THOMAS NEILL.
AGREAT many statements have been made about Thomas Neill Cream, known here as Thomas Neil, the murderer sentenced to death on Friday week, but none of them throw any light upon an important point in his history. How did he live ? He had no property; he had not long been out of an American prison ; and he had no visible means of earning money. Yet he unquestionably had some. He paid for his passage from America ; he lived at a hotel; he took rooms; he frequented a restaurant ; he paid chemists for opium and strychnine; and he was addicted to the society of women who wanted money for their compliances. He may, no doubt, have obtained money from relatives, but the whole course of the evidence about him raises irresistibly the pre- sumption that he lived by blackmailing; and that he had been so successful in that evil trade in America, that he fancied all men with characters to lose, and especially all doctors, were too timid to resist. They would pay anything rather than bear the annoyances and suspicion to be caused by an inquiry, which he could always either ensure by anonymous charges, or, at least, could threaten. Some of those he attacked might defy him ; but they would defy in silence, or if they appealed to the police, it would be most difficult to pro- cure evidence. All that was needed, in his experience, was a "case," which could be a basis for operations ; and this he proceeded to secure by deliberate murder. He gave some girl of the town strychnine capsules, and when she died in torture, proceeded to accuse this, that, or the other man—it hardly mattered whom, provided he had wealth and a high character—of being either the poisoner or the father of the person accused. This was his mode of living, his trade ; and it can hardly be doubted from his recklessness and the life that he led in America, that he at least occasionally succeeded in extorting money from his victims out of their fear of pro- fessional discredit. The murders were to him mere incidents in his business. He chose girls of the town to murder because they were the least protected of the community, and could be induced to swallow his pills ; and he chose strychnine as his agent because it was the poison with which his original trade of drug-seller, and his subsequent experience as irregular practitioner, had made him most familiar. It has been suggested that he hated street-girls, or that he enjoyed the horrible suffering caused by the poison; but the evidence is against the first suggestion, and there is no proof whatever of the second. The girls never died in his presence, nor is there any reason to imagine that he exulted at all in their pain. He simply wanted them dead, and dead of poison, in order that from that basis he might commence operations to get some money, and to have plenty to eat and drink. It may be sup- posed to be impossible that such a coldly greedy criminal could exist, but unhappily, parallel instances are only too numerous. Once grant that Neill regarded blackmailing as his trade, which seems past doubt, and the explanation of the wretch is easy enough. There have always been in the history of crime men to whom murder was a detail. The poisoner of Rugeley, Palmer, in pursuit of his business as a welsher on the great scale, is believed to have poisoned thirteen persons in succession. His scheme of life was to bet on horse races, pocket the money if he won; and if he lost when it was inconvenient to pay, to invite his antagonist to dinner and kill him quietly with a deadly drug. The poisoners for insurance money, who were suspected of being so numerous that the Government altered the law, did precisely the same, and so, very nearly, if all tales be true, do the women who insure burial allowances for their children, and then put them to death. The brigands of Italy, the train-robbers of America, the Thugs of India, are all seeking cash, and that alone, and commit murder on victims whom they neither hate, nor fear, nor know, occa- sionally or frequently, as acts essential to the profits of their business. The single reason for surprise is to think that a criminal so fairly instructed as Neill should run such frightful risks, and that also may be explained. He was prepared, should detection follow, for the penalties of blackmailing, as burglars are prepared for the penalties of breaking into houses, and he thought the risk of murdering unprotected women very small indeed. And so it was. Clover, the woman on whose account Neill was condemned, was certi- fied by a regular practitioner to have died of delirium tremens, and but for his own blunder in stating that she died of strychnine—a fact which the poisoner only could have known —Neill would never have been suspected of the capital offence. Nobody dreamed that Clover had been murdered. The truth is, that murder is a crime made uncommon, not by the ease with which the murder is detected, but by three other causes. One is, that it can rarely be very profitable in proportion to risk, except to those who are not likely to commit it—that is, the heirs in tail of large properties. Neill was not without the motive of gain. Another is, that the majority of civilised men have at least relics of conscience, and shrink from a crime so universally and justly regarded as separate in its magnitude. Neill had killed his conscience by his career. And the third is, that owing to a universal and, as we believe, instinctive emotion of horror, the murderer is hunted as no other criminal is, except, perhaps, a great forger, and therefore escapes seldomer than any other criminal. The evidence against Neil was hunted up with a patience and a care which, in the case, say, of a burglar, would not have been displayed.
Fortunately, Neill's guilt was proved beyond all doubt, and as we do not think him abnormal, except in the fact that he perpetrated one crime in order to profit by another—and most train robbers in the United States do that ; murdering the Express guard in order to obtain the keys with which to pillage his safe—we should have nothing more to say of him, but that he illustrates an assertion we frequently have occasion nowadays to make, that there are men in the world for whose crimes society is in no degree responsible. This murderer, at least, was no result to be expected from the neglect of men, from ignorance, or poverty, or social isolation.
He had learned enough to follow a trade—drug-selling—which requires a considerable, though narrow sort of, education. He was not, when he committed the crime, in any painful want, though he had not much money on him when arrested, nearly three-quarters of a year later. He was not isolated from his kind, having associates, acquaintances, and, it is believed, even close friends. He may, of course, have been the victim of latent insanity, or of some of those hereditary pre- dispositions which are among the mysteries of physiology, but so far as human eye can detect, he was a voluntary criminal. There are, and have always been, hundreds of such men'in the world, though few so bad as he ; and the right of the human race to deal with them seems to us as well established as-any right based upon self-defence,—much better established, for example, than the right to slay a poor conscript who, under irresistible compulsion, invades a neighbour's territory. There is hardly the need to appeal to a higher law than that, though there is one. Such a man is doing acts of war against the race, and may justly be deprived of any possibility of doing any more. It is nonsense to say, as we perceive that the Echo, true, even in such an extreme case, to its theory that bene- volence is the one certain religion, is almost inclined to main- tain, that society ought to "prevent" such crimes. How is it to prevent them, except by removing those who commit them, and so inspiring the half-inclined with a salutary fear ? It can, perhaps, though we disbelieve it, bring up all children to be " civilised " members of the community ; but it cannot bring them all up to be good members. There will remain, educate how we like, monsters of depravity, and cruelty, and greed. Nero was one of the best-educated men within his wide dominion, or, if he is rejected as a pagan, many of the Italian tyrants, who rose to Neill's level in criminality, were men of the highest intellectual gifts and the widest cultivation, and were, in some nominal yet actual fashion, Christians in belief besides. We can no more hope to extirpate all the wicked by training, than we can hope to reduce all men to a single type ; and prevention at the utmost can but reduce exceedingly the number of those who justify the gallows. The single argument against the penalty of death for such men is that it is ineffective ; and the answer to that is the instinct, an instinct derived from ages of experience, which compels men, when every other remedy for an evil has failed, to betake themselves to this one. The instinct of all human beings holds death to be the most awe-inspiring sanction of any law, the one before which all impulses, even the maddening impulse to murder, shrink back, and in acting on that instinct they employ the strongest of deterrents. It may be said that Neill's crimes prove of themselves that death is not a deterrent; but how many Neills would there be in the world, but for fear of the doom which he himself, up to the moment of the verdict, thought he should be able to avoid ? He did not fear penal servitude for life, for that sentence had been passed on him already in America, and had produced neither reformation nor terror.
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