SCHOOL FOR CRIMINALS.
THREE murderesses of the order now so common in this country have been settling their last accounts with the world : let us see what the world has done for them.
Mary Ann Gearing, convicted at Lewes of poisoning her hus- band at Guestling, was hanged on Tuesday. Before her death, she confessed that she had murdered two of her sons and at- tempted to murder a third. She was quite penitent, and wrote several affectionate letters to her family ; the murderous propen- sity, it seems, not being incompatible with the sympathies of kin. In these letters she averred that she was prepared for death : how bad she been prepared for life?-
" Her maiden name was Plumb. Her father, George Plumb, was an honest hard-working agricultural labourer, living at Westfield in Sussex. She was sent out to service when very young; and lived at Coghurat Farm, then in the posses- sion of Mr. Thomas Wood; but being detected in dealing improperly with the milk and butter money, she was dismissed. She then went to live at another place in Westfield, where Benjamin Geering was likewise employed. An intima- cy sprang up between them, and she became pregnant when only sixteen years of age. The old bastardy-laws were then in force ; and by putting them in opera- tion, the parish-officers compelled her to marry Geering ; which was sorely against her inclination, and she had even to be carried into church. Ten children were the fruits of this marriage ; of whom eight are living, and two have died, as she has confessed, of arsenic administered ny her. She and her husband had frequent quarrels; and it is stated that she was a gin-drinker and a determined opium- eater. Of course these habits caused her to be in frequent want of money, and this want was aggravated by a practice she had of pawning the best clothes of her husband and sons every Monday morning and redeeming them on Saturday night."
Thus introduced to wedlock, how could the wretched woman hold it sacred ? What lessons did she learn from the practical teaching of the law? For an act of juvenile incontinence, com- mitted probably in the grossest ignorance, the parish gave her as a slave for life to the seducer: she endured him for eighteen years, and then resorted to the means of divorce customary among her class.
Rebecca Smith, convicted at. the Wiltshire Assizes of poisoning her child at Westbury, was hanged at Devizes on Thursday. She confessed that she had poisoned eight of her children, by applying arsenic to her own breast when she suckled them. Re- becca was not a woman of abandoned character. She was re- gular in her religious observances ; was accounted by her neigh- bours an inoffensive and industrious woman; and had endured no small privation through the drunkenness of a husband to whom she had borne ten children. Although she had not devoted herself to a life of celibacy, she had evidently adopted a practical philosophy of the Malthusian school. She said that she had killed her children because she was afraid they would come to want. She had selected the eldest, a girl, for rearing ; and she expressed a fear that after her death the child would be neglected by her husband. She had perhaps heard of such suggestions as that actually pro- mulgated in print by " Marcus," about 1837, for the " painless extinction " of children whose parents could not afford to rear them. She had clearly perceived that at "Nature's feast there was no cover" for her offspring, so she annually bid the little candidate for existence "begone." She had probably heard of wires who had been reproached by stern parish-officers with their maternity, as a crime ; and she had taken a short cut to settling "the population question" in her own family. It is evident that Rebecca Smith was a woman not without conscience or reflection ; but she was perplexed ; and her "error in judgment" was ex- piated at the gallows. No doubt, a natural religious feeling would check these enor- mities ; but how differently is that religious feeling fostered ! At Chippenbam, several humane persons endeavour to obtain for Re- becca Smith a practical extension of Christian mercy, in the shape of a commuted sentence : and one does not see how capital pun- ishment is to elevate her sense of Christian faith, or to check the perverted form of maternity which she has exemplified, half so well as a living expiation would. At Lewes, the Chaplain who had the cure of Mary Ann Geering'a soul humanely spared her presence at the " condemned sermon." At Coventry, the Reve- rend Mr. Chapman, Chaplain to the Gaol, actually subjects the condemned murderess, Mary Ball, to torture, by way of enforcing his religious instruction. To give, her " a foretaste of hell," he held her struggling hand over the flame of a candle, and as she winced, asked her, " What that would be compared to the tor- ments of hell, where her whole frame would be burning for a hundred years ? " Mr. Chapman was called to account by the Visiting Magistrates, and he excused himself by averring that he had acted from "the best of motives ": Mary Ball was a woman of obtuse intellect, and he had done it "to facilitate her sense of pain." Precisely what has been said to recusants, Popish and Protestant, at the stake. By the same rule, Mr. Chapman himself might with equal decorum, and not with less need, be afforded some intellectual help to the comprehension of the excesses to which bigotry has betrayed men, in a foretaste of Smithfield buntings or a sample of the rack. He has been suspended from its duties, and will probably be discharged ; yet it must be con- fessed that he has only driven this kind of doctrinal torture to a practical extreme : it is quite possible that the physical pain which he inflicted on the obtuse Mary Ball was far less cruel than the moral agony inflicted by means less coarse on less coarse natures.
But see in these few instances, casually brought within the scope of a week's news, what a mass of confusion is the practical moral code taught to the poor and ignorant. Note the instruc- tion on matrimonial rights and duties conveyed by the Poor-law to Mary Ann Geering ; the practical illustration of Malthusian tenets in the decent Rebecca Smith ; the exemplification of Chris- tian doctrine to Mary Ball. What are the ignorant, tried by the temptations of necessity and shameless opportunity, to make out of such materials?
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