THE TEMPTATION TO BILL.
THE temptation to kill, if not more common than is usually supposed—and we believe it is more common— may take shape in the most unlooked-for places. It may appear in the heart and brain of a person who from his youth upwards has been horrified at the very thought of murder. It has been said, with wilful cynicism yet with some rudiment of truth, that there are persons who were born to kill one another ; that there are persons—not naturally murderous persons— who if brought into close contact would have the capacity inevitably to make one another so desperately angry or so unutterably miserable that one would be bound to kill the other. Happily, we must imagine, in the changes and chances of life the human ingredients necessary for these fatal consequences rarely come together. But let it not be supposed that a mind of considerable rectitude and restraint would be incapable of harbouring thoughts of killing under the given conditions if by killing alone the way were seen clear to an end of an intolerable misery or tyranny. Especially would this be true if at the same time the temptation were heightened by a vision of an easy path to ecstatic happiness on the removal of the one obstacle. Yet the thought of killing does not seriously enter the minds of the majority who would stand to gain by somebody else's .,eatb, for the simple reason that they shrink from a crime of which the very sound of the name conveys a sense of horror. Civilisation has, in fact, successfully created an atmosphere of wholesome dread by resolving to think of murder as a crime entirely apart from all others,—as one which deserves a penalty that would be excessive for every other crime in the world. Society is forced to protect itself in this way because it is based on the assumption that murder will not be committed. Murder is so easy. It solves so• many difficulties which are not soluble in any other manner. Therefore the fact that it is by far the greatest of all anti-social crimes must be brought home to every member of the community. Other crimes only speak ; murder cries out. That is the whole argument for capital punishment, and it can never cease to have its force.
How easily murder may burst out and spread like an epidemic, in spite of all, may be judged very well from the extraordinary list of crimes now before the country. But murder is not only imitative, as it is perhaps in the present phenomena. If the view of the community that nothing can extenuate murder is not kept constantly before the eyes of a person tempted to yield to an exceptional temptation to kill, that person may take the fatal step of introducing his own judgment—possibly a good judgment of its kind—into the matter. There was a case a few years ago of a boy passionately devoted to his sister, who believed she might be dragged down into ruin by her mother, who had given way to drink. He did what he could to save the situation, and at last made up his mind that there was no remedy but the removal of his mother, who had forfeited her title to be called a mother. He killed her. His justifica- tion seemed to him complete. He, in fact, executed her, claiming the right of private judgment. Here was a motive not only intelligible but of its sort pure. Yet it ignored by far the most important part of the whole argument,— the argument on which the structure of society is reared, and without which society could not possibly continue. There was once a distinguished physician in London who used to tell his pupils that they should never dismiss from their minds the possibility of murder in the case of a mysterious illness, however little suspicious the circumstances might be. And he used to quote his experience when he was called into consultation with a local practitioner who was baffled by the illness of a clergyman's wife. The physician asked the clergyman : " Has the possibility of poisoning occurred to you P" "It has," was the answer, "and I have been so careful to guard against it that I have actually made it a practice to prepare my wife's food myself." " Then I dismiss the thought," replied the physician suavely; "but as I have already taken a sample of the food I found in the bed- room, I may as well analyse it in London as a matter of form." The clergyman thanked the physician for his scrupulous care. The latter returned to London, and the former shot himself. The wife recovered, and—this may be embroidery—erected a memorial to her husband in the parish church.
Murder, we said, is an imitative thing. Once relax the pre- caution of society and the practice of murder would instantly respond. For years those who advocated the abolition of capital punishment pointed to the example of France, where abolition was practically accepted. Fortunately the French law had not been formally changed—one can well believe that it would be a difficult matter to re-enact a measure legalising capital punishment after it had been done away with—and recently some murderers have been executed in France in complete accordance with general feeling.
Murder is not the result always of cold-blooded calculation. The very fact that it can be imitative shows that it may come spasmodically and without warning, like "running amok." What is required, then, is some check which acts, as it were, automatically, and holds a man back by some scarcely defined and almost instinctive fear. It may not be, perhaps, that he actually 'visualises the gallows when he is in a transport of fury or avarice, but the implanted recollection that murder is an indescribably terrible offence does deter him. The advocate of the abolition of capital punishment says that a man who can pass into the frame of mind to commit murder could not conceivably be restrained by the fear of hanging at the fatal moment when the blood rushes to his head and he stands, as the Greeks used to say, outside himself. Of excep- tionally unbalanced minds that is very likely true, but it is quite untrue of the large class of minds which, while coming well within the definitions of sanity and personal responsibility, are still in need of being helped to resist themselves. This is what the advocate of abolition always forgets. It is the general horror of murder, agreed upon by the whole body of civilised men, which acts with exceptional force in what we might call the neutral classes of humanity.
Particularly is this restraint necessary in the case of women who are tempted to rid themselves of the burden and disgrace of illegitimate children. The more we think of the lenity with which this crime is judged to-day by well-meaning senti- mentalists, the more are we appalled. As though a helpless baby were quite unworthy of protection, and could be drowned like a kitten in a tub ! A correspondent told us lately of a. girl who killed her child and was acquitted by the jury, and immediately afterwards was able to say : "All the people round about have been congratulating me, and I have so many invitations I don't know which to accept first." Compare with this the case of another girl who kept her baby alive, but was imprisoned for a month for neglecting to pay the promised 5s. weekly for its maintenance. How could she fail, as our correspondent remarked, to compare her lot with that of the murderess who has walked out of Court scot-free, has no incubus on her hands, no need to pay 5s. a week out of her slender wages, and has so many invitations that she does not know which to accept first P If the advocates of the abolition of capital punishment were logical, they would set up the.definite plea of irresponsibilily on behalf of women who kill their illegitimate children. No doubt there are cases in which irresponsibility could be proved; and, indeed, when- ever the plea was made it would deserve the gravest con- sideration. We are second to no one in condemning the cruelty and futility of punishing people for crimes whioh they committed in a state of semi-insanity. But the efforts of mistaken benevolence are directed, not to proving the irre- sponsibility of the mother, but to palliating the crime. Those who are urging the thoroughly organised treatment of the feeble-minded have all the logic that the others lack. The expense to the country is enormous owing to the unending treatment of irresponsible persons as though they were responsible. When humanity and ,economy, as we said last week, point in the same direction as they do in demanding this rerorm, the argument is overwhelmm. g.
The so-called humanitarians take so inverted a view of the whole problem of crime that they sometimes speak of the tracking down of a criminal as though it were an act of vindictiveness performed at an exorbitant and unjustifiable expense to the State. The murdered person is already half forgotten—" dead is dead, and gone is gone "—and they con- ceive of the act of prosecution as though it were persecution,— a relentlessly managed business which concerns only the State and the one criminal. This, of course, leaves out of sight the entire community, whose interest it is that the author of the worst of crimes shall be tracked down to his ultimate lair, whatever the trouble and whatever the price, and that every would-be murderer shall be aware when he is contempt ting the deed that he himself will be no exception to the rule of the land.
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