CHILD MURDER.
THEpublic, in its healthy horror of the crimes committed by Charlotte Winsor, the Torquay murderess, has we think rather missed the point of the ghastly story told by her accuser. It has fastened justifiably and naturally npoii the sicken- ing revelation involved as it were incidentally in the woman Harris's statement, upon the fact that in 1865, in a pleasant village of Devon, there lived a woman of forty-five to whom child murder was a profession, who would, by her own statement,
" put by " any other woman's offspring if only she were paid, who was willing to kill " forty " children if it were made worth her while, who had put her finger under the jugular vein of one, and stifled another three weeks old, and put away a third " for her sister Poory," and killed a fourth while her accuser looked on by throttling it under the bed-ticking, who took " orders " for murder as other women take orders for washing, who when a doubtful commission arrived only objected that her customer, had she been "honest," would have prepaid her fee, and who when asked if she had no supernatural fears bade the questioner " go to hell, for she was doing good." Murders like those committed by Pritchard or Constance Kent are justly felt to be trifles by comparison with massacres like these, with a habit of murder con-
tracted by a woman who had no motive other than a desire for very trifling rewards, who had no animosity and no remorse, who wept when her accomplice gave evidence against her, and who
seems, by one of those awful perversions of nature which almost justify the Calvinistic view of humanity, to have been willing to commit a murder as an evidence of good-will. Thugs do not reach that point of degradation, and to see it reached at the present day in England, and among a village population, has given a shock to the community such as no murder ever gave,—a shock deepened by an impression, instinctive rather than logical, that Charlotte Winsor may not be the only woman who increases her means by making a trade of the one great crime supposed to be stopped by civiliza- tion. We do not wonder that the public, well aware that infanti- cide is one of the specially English crimes, that in Lancashire " overlaying" is one of the most frequent causes of infant death, the overlaying being deliberate, that the Coroner for Middlesex has affirmed and proved the existence of 12,000 women in London each of whom must have murdered a child, that no week passes without the police reporting the discovery of the bodies of infants,
should have seen in the Torquay horror new proof of a condition of affairs it had all along suspected, should have fastened upon
Charlotte Winsor, and altogether forgotten what seems to us the main sentence in Mary Harris's story,—the story, let us always remember, of a woman almost as guilty as Charlotte Winsor her- self. She stood and saw her own child killed, killed " bar- barously," to use her own words, from a ghastly curiosity to see what its death would be like, and then helped to strip the poor infant, not yet cold, and pack it away in a rabbit-box, all appa- rently without a sigh, though her conscience or her fears afterwards awoke. This woman said in her cross-examination, " I had had 3s. 6d. a week for a previous child, but I had never had but those
two children." So it was not to conceal her shame, as penny-a- liners always assert, and juries seem always to believe, that she had
put away her child. She had had one before, shame was over and done with, and she wanted to be rid of the second baby, not that she might be believed chaste, not because she " had been tempted
and had fallen,"—she had lived with her paramour six years,— but simply that she might be rid of a trouble and an expense for which he was no longer willing to pay.
That, it seems to us, is the true point of a story such as ought to cover the kingdom with shame, to rouse men, if it were possible to rouse them to anything, to a savage decision that at any cost, whether of effort or liberty, or even minor morals, a scandal like this shall end. We shall never discover the remedy if we go on ignoring facts, and the first and most dreadful fact is that shame is not the only cause of infanticide, but only one cause, and pro- bably not the main one, that we have something to cure besides unchastity, something to denounce besides men's lust. We believe if the cause of every such crime during the past year could be made known to men as it is known to Heaven, we should find shame very seldom recorded, should discover that the majority of such crimes are committed by women who have no fear of the world's opinion in the matter, being far below that, and more than a moiety of the remainder, perhaps more than five-sixths of the remainder, by married women. It is the toil and the worry and the expense, the weary hours of nursing and the incessant watchfulness, the interruption of work and the danger of utter poverty, which these murderesses dread, and not merely ex- posure. In many classes indeed exposure signifies nothing. In many villages a cottager's daughter is hardly more ashamed of a "love-child " than of a child born in wedlock, is pitied by her neighbours as having had a "misfortune," and applies for her half- a-crown a week with a calmness which suggests what is usually the truth—that though a victim, the suffering she feels springs from poverty and disappointment rather than outraged modesty. .Among mothers of the same class,—we speak of the dregs in village life, —the terrible accusation of child murder is one of those most frequently bandied about, and union doctors know only too pain- fully, and tell men like Dr. Hunter, how fearfully often it is true. " In Lincolnshire Dr. Hunter found a worse degree of criminality in older mothers. After losing a child or two they begin to view the subject as one for ingenuity and speculation. It is related that on the birth of a second or third bastard the neighbours will say, So and so has another baby ; you'll see it won't live ;' and that this becomes a sort of joke, in which the mother will join, public opinion expressing no condemnation of her cruelty. . . . It was in many places reported that infant life had been saved in the midst of one of these wastings by the threats of a determined surgeon or neighbour. Where the coroners have been induced to support these attempts to save life, where inquiry has been made, and severe admonition, with an appearance of a chance of com- mittal, also where the registrar has pretended to refuse registration without medical certificate in families notorious for their loss of infants, in these cases an amendment has taken place. It was more than once related that women who had lost two or three successive children lost no more after it had been plainly signified to them that their proceedings were watched." No improvement in chastity would do away with this cause of crime, this horrible unsexing effect of poverty, which leads women to look upon their children with loathing, as mere torments sent to wear them down, and which when it does not lead to murder often produces a neglect almost as evil. None except the wives of the clergy are, we think, quite aware of the depth of this senti- ment among a class of the country poor, of the bitter regret with which they bemoan their prolificness, of the acute horror they often profess of marriage. And indeed a cottager's wife with five children in five years, the work of the house to do, her husband's food to cook, and something to earn either by straw-plaiting, or washing, or the weary, back-cracking, badly-paid, demoralizing labour of weeding, has a lot such as no humane legislature would inflict upon a convict. What wonder that she sometimes comes to hate the little things, who at the most inopportune momenta are so querulous and so obvious, so eager for the food which they make scanty, or so insufferably noisy as half-governed babies always are ; or who can be surprised that among hundreds of thousands of people with unrestrained tempers —temper is the universal vice of our so called " kindly" race—and callous hearts, a few should be found in whom the murderous wish is cultivated till it developes into the murderous act? That they exist is certain, and the question is how to check them, as well as the class who commit murders from shame. It is nonsense to advise severity, for even if juries could be trusted to convict- -which, while the crime is capital, they will not do—there are limits to the values of human evidence. The relation between mother and child is such that if her love does not save it nothing else can. Take the single case, so frequent in the North, of over- laying. Any experienced nurse would affirm that, provided the mother were not drunk, the overlaying of a child is nearly an impossibility, but it is not quite, and though it is certain that six or eight hundred cases cannot occur fairly in a year, still each individual case may be a misfortune, and who is to hang on a scientific a priori deduction? So with the Lincolnshire use of opium, or the London trickof systematic neglect—who is to decide what is wilful and what accidental ? We must trust the mother, whether we will or no, and the cure, if there is one, is to be found that in her improvement, and secondly in relieving her from some part of her terrible temptation. The former is slow work, though it may be accelerated, if the Nonconformist ministers will ever give up their obstructive chatter about the limits of State work, and permit sensible men to make education sternly compulsory, if legislators will prohibit female field labour,— as great a barbarism as the practice of ploughing with women for draught cattle, still to be seen in Belgium,—and if events gradually raise the minimum of wages. But we can accomplish the second end more speedily still, though not by foundling hospitals. Those institutions, we fear, though excusable in countries whose rulers believe that a child dead before baptism is a lost child, would in England not only remove one great protection to chastity, but ,speedily inflict on the community an immense caste of homeless, motherless, fatherless, but notillegitinaate children, as dangerous to society as bastards are now assumed to be. But there surely might be child hospitals in every great town, child schools in every village, in which babies could be received, not secretly but openly, not gratis but for payment, so as to relieve the mother of her toil andloss of work, often amounting to loss of bread, and be trained in their own station as the mother never could train them, and restored say at twelve years old. Such institutions, if they would but receiveall children without inquiry save-as to the mother's locale, identity, and means of payment, would remove the greatest temptation to child murder now existing, namely, the actual impedi- ment presented by the child to its mother's existence. Suppose she is a field labourer, the child actually absorbs her bread, or suppose (a much more frequentcase) she is a servant, the poor babe by the mere fact of existence drives its mother to the union. Surely we can stop that without either increasing immorality or the temp- tations to child murder, and if we can we are bound to try. If it is possible, as we believe it is possible, for society to sin as a whole, then assuredly English society sins in this—that wealthy beyond example, easy beyond historic precedent, orderly beyond any society existing in the world, it suffers pauperism to reach a point at which nature succumbs to incessant misery, and the mother, rather than bear the aggravation of her lot produced by the existence of her babe, stifles it in bed-ticking, and buries the body in a rabbit-box, thrown out afterwards•in a field.
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