TRAPPED.

Evening Star, Issue 14438, 6 August 1910, Page 2

TRAPPED.

THB capture of Crippen has been- the event ,o( this week. It lias touched the imagi- j nation of the whole world; indeed, nothing quite so sensational, both actually and potentially, has been, recorded by the newspapors for a very long time. It is becoming even more difficult fur the wrongdoer to escape detection. A negro proverb says •*" The Devil helps the thief " every day, but one day God helps the " policoman." It seems as if the hidden Power were both multiplying His detective agencies and increasing their efficiency. The knapsacks of travellers sometimes fall down tho deep crevasses of the Alps, but by a sure law of Nature every article is at. length lifted to the surface, as if by hands of snow. So is it with crime. It is said that murder will out. It is an old proverb, and grows true with age. I/ong ago this world was wide, and the criminal could easily find a place where law did not run. But now space is annihilated. Once the capture of the criminal depended on the swift limb and the strong arm. To-day, Science has added such subtle instruments to Justice that those old ones seem clumsy and inefficient. We have made even the fingers of the criminal a witness against him, and have summoned the very air to become a minister of Justice for his detection. '*' " # * * # * * But though this is so, we doubt if >t will deter men and women from evil. The sureness of being found out is certainly something gained. Yet human nature is an extraordinarily stupid thing. That great scientist, Mr Romanes, says that we may infer intelligence in an animal whenever we see it able to profit by its own experience. We might sometimes think "that man, if judged by this test, did not stand high. There arc few animals so slow to loam the lesson of experience. Darwin points out somewhere that no animal can be long caught in the same trap. In this country wo have learnt that even sparrows, in some mysterious way, are able, after a time, to detect the poisoned grain and avoid it. But vice and evil go on setting the same old traps, offering the same old poisoned baits, and silly men and women, generation after .generation, arc ever found-ready to be seduced. A murderer is executed, but manyof those who have witnessed tho execution go away to cherish the same bad passions, to practise the same bad habits —some of them to share tho same miserable doom. A gambler, ruined by his losses, puts an end to his life, but the next racecourse is as crowded as ever with an infatuated throng. A drunkard is carried to an untimely grave, but tht mourners are in their cups ere the cere- . mony is fairly over. The Devil keeps baiting a few' old traps, smelling of the blood of ruined generations, and he has little need either to hide them or to change his baits. The same old ones do quite well. Thirty pieces of silver, a wedge of gold, a ray of purple, a pretty face, and—there you are! He goeth after them as an ox goeth to the slaughter. Ono of our greatest writers was discoursing to us not long ago on 'The Human Ass.' Ho did not find the animal in the direction wo are indicating, but ho is there in abundance for anyone who cares to look. * * * * * * * ; What is tho reason for this stupidity? How is it that men and women, in spite 1 of endless warnings, go on putting their heads into the same old traps, and Felling their soals lo evil for the same old price? ft is another development of that gambling passion 'hat seems to be in us all. Occasionally one escapes here and there. And there 'is always tho possibility that we "may be of the lucky few.- Crippen was caught, but, then, how many others have hot been? It is this possibility that tempts men to lake .risks ■■in crime and immorality. ■We all rejoice that retribution has no successfully dogged the steps of Crippen. But what of the woman he murdered? What compensation can atone for her wrongs? The. law may take the life of the murderer, but of what concern is that to the mangled form dissolving into dust? What atonement can be made to those who have been tortured to death, and who knew life mainly in its deprivations and despairs? On the theory that there is pome future existence in which .-iccounts will be squared and justice bo done to thnso who woro deprived of it here, these things may be borne with. But on tho hypothesis '.hat this life is all, it becomes a very ghostly business for the ruined and wronged—<r no inconsiderable portion of every generation. "Justice will never hear you," said tho Roman Emperor to tho p<x>r woman who had appealed to it and against him; "I am justice." If there is no final court of appeal beyond this visible scene, it is indeed not only a sorry but a. horrible world for multitudes. It may perhaps be said that the true letribution is within. Tho remorse of the wrongdoer is his real, as it is his proper, punishment. In his own conscience he suffers tho "due reward of his evil deeds. But apart from the fact that that is no consolation to the life he has ruined, it is unfortunately not true. It is, indeed, quite contrary to the law that mice in the moral sphere. It is said that virtue is its own reward. In a sense it is so. And yet it is not the whole truth, nor oven the most important part of it. If is the peculiarity of tho virtuous conscience that in proportion as it grows virtuous it becomes more disquieted about its virtue. The more it attains, tho more sensible it grows of the unattained. Tho moro pure and good, the more unable it is to be at peace with itself. "Thus the satisfactions of " conscience are least known where they are " best earned." We find this confirmed when wo look at the case from the opposite side. In any court of law it. is the rule to graduate tho sentence in proportion to tho frequency of the crime's repetition. A light I sentence on young offenders, but on the hardened criminal falls the full rigor of punishment. Vvo all approve this. But is that procedure followed in tho Court of Conscience? All ethical writers agree in affirming tho opposite. They agree in what our own experience tells us. It tells us that in proportion to the frequency of tho wrong done the conscience grows insensitive. So far from treating the first sin lightly, it then administers its sharpest strokes. Tsut as the sins mount up, the Judge (Conscience) passes ever lighter sentence. As the offender comes frequently before the bar ho gains the ease of familiarity, and finds ever more successful pleas of mitigation, till at .last "he contrives " to corrupt the whole procedure, to suborn "the Judge, and turn the very chamber "of Justice into a council room of guilty "conspiracy."' It is on this very ground that the outward punishment is made more severe. It is made more sovere because the inward adminbtration lias failed. * » » * * * * The cables told us that after Crippen's arrest and examination he went quietly to sleep. but the girl collapsed and fainted. This is just what we should cxpeti.. The conscience of- Lenovo was not yul habituated to evil, but in the case of the older offender the more frequent repetitions of wiong-

doing had done for it what we have just described. It is not true, therefore, that tho criminal is adequately punished by the remorse of Conscience, for it is the worst offenders who get off most leniently. What, then, is its real function? It corresponds, as our greatest ethical thinker points out, not to the Judge's sentence on the past, but to liis prospective warnings. It is as a premonition, and not as a punishment, that it discharges its office. It wakes up every now and again, and keeps alive a sense of light, but it does not secure its execution. We legitimately infer, therefore, either that Conscience itself is a lying prophet or that there is another’ sphere to which its premonitions point forward, if “death gives final discharge alike to the sinner and the saint, “wo are warranted in saying that Con- “ science has told more lies than ever it “has called to account.” ******* The ]Mobility of such another order of things is startlingly suggested by the capture of Grippen. A writer in Wednesday s ‘ Star ’ admirably put it. " Everyone on board the Montrose is going- about his daily business. The cooks were preparing the meals, sailors washing decks and coiling ropes, passengers reading or gossiping on deck, r.o one dreaming they had murderers in their midst. The murderer himself and his paramour walked and talked with the rest, and supposed they were quite safe—for the time being, any way. Yet the very air they were breathing “to trained ears” was vocal with messages about them and planning their retribution. And when the voyage ended they found themselves confronted with the officers of justice and the facts of the crime. “ Ariel,” in his column on Wednesday, says that all this is rather “ uncanny.” It undoubtedly is, but its chief uncanniness lies not so much in the way that the very dements conspired to trap and expose Gripper, hut in the possibilities that such an exposure may be in store for ns all. Wo are all sinners is a trite commonplace, but most of us have not been found out. Few suppose that man is .the supreme existence in Creation; there may be a liighev intelligence than his. Tins hichor older may be dealing with him all his life, as the- captain and the officers of justice were dealing with Grippen, though he was quite unconscious of it. That, indeed, is the assumption of the moralist and the religious teacher. And they will find abundant material in the capture of Crippen to illustrate, if not to vind’catc, it. What if, at the end of our voyage of life, we should all find our, past waiting for ■is, and be forced, like Grippen. to face it again? -x * * * Wo thought it perhaps only a rhetorical effort to be told that for every idle word men should speak they would have to give an account. But in these days Science presents us with the gramaphono and the audiphono, and we begin to wonder if the impossible saying may not bo true. Moreover, we have learned that there arc stars so distant from us that the light from our world has not yet reached them. If, therefore, wo were transplanted thither, and had the necessary optical power, we should bo able to read the record of the whole history of the earth from its beginning. And if we could grade properly the distance wo could find a point in space where our own life, with all its events, might lie seen unrolling itself like a. panorama before us. “ I looked for my past,” says the poet, “and lo it had gone before.” That may turn out to bo more than a poetic fiction. It needs only a change of place, and the light will carry ,;i ,phojograpli of our .whole history and print it "before our own eyes. And not only the light hut even material things have an extraordinary power of preserving our memory. We are continually steeping inanimate objects with our consciousness, and these react upon ns in recalling that history. The scent of a flower, the song of a bird, the place or room where a certain wrong was done, the very colors ct the earth and season of tho year, have this strange power. They seem to keep a silent record of what wo have been and done in file associations connected with them. And they surrender up that record when we come in contact with them, though years upon years may have parsed since the event took place. The very sky and earth are thus books of remembrances. And tills may be a profounder truth than wo have realised in the saying of the Hebrew poet-: “lie will call to tho heavens above and to “the earth beneath that He may judge the “people.”