THE VERDICT ON DEEMING.
THERE never was much reason to fear that a Melbourne jury would acquit Deeming. Even an English jury would hardly have been beguiled by the absurd plea put forward on his behalf, and in Melbourne it must have been utterly thrown away. The tradition of the old convict days has been kept alive in Australia by the makers of legends as well as by local historians, and to tell jurymen in Melbourne that because a man was unusually wicked, therefore he was irresponsible, was to waste intellectual force. The people there have heard of men a good deal worse than Deeming, and are inclined by tradition to think that if such phenomenal persons are shot or hanged before they are tried, the world is well rid of scoundrels, and benevolently spared a perfectly useless cere- monial. Lynch-law has never been established in Australia ; but the main reason for that is not the temper of the people, or its ignorance of criminal possibilities, but the certainty that if a criminal can but be caught, the jnrymen who try him will neither be cajoled, nor intimidated, nor bribed into breaking their oaths. The argument advanced, too, was in itself very thin. In a land where drinking to excess is common, " nervous " disease will be common too, and "psychological" doctors were found in Melbourne to testify that if Deeming was not exactly insane, he was a victim of uncontrollable impulse; but they did not produce one particle of evidence in support of their contention, except a number of assertions made by Deeming himself, entirely un- corroborated, and as a matter of fact, denied by his relatives at home. Indeed, all the facts of his life tend to prove the contrary of his defence. So far from acting on uncontrollable impulse, Deeming throughout his life behaved like a cunningly cautious criminal, who could and did wait his opportunity, who could prepare his means carefully, and who, so far from being reckless of consequences, was intensely afraid of them, and guarded against them by precautions which were almost scientific in their skilfulness, and which, in one instance at least, were marvellously successful. But that murder be- came a habit with him, Deeming would never have been convicted—morally convicted, that is—of his original massacre at Rainhill. Nobody even asserted that he was insane in the ordinary sense of the word, and "instinctive criminality" is hardly a defence to put before plain men. They can see just as well as the cultivated that while the plea may in some rare case be true, and a man may exist so abnormally consti- tuted that crime, merely as crime, tempts him irresistibly— the history of the Renaissance in Italy certainly suggests a theory of the kind, and we could not in any other way explain Gilles de Retz—the defence is one which only Omniscience can test, and which no human Court can possibly entertain. If it did, it must listen to the plea whenever any crime was perpetrated repeatedly, with this amazing result, that the greater the criminal, the greater would be the certainty of his escape from justice. Jack Sheppard would be let off free, and the boy-burglar, half-hero in his own eyes, would be left to suffer the sentence of the law. Such a defence is forbidden, not only by common sense and common ex- perience, but by consideration for the safety and the morality of the community, which, if it were frequently accepted, would be driven to decree, as Moses did, that the perpetrators of criminal acts must be punished irrespective of motive, or of any question of moral guilt. We could not have every burglar pleading kleptomania with success, even if we -all believed him to be a victim of kleptomania.
Deeming, as the jury very sensibly said in the rider they appended to their verdict, was perfectly sane, so far as human eye can perceive, though he was a criminal of a type becoming so rare in this country, that Englishmen are inclined almost instinctively to explain him as a being not governed by ordinary reason. He was a perfectly rotten man, in whom conscience was dead, and to whom crime had become a stimulating excitement, such as gambling is to many rich men. He did not particularly care about the profits of it, indeed his murders did not usually yield cash, but sought it for itself, would rather get out of a difficulty through a big crime—to him, -only a big but exciting risk—than through any other way. There was no particular reason for his murdering his first wife and his four children. Deeming was a cosmopolitan, at home anywhere in any English-speaking place, and he could have deserted his victims easily enough, just as a rich man -could raise a sum of money ; but the great crime, his form of gambling, attracted him, and he perpetrated the hideous deed with the coolest judgment and foresight as to chances of detection. He intended to repeat it with Miss Matheson, whom he subsequently married, but who, moved by some instinct, or some revelation made in bravado, fled from him ; and he did repeat it, even in detail, with his third wife, Emily Mather. Miss Rounsevell would, but for his arrest, have fallen a fourth victim; and it is quite possible that there were others -of whom the world has never heard. None of these crimes moved him in the very least. He was always as happy as a rabbit who has eaten her progeny. The universal testimony of all who came across him is that he was a pleasant fellow, given, no doubt, to boasting and showing off, but sociable, genial, open-handed, and inclined to a loud and effusive hospitality. One or two witnesses say they suspected him, but it was after his crimes were known, and their suspicions seem always to have referred to his methods of getting the gold and diamonds which he displayed and lavished so pro- f nsely. It is imagined, of course, that his demeanour was all assumed, and that he must at heart have been torn by inward anxieties ; but we suspect those feelings are all read into him, that his conscience was dead, and that when safe from pursuit, as he was, for instance, on board ship, he was really as light- hearted as he seemed. There are in some men, if we may perpe- trate a bull which exactly conveys our meaning, inconceivable -depths of shallowness, and the peculiarity is constantly found in habitual swindlers, to whose class Deeming originally belonged. Montague Tiggs are rarely melancholy. Palmer, the poisoner of Rugeley, was a man of much the same type. He is believed to have poisoned thirteen persons in succession, but seemed to each successive victim rather a pleasant host. Naturally, such a man as Deeming, both as supreme egotist and as it shallow person, would be inordinately vain, as was also Williams, De Qaincey's hero, who used to dress in coloured silk for his murders ; and it was this vanity, we believe, which gave Deeming's crimes their special direction. He was proud .of the ease with which he, a man of no stature or appearance, could captivate ordinary men and respectable women, a pride -which he constantly betrayed at the trial. The two things which vobviously hurt him were the hostile glances of the spectators, and the fact that Miss Rounsevell, as she showed by her evi- dence, bad, on the revelation of his crimes, entirely escaped his influence. He could not bear that shock to his vanity, and was eager after his sentence to have some message or visit from her showing that she believed in his innocence,—that is, had been successfully deceived to the last. His boasts to his intimates took the same direction ; and it is difficult to doubt either that he will make a confession, or that it will be intended to show himself as an even greater criminal than he really was. It may be said that his extraordinary outbursts of fury, though consistent with morbid vanity, are inconsistent with shallowness ; but the peculiarity is frequently found in both men and women of his type, and springs, we imagine, from a very deep root in human nature. The utterly conscienceless tend to revert to animal conditions, and the liability to outbreaks of uncontrollable fury is found in all animals, even the gentlest, such as gazelles and sheep. Deeming was, in fact, simply a typical criminal of a most dangerous kind, and though examples are rare here, they are not infrequent on the Continent, where a vain, shallow, boastful profligate often develops into a resolute murderer. Deeming's courage is doubted, because he often trembled and fainted; but he was collected enough on the last day of his trial, and he was probably rather a nervous man than an irresolute one. He was clearly resolute enough to persist in a most dangerous career, and to adhere to his horrible conception of life as a state in which continuous crime offered the strongest tempta- tion as a pleasant and stimulating method of existence.
It is said that the immense publicity given to this man's career, his enormous notoriety, must do mischief; but we doubt the applicability of the doctrine, usually quite sound, to the particular case. Deemings are born, not made, and the vulgar conclusion about the criminal will be the healthy one that superfluity of naughtiness does not pay ; that there is a point at which Providence itself intervenes ; and that when human justice is fairly roused, the world is but "a safe and dreary prison for its enemies." The English-speaking world, to its remotest Colonies, has joined in the pursuit of this great villain, and in spite of his disguises, his precautions, his vast experience in crime, has pinned him fast. His own exclamation that he had been tried by the Press and not by the law, though but one more illustration of the desire of criminals to declare mankind in a conspiracy against them, is so far true that undoubtedly the indignant opinion of aroused civilisation did much to ensure a righteous retribution. To be notorious on three continents may be pleasant, but the belief that if once detected, three continents will join to hunt the criminal down, is not the kind of conviction which fosters enjoyment in the excitement of crime.
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