THE TRAGEDY IN HOSIER LANE.
of any good thing, so full as regarded Providence of trust and distrust, trust for the future, and distrust for the present so methodical and so distraught, is an anomaly not explained by the easy but fallacious suggestion which the Coroner's jury in their act of care, were decorously laid out, and apparently in newly- pity so readily adopted.
THE interest of the Hosier-Lane tragedy seems to us to consist mainly-in the light it throws on one of the great social evils of this country,—that fear of poverty, rising constantly to the very verge of mania, which haunts certain valuable classes of the community, saps or rather corrodes their moral characters, poisons their lives, and very frequently destroys their instinctive faith. As a rule, the fear is concealed, from the motive which in part pro- duces it, the pride of respectability, and we doubt if the prosperous are ever quite aware, or, indeed, ever can be quite aware, of its intensity and diffusion. "I fear greatly," recently said a philan- thropist, who had singular opportunities of knowing the poor, "the next generation of Englishmen will be an utterly joyless people. As fast as they rise above savagery the fear of the future settles on them like a cloud." The terror penetrates their very souls like a superstition, till it becomes a permanent -constituent of their characters, never decreases, never disappears, paralyzes energy, and deprives them in the day of misfortune alike of recuperative power and reliance on the Divine. They can pray against all evils but this, against which Christ himself directed prayer. The frightful tragedy which has this week divided attention with the Irish Church is only an extreme instance of its effect, minor instances of which are witnessed every day. The unhappy couple whom the jury from a natural pity have pronounced insane, though every incident revealed showed unusual clearness of judgment and fixity of purpose, had clearly no other motive for their crime than terror of the future. Even supposing Duggan's own statement true, that he was harshly treated by his employer—a charge which the em- ployer distinctly denies—the harshness consisted only in a dismissal, and was only resented so savagely because that dismissal exasperated the permanent dread which ultimately drove husband and wife to crime. Duggan was just the kind of character to feel that dread in its utmost bitterness, an extremely respectable, laborious, but sickly and depressed man, with a strong desire to rise. He seems to have worked most diligently through life, to have kept any situation he obtained, to have been respected by his own family and neighbours, and to have complained habitually as his worst cross in life of his deficient education. He feared it would deprive him of the work as clerk on which alone he was dependent, his ill-health forbidding hard labour, while his family rendered any accumulation from his wages nearly impossible. He was reported by all who observed him to be extremely fond of his children, though, probably from poverty, he had not sent them to school, and the very incidents of the murder showed steady consideration for their happiness. He loved them, he says himself, in a letter either written or finished after their death, so much that .he could not endure to leave them in want, and there is no reason to accuse him of self-deception. If he had been thinking only of himself, self-destruction would have secured his end, release from immediate suffering. The means adopted for the murder were those which he knew would inflict least pain, and the poison was administered in sleep, and the bodies, as a last
" washed clothes. There was no passion, no hatred, no revenge impelling Duggan to the murder of the children ; nothing but fear, a fear which his wife shared as completely as himself. Her case, indeed, is more remarkable in some ways than his. Duggan was suffering from rupture, and possibly, therefore, from the extreme nervous disturbance which often accompanies that form of disease ; but his wife seems to have been a healthy woman, who brought up six children, and turned them out daily so neat that they were remarked by the neighbours for their tidiness.
There was no actual hunger upon her, for they had still 12s. in the house ; though it seems probable, from the surgeon's evidence, that she had either abstained from food for the sake of economy, or, as is more likely, had been unable, from the agitation of her own thoughts, to eat. We agree with the jury that she aided in the crime, for it is, in the first place, most improbable that she was poisoned in her sleep three hours after her children had all. died ; and, in the second, Duggan had no conceivable motive for inventing such a charge against his wife ; and he speaks of her in his letter to his brother as sharing in his design. Either he must have completely controlled her will, which, with the children at stake, is improbable, or she shared
his fear of the future, the horror which he expressed of death- from misery, and indignity, and privation, a horror which actually
enabled her, as we read Duggan's letter, not merely to assent to the crime, but to plan its commission with her husband. Had their resolve been a common suicide, there would have been little to surprise us. That has happened before, and the resistance to- overcome is in such a case very much less. Despite all the teach- ings of religion, mankind refuses, perhaps in obedience to some deep instinct, perhaps from a selfishness beyond the control of the will, to believe that suicide is murder, and men kill themselves every day to whom the murder of another would seem an almost impossible crime. But here we have a woman deliberately plan- ning the slaughter of children of whom she was proud, and for whom she steadily exerted herself, because she feared that she
and they would find themselves in poverty. One has heard of- such murders committed from passion, or during a fit of insanity, or under overwhelming distress, but this quiet concurrence of two-
minds in what to them must have seemed a great crime—indeed, Duggan admits that,—out of fear of an evil not yet present, is, we almost without example, and sets in the strongest light the profound distrust with which some of those among whom we live must regard the working of the institutions around them. Before two persons could have combined for such a crime, they must have despaired of aid from friends, from society, and from God.
Not the least amazing incident in this tragedy is the revelation it makes of the religious position of such a man as Duggan. It is hard to doubt that there was in some corner of his mind a hope
that in quitting this world he was about to enter a less inexorable one, that if not himself, at least his children, would be a little
nearer to the direct protection of the Almighty ; yet it never seems to have occurred to him, even casually, that he might receive such protection here also. He keeps and uses a family Bible, bids God bless his brother, expects retribution to fall on his employer, and even alludes to the expression, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again ;" but he betrays at the same time an absolute despair of assistance from God, a failure of power even to look at that side of the ques- tion, which, in its entireness, suggests not so much an absence of religious feeling as an incapacity for it, such as we attribute — it may be erroneously — to the whole animal world. He was not an unreliant character at all. He
evidently relied to the full upon his wife, upon the police,—
whom he summoned by letter after he had murdered the children, —upon his brother, and in one way upon his employer's word ; but upon Heaven, while acknowledging its power in words at all events, he had no reliance at all, no idea apparently that reliance upon God was conceivable, or could enter in any way into his own view of his own position. Or if, as we should be inclined to believe, he relied upon God at all, it was upon His mercy there, as opposed to His want of mercy here, a state of mind hopelessly inexplicable, showing a faith at once strong enough to encounter death, yet so weak as to be non-existent. The contradictions of human nature are endless, but this man, driven to murder by desire for respec- tability, so fond of wife and children as to desire that all should be involved in the same doom with himself, yet utterly despairing
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