CIVILISATION AND MURDER.
DOES the machinery of civilisation do more upon the whole to secure our safety or to endanger it P It is a question of no less than life and death import for some of us, and it must be admitted that what we have read in the newspapers for the last year does not point to a re. assuring answer. Let it be granted that the very most is made by the Press of every sensational killing, for there is nothing so valuable to any news-sheet as a good murder. It would pay a syndicate of papers handsomely to subsidise a few criminals, no matter what they had to lay out in settling blackmail accounts. But in the meantime they have to do their best with whatever turns up in the legitimate way of business, and if they get the right sort of crime, they make England ring with it ; and the right sort of crime is one that proves the existence of a common danger. Probably once a month on an average it happens that some brainsick potboy shoots the girl he used to walk out with because she has taken up with another sweetheart, and even commoner are the double suicides or murders followed by snicide,—the work of people who find life too hard or too unpleasant to go on with. Dramatically, these crimes are by far the most interesting ; they show in the crudest, most unmistakeable form the wild play of those passions which in all ages have interested poets and writers of romance; they show what life is valued for by certain natures and how far it may be held in contempt. But the general public is not really stirred by these occurrences ; they do not touch it home. The average man knows very well that he is not going to be fool and beast enough to massacre his wife and children and himself on top of them ; the average girl knows very well that her sweetheart is not of a temper to brandish revolvers if she sets her cap in a new quarter,—or else she ie convinced that he will never have the occasion. These sporadic outbreaks are only the exception, from which we trust to our own admirable and balanced character to deliver us. But when an old gentleman is found with his throat out and his watch gone, or a lady with her brains beaten out in a railway carriage, then comes the harvest of the evening paper ; then we experience a not altogether dis- agreeable thrill of apprehension and a burning desire to know all about it; then we begin to take an interest in our police system, and clamour that our detectives should be sent to learn their business in France. Then, in short, we are really concerned to know if our lives are safe as we go about the world on our daily business.
The answer is plainly that they are not. No life, of course, is safe from one who runs amuck to take it; if a man wants to go and kill his enemy a little nerve makes the venture a certainty ; but he will probably hang for it, and so practically the enemy's life is safe from the man who wants to take it. What may be called rational murder—long premeditated killing for a sufficient motive—is exceedingly rare ; it is motiveless, sudden, unreasonable murder that none of us are quite assured from. Of course England is a big place with a large number of people in it and the percentage of these occur- rences is trifling; but we are inclined to think on the whole that a homicidal propensity is more easily gratified than it used to be. A young woman was killed near Windsor the other day, and the police were absolutely at fault. No reason could be assigned for the murder ; the old clue, cut bond ? who was to profit by it ? yielded absolutely no result. Still, this girl was walking by herself after dark in a more or less lonely place, and a timid woman will always avoid doing that ; but many a woman, however timid, has to travel by herself in railway carriages, and probably a great number of them suffer horrible apprehensions when they remember the tragedy of Miss Camp's death. A railway carriage in a suburban train which stops every five minutes
at crowded platforms would seem as safe as an omnibus ; yet this poor girl was killed not by any sudden stab, but after a violent struggle was hammered to death with a pestle, and shoved under the seat; and the man got away perfectly safe. He had only to get out of the carriage to be practically secure against detection so long as he kept his nerve. The immense accumulation of humanity in our towns and the migratory habits of our population afford a great shelter to the criminal. It is only in remote country villages that a stranger is noticed as a stranger ; everywhere else a man may come and go unchallenged; and in London itself you might walk down the streets with blood- stains all over you, and it is odds that so long as you went on your way quietly not a soul would notice. If there is any thread of motive linking the murderer to his victim, the police will probably get on the trail and work up along it. But if the criminal has obeyed a mere momentary impulse, who is to detect him P He may have seen a watch or money and suddenly struck ; he may have assaulted a woman, been threatened with detection, and preferred to ran the whole risk ; and if the thing has been done without premeditation he slips away, and can only be discovered, as a rule, by that strange garrulity of the criminal which gives him a morbid desire to talk over his exploit. A strange instance from France has been in the papers this last week. A pedlar named Vacher was arrested for a murder made still more horrible by mutilation, and he has now confessed to a string of sixteen such acts, the victims being of both sexes and of every age. Yet no suspicion seems ever to have rested on him. The desire to kill is present in a suppressed form in man, civilised or uncivilised ; it is an ugly thing to say, but it is the basis of the sporting instinct. Man is originally a beast of prey, contriving the death of other animals by subtlety, and like all other beasts of prey, he occasionally kills for the sake of merely killing. It is against nature for him to kill his own species; but all insanity—when it is not a mere paralysis—is an exaggeration of some funda- mental instinct in our nature, and homicidal mania is a form of the hunting instinct. The worst of these occurrences is that one leads to another as suicides do ; suggestion stimu- lates the obscure prompting. And there is no doubt that impunity helps, for these people are only "mad north-north- west" like Hamlet, and the gallows is a deterrent for them as well as for the common footpad.
The conclusion would seem to be that modern life with its continual movement is favourable to the murderer who kills on an impulse, but he is fortunately only the exception. Poisoning, the commonest of all forms of assassination and the deadliest, is much rarer, we should say, than it was, though much commoner than it is known to be. The happy hunting-ground for poisoners is a place like West Africa, where all food is a mess chopped up and stewed in a pot, where deadly vegetable poisons are abundant, and where there is a study of herbs but no analytical chemists. With us nowadays the old-fashioned herb-doctor hardly exists, and the " wise woman," who was probably a very real terror and danger to her neighbourhood, is no more heard of. It is said that in parts of England partial poisoning is common as a wife's revenge upon her husband ; but probably she has to go to the shop to buy ratsbane, and she knows well enough that the modern doctor is able to prove the existence of strych- nine in a body. So she avoids the risk of an inquest and merely gives her man a bad indigestion. Scientific poisoners, no doubt, then, still are to be found—or not to be found ; but we doubt their frequency. The one thing that civilisation does not seem able to check is the violent, brutal, and bloody homicide. The police, we think, always make the same mistake ; they persist in expecting to find an adequate motive. Now the man who does this sort of thing is precisely the creature with a strong brutish element who will act upon brute impulse ; a burst of anger, sudden access of greed—the motive in the Muller case—or an impulse of brutal desire, to take the commonest of crimes as an illustration. The police are themselves so familiar with the consequences of crime, and so interested in the professional law-breaker who calculates the risks, that they do not make allowance for the case of the brute who, in a whirlwind of rage or desire, is simply blind to everything but the action of the moment. He is the man who perpetrates the most notable crimes, and he is the man they .cannot discover.
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