much hotter against the murderer than against the conscript ; but still, as the intervention of a trial in the one case and not in the other blinds their eyes to the truth, we can recognise the sincerity of their position. But to retain the penalty of death for one sex and not for the other seems to us monstrously unreasonable. The crime is exactly as injurious to society in the one case as in the other, and morally the woman who murders is often more guilty than the man. She is more trusted, her instrument—poison—is more treacherous, and she is almost invariably sober. She has, if anything, a keener conscience to overcome, and a natural impulse of pity for all physical suffering which she has to beat down before she can attain the necessary callousness. Why, then, is she to be spared, to her own immense injury, the law which registers the universal abhorrence of murder being a strong educative force ? Simply because the execution of a woman is rather more painful to a sensitive society than the execution of a man. That is the real reason, and it is quite time that society, recognising it, should ask itself whether some at least of its modern philanthropy, its horror of giving pain, does not spring either from pure selfishness or from enfeebled nerves. As it is quite certain that we cannot cure certain forms of disease, caries, for example, without inflicting pain, so it is quite certain that we cannot keep the community free from crime, indeed cannot even keep it together in law-abidingness, without punishment, which in many cases must be most painful, or even shocking, to those who inflict it. The surgeon who always trembled and shook when called on to cut for cancer would be a bad surgeon, and the citizen who always quails when punishment is visible, or is realised by his imagination, is a bad citizen. What he has to do is to make sure that trial is perfectly just, and is, moreover, thorough, so that there may be no failure of justice, and so see that the penalty is carefully proportioned to the offence ; and then, like the surgeon, to operate with unshrinking nerve. The world in its strong and most righteous recoil from cruelty is forgetting, we fear, that lecturing will not do everything ; and that to put down crime, which always involves cruelty, it is necessary to inspire fear. The law educates the conscience, and to make the law effec- tive it must on occasion inflict pain, and this on both sexes equally. The argument that a woman should not be executed for murder because of her weakness is an argument against all punishment whatsoever, for nothing can be weaker than a criminal once arrested and practically in the grasp of forces which, as far as he is concerned, are irresistible. There are, in fact, but two arguments for exempting women from the same penalties for crime as are inflicted upon men. One is that they are heavier for women than men, which is sometimes true, and is the reason why women should never be flogged, or subjected to exhausting labour; but this argument is inapplic- able to the penalty of death, which, as we have ample proof in the evidence of all doctors and in the records of the French Terror, is not even more alarming to women than to men. The other is that women, from natural inferiority, are irre- sponsible beings, and can no more be justly punished for doing wrong than animals can. That—to ourselves mere nonsense—is a good argument if the opponents of capital punishment for female poisoners are willing to plead it, as we sometimes are tempted to suspect they are; and we leave them to plead it, and to take the consequences. It is not women who, on that plea, will save Locueta from the gallows.
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