RISK AND CALLOUSNESS.
PERHAPS the only very unusual feature in this shocking Whitechapel disclosure is the evidence it seems to give that a man may, by use, as completely lose his appreciation of the risk he incurs from his fellow-creatures, when he is setting their laws at defiance, as he almost certainly will lose, by use, his appreciation of the risk which he incurs in common with his fellow-creatures, when he is encountering some ordinary peril in the interests of country, or even merely in the interests of commerce. No one expects a man who is habitually in the battle-field, or who works habitually in a powder-mill, or who goes up habitually in a balloon, to keep his sense of the dangerous character of his calling fresh in his mind from day to day. If a man is in the habit of breaking-in young horses, he will soon for- get that he is in any special peril of his life. The regularly,- trained chamois-hunter cannot realise his special danger, and the veteran in an active campaign is soon blunted to the special terrors of war. We are quite accustomed to seeing the joint effects of habit and companionship in rubbing off all the excitement in the sense of danger, however real ; but we commonly suppose that the necessity of solitude, that an enforced secret from the world which it is known that the world would severely condemn, will prevent this gradual loss of excited feeling, and perhaps even stimulate the natural and wholesome sense of fear into one both morbid and paralysing. But in this Whitechapel case, at least, this has clearly not been the effect of long concealment. We do not, of course, know whether it will turn out that the body buried in Whitechapel was or was not Harriet Lane's, and still less whether, if it was, she had been murdered, and murdered by the man who was found in the act of trying to get rid of the remains. That is for our Courts to decide, and we should be very sorry to prejudice the decision in the least. But this seems quite clear,—that a woman's body had been buried for a considerable period in the premises at Whitechapel, and that the prisoner Wainwright became aware of the danger of keeping it there, and wished to transfer it to some safer place ; that for that purpose he dug it up, or had it dug up, and hacked in pieces, and wrapped it up in American cloth, and got a 'fellow- -workman to help him bring it out, and then conveyed it in a cab from one London house to another. Yet he took such slovenly means to guard against the discovery of a proceeding of the im- portance of which to himself he was clearly well aware, as we may gather from his offer of a bribe to the police, that, first, he did not buy cloth enough to make up the horrid packages safely ; next, he allowed a man who was not in the secret to he twice alone with the packages ; and thirdly, he invited a companion,—a woman who appears not to be accused of any complicity,—to accompany him in the cab on his dangerous errand. Now the ordinary inference from such a course of action would be that the man did not know what it was he was carrying. And but for the offer of a bribe to the police, that -would have been the inference drawn by a great number of people, from the evidence as we first heard it narrated. It seemed to most people simply incredible that a man who knew what was in those packages should have been so easy in his mind as to the event, that he did not even take common care to keep the secret to himself,—that he economised foolishly in the very covering of his ghastly baggage,—that he was just as willing to leave it in the hands of another as to keep guard over it himself,—and that he even invited superfluous company during the very journey on which the safety of his secret depended. Here, then, is a clear case in which conscience certainly did not make a coward of one man, but in which rather he grew so well accus- tomed to his revolting secret, that it hardly occurred to him as on the cards that anybody would find it out. As the rope-dancer or the gymnast accustoms himself by small degrees to doing what turns the heads of the wondering crowd, and makes them almost giddy with superfluous sympathy, so apparently the dealings which had gone on so long with this corpse in Whitechapel, in the form of efforts used to destroy the remains and to render their decay lees offensive, had rendered Wainwright daily more obtuse to the risk of discovery. It seems clear that while the effect of so long- .sustained a pressure of secrecy on some minds would be to render them so sensitive at every nerve to the risk of discovery, that if they blundered at all, it would be from excess and superfluity of nervous precaution, there is really one man,—and we may pre- sume that there must be many,—on whom its effect is just the opposite,—to give him confidence, and even careless confidence, in his secret's inviolability. Just as a man who is constantly riding at high fences without getting a fall loses by degrees all his fear of a fall, so Wainwright, by his habituation to the practice of dealing freely with a dead body as he thought most likely to serve his purpose, appears to have lost almost all dread of any one's penetrating his secret.
And this seems the stranger, because the merely physical horror of such dealings With a dead body for mouths after its interment would be likely to enhance all the fear which either conscience, or the anticipation of the loathing with which society treats such conduct, would excite. It is not very uncommon to find men of pleasure and of a certain attractiveness,—such as apparently, judging by the testimony of many persons, Wainwright possesses —in whom there is a perfect indifference to social opinion ; and it is not, perhaps, so very uncommon, though it is uncommon, to find men of pleasure in whom there is but little physical shrinking from the details of death, and the terrible changes which death works on the bodies of those whom they have intimately known; but it is certainly very uncommon to find men of pleasure, and also of a certain attractiveness, who are able to throw off both the fear of other persons' horror at their doings, and the physical horror which these sort of doings are themselves calculated to inspire. Wainwright, however, under any theory of the matter, must be tolerably indifferent to both these feelings. It seems quite clear that instead of providing every ordinary precau- tion against detection, much less every precaution which a morbid fear of discovery could suggest, he took less than -common pains to guard his proceedings from exposure. And it seems also quite clear that his physical horror of such dealings with a corpse so long buried must have been far less than it is in ordinary men, or he could never have carried out the preparations for the removal. It is very singular that a man evidently regarded as taking " in his manners by his own class, should have been thus doubly obtuse both to the terrors of social opinion and to the physical horrors of the grave. As a rule, pleasant manners imply a certain amount of sensitiveness to the opinions of others ; and also a certain amount of sympathy with ordinary tastes and feel- ings. That a man should have such manners, who must have esti- mated the peril of this detection at very little higher than a good rider estimates the peril of a difficult leap, and who could deal with the remains which had been so long buried near him with the sort of callousness with which he would have dealt with a real package of " bristles," such as, it is said, he represented the dreadful parcel to be, is really anomalous, and looks more like a departure from ordinary human dispositions than is common even in the history of this kind of investigation. We hardly remember a case of deliberate mutilation of a corpse so long after death, so long after the subsidence of all the passions which are ex- cited by human relations with the living ; and certainly we re- member no case in which the precautions taken against discovery, instead of being elaborate, hardly betrayed common anxiety to conceal what was going on. It looks as if both all physical and social sensitiveness had been completely absent from a man's mind who could do the things Wainwright has done in the way he has done them,—and this we say, without even implying any opinion at all as to the way in which the woman whose remains he was dealing with came by her death. Wainwright may be as innocent as one of his own children of any murder, and yet his careless mode of providing for the body after its long interment would be none the less marvellous. For most men, the mere possession of such fearful "fragments of the tomb," and inability to dispose safely of them, would have been a hideous nightmare, and had any attempt like that ultimately made by Wainwright, been thought of, no precautions would have been considered too elaborate for the case. The packages would have been wrapped and rewrapped in threefold coverings ; night-time would have been chosen for the enterprise ; no one would have been allowed to help in the task, or left alone with the packages ; certainly no appointment would have been made with a third person on the journey. But as far as we can see, no such importance at all was attached by Wain- wright to the effort to conceal what he was doing. Had he been carrying brushes, he could not have conveyed them with less preparations for secrecy.
If, then, it were universally true that "conscience doth make cowards of us all," it is pretty certain that Wain- wright could not be guilty of the crime imputed to him, for less show of fear in the arrangements for removing the corpse could not have been made. But without raising that question, there can be little doubt but that the sense of danger, of reluctance, and of disgust, which would, in ordinary cases, have possessed the whole soul of a man bent on such an errand, must have been so singularly wanting in Wainwright's mind, as to suggest almost a new human type different from any with which the world is as yet familiar.
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