Copse

“ It was the hour when crime and guilt, drunken rage and grief, mingled together their fearful agencies; and every street and alley was crowded by half-naked wretches quarrelling and singing: some screaming in accents of heartbroken anguish; others shouting their blasphemies with voices hoarse from passion; age and infancy, manhood in its prime, the mother and the young girl, were all there, reeling from drunkenness, or faint from famine; some struggling in deadly conflict, others bathing the lips and temples of ebbing life. ”

“ A poor, harmless young officer—but why enter into the details of the infamous case? they are but too well known, and if ever cruelty, pride, and cowardice, and things much worse than even cruelty, cowardice, and pride were brought to light, and, at the same time, countenanced, they were in that case. ”

“ But believe, then, in the poetry of the police. He is free, but he is ours. A pretty criminal is the dear child; but we will leave him on the tree, not gather him too soon; he will be more worth our trouble by-and-by. Shun immature fruit—it tries too much the teeth and the stomach. ”

“ To criminals who are guilty of enormities, when the temptation, to a sober mind, bears no proportion to the horror of the act, or the probability of detection and punishment, the same observation applies; and every violent passion, as well as anger, may be termed a short madness. ”

“ The darkness would increase our vexation, our anger would return as we woke, and become more bitter. Dark and melancholy passions — amongst which are hate, revenge, and jealousy — grow stronger in the night hours, just as wounds and some kinds of diseases do.
In quarrels, law-suits, and every kind of dissension, we ' deliver ’ one another to ' the officer,’ because we mutually offend each other: — therefore we have reason to fear lest we be cast into that ' prison ’ whence we shall not go out 'till we re-pay the last farthing,’ [2] according to the strictest justice. ”

“ I was myself beginning to feel a sentiment of pleasure, and to picture to my mind the unfortunate felon, converted, by a few words of counsel, and still fewer dollars of charity, into an honest and worthy member of society, when—oh horror of horrors!—the repenting convict suddenly snatched up a brand from the fire, and discharged it, with a violence that would have felled an ox, full upon the head of his patron. ”

“ If, sir, you have a sister, a daughter, a mother, a wife, picture her—after such a careless accident—grasped by a policeman, dragged through the streets, exposed to the eyes of the jesting crowd—the blackest construction put upon her action, shrinking before a magistrate, cast into prison, and, God knows what else!—and all because of an act, not in reality more inexplicable than that of a man who walks off with a hat not his own, or another person's umbrella—in a fit of forgetfulness. ”

“ Will such back and belly arrangements as those I have described deter men from sin by the fear of its consequences?
Why should not those felons—for such they all are, I presume, till the term of their punishment be over—why should they sleep after five? why should their diet be more than strong health requires? why should their hours of work be light? Why that drinking of spirits and smoking of tobacco among men whose term of life in that prison should be a term of suffering? ”

“ And now within all the automatic succession of theoretic phrases—distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbours and of his own wife. For the pain, as well as the public estimate of disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession. To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner’s dock is disgrace. ”

“ In that event I should have a witness and the detection and punishment of the offenders would exonerate all those who in case of my removal would have part of the criminal credit of molesting the private residence of a professor and a [Pg 29] scholar. 2d, The fear of personal injury from the hands of one, who for many years past has been known to be a man of peaceable and unexceptionable behavior and who never attacked or struck any man in his life, appears to have its origin in a consciousness of guilt and to be a virtual admission of it. ”

“ In the alloting of punishment the age, former social status or mental qualities of the offender are rarely taken into account. There are no excuses, no explanations. Take the gravest crime of all—cowardice. ”

“ They ask for help for the brain, starved, disorganized, and growing feebler. We give them the pledge and prayer, and taunt them as vile, and willful, and wretched sinners. What wonder that the glimmerings of reason and the lights of a higher manhood should disappear in the darkness of total insanity under such treatment? In the delirium of criminal assault, or the imbecilities of the low drunkard, or the strange acts and changes of character in the so-called moderate drinker, they mutely appeal for aid, and we brutally fine, imprison, and persecute them. ”

“ We wear rags, we eat scraps fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols, we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our incongruity. ”

“ We are poor men and contrive to maintain our family somehow. After having seen, Sir, how you—a Government servant and a man of wealth and position—have fared at the hands of the Police, it would be insane for us to court their displeasure. ”

“ If we succeed, other things being equal, in adducing{356} a number of feminine characteristics with one of which the cruelty of the crime may be connected and explained, we have a clew to the criminal. The instances mentioned,—the motherly care of house and family, frugality, miserliness, hardness to servants, cruelty to aged parents,—seem rare and not altogether rational, yet they occur frequently and give the right clew to the criminal. ”

“ Yet such trivialities make history.
If you have a good conscience, the only wielder of temporary power who appears mighty and yet mild is the policeman. To the bad conscience he represents more the solid terrors of the law than the Lord Chief Justice himself. He is the only creature from whom familiarity never takes away any of his terrors.
We once had an old cook who put it in a nutshell. "Happy is he who can look a policeman in the face," she declared. ”

“ I know that policemen themselves often dread more to arrest a half-drunken woman than a man, and that it requires more than one man to overpower the maniac who, with tooth and nail and the fury of drink, fights more like a demon than a human being. ”

“ They are highly emotional before, during, or after the crime, which they do not commit treacherously, but openly, and often by ill- chosen methods, the first that present themselves. Now and then, however, one encounters criminals of passion who premeditate a crime, and

carry it out treacherously, either by reason of their colder and less impulsive temperament, or as the outcome of preconceived ideas or a widespread sentiment, in cases where we have to do with a popular form of lawlessness, such as the vendetta. ”

“ They must endure, if not endorse, these twin vices, embodied, as they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son, employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend. ”

“ The policeman who finds a drunken man or woman on his beat arrests the unfortunate with as much wrath and probably as much brutality as he would show a burglar or a murderer; the committing magistrate before whom the victim [Pg 127] is taken treats him or her precisely as he would treat a criminal; in the various penal institutions to which this man or woman is committed the idea upon which their whole treatment is based is that of punishment. ”

“ CHAPTER IV CRIMINALOIDS We have seen how, owing to disease, alcoholism and epilepsy, physically and psychically degenerate individuals make their appearance in a community of normal persons. But a large proportion of the crimes committed cannot be attributed to lunatics, epileptics, or the morally insane, nor do all criminals show that aggregate of atavistic and morbid characters,—the cruelty and bestial insensibility of the savage, the impulsiveness of the epileptic, the licentiousness, delusions, and impetuosity of the madman,—which we find united in the born criminal. ”

“ Such defects as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, extreme cruelty, moral perversity, repeated conviction for crime, or habitual drunkenness should be made of equal weight with unfaithfulness and desertion, as indicating innate inferiority rather than an "occasional crime." ”

“ Cleansed of our sins by honest labor, we shall sin no more. When I pass a policeman on the street, my heart swells to reflect that he is not my enemy but my friend, sworn to protect honest citizens like you and me. ”

“ It is not true, of course, that crime is a disease. It is criminology that is a disease. But the suggestion about the painful duties of a policewoman leads naturally to my deduction about the painful duties of a hangwoman. ”

“ Many a pleasant countenance covers an aching heart, and many a gorgeous costume hides the deadly worm; jealousy, disappointed ambition, blasted hopes, cold neglect, and conjugal infidelity, produce many a miserable heart; and rage, envy, malice, and murder, lurk in many instances under the cover of pomp, splendor, competency, or magnificence; not to mention the care, anxiety, and trouble of officers of state in these troublous times. If the poor knew the situation of many of those in different circumstances, they would not envy their situations. ”

“ But with the larger number the enticements of appetite are as strong and enslaving in one grade of society as in another, and the disturbance of normal conditions as great. And so you see that the wife of an intoxicated army officer or lawyer or banker may be in as much danger from his drunken and insane fury, when alone with him and unprotected, as the wife of a street-sweeper or hod-carrier. ”

“ The last class is that of occasional criminals, who without any inborn and active tendency to crime lapse into crime at an early age through the temptation of their personal condition, and of their physical and social environment, and who do not lapse into it, or do not relapse, if these temptations disappear. ”

“ Any experienced criminal psychologist will tell you, when you ask him, whether he has been much subject to mistakes in trying to explain women’s crimes from the starting-point of their ennui. The neighborhood knows of the periods of this ennui, and the sinner thinks that they are almost discovered if she is asked about them. Cherchez la femme, cherchez l’amour; cherchez l’ennui; and hundreds of times you find the solution. ”

“ I sometimes wish that the policeman on duty there—so Argus-eyed to arrest the tiny shoe, when temptation is too strong for childhood which has always been cooped within city limits—would bestow some of their notice upon the men-loafers who stretch themselves at full length upon benches, occupying them to the exclusion of the children; puffing vile tobacco, and making a spittoon of the path through which ladies pass. ”

“ You will notice, gentlemen, that Chief Justice Williams does not deny the existence of every kind of moral insanity. As I explained before, not the will but the passions may really be diseased or insane, and they may prompt the lunatic to commit very unreasonable and even criminal acts. ”

“ The criminal impulses, rage, fear, lust, pride, vanity, covetousness, and so on, are the same in general 381type as those of the normal person; the main difference is that the criminal lacks, in one way or another, the higher mental organization—a phase of the social organization—to which these impulses should be subordinate. It would not be very difficult to take the seven deadly sins—Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Lust—and show that each may be regarded as the undisciplined manifestation of a normal or functional tendency. ”

“ Where may we hope to find the criminal in his most natural state of body and mind—in confinement, a balked and disappointed man, or in the open, faring forth on his plundering errands, seeking whom and what he may devour? ”

“ If facts, as they were known to me, became known to others, an eager policeman, anxious to fasten guilt on some one, might arrest her on a capital charge. Apart from the question of contaminating hands, what might not be the effect, on one already in so pitiful a condition, of so hideous an accusation. ”

“ You will be disdained; the mob will throw stones at you. Policemen will drag you into prison. You shall be for the humble as for the powerful, for the poor as for the rich, a subject of laughter, an object of disgust and of pity. ”

“ Imagine the offender to be poor, and you complete the picture. He who should be the counsellor, the comfort, the ornament, of that family, is its tempter, its trouble, its reproach. His wife and children, when alone, enjoy a respite, and begin to brighten up ”

“ We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more meltingly and fearfully painted. ”