UNPROTECTED MALES

Colonist, Volume VIII, Issue 825, 26 September 1865, Page 5

UNPROTECTED MALES

(From the Saturday Bevieiv.)

In a Parliamentary paper recently issued, Captain Tyler informs his chief that " gentlemen passengers, as well as railway officers of all classes, constantly refuse to travel singly with a stranger of the weaker sex, under the belief that it is only common prudence to avoid in this manner all risk of being accused—for purposes of extortion— of insult or assault." The paragraph has been approvingly quoted in most of the newspapers; and it is seldom that a statement _ so bold, and at the same time so veracious, appears in a departmental report. Any one who travels much knows that a good deal of alarm has been excited amon* respectable males of late by the mania which appears to have seized the other sex for imagining, or asserting, that they have been criminally assaulted. Upon railways the terror has become a perfect panic. No man •with any consideration for his character will venture within winking distance of any woman who is reasonably good-looking, and young girls are avoided by all prudent persons as if they had the plague. Old women and very ugly women—women of that sterling repulsiveness that they carry in their faces an unanswerable refutation of any possible charge of assault—are at a high premium just now, especially for lon<* railway journeys. Now 'is their hour of compensation. The men may turn from them in the drawing-room, may manoauvre to be separated from them at the dinner-table, but m the railway carriage they enjoy a popularity for which bright eyes and youthful cheeks pine in vain. True as the needle to the pole, the cautious passenger flies to the iavored seat which places him under the wing of hairless and cappy age. The alarm , is not wholly groundless. A passion for particular kinds of perjury does at particular times infect particular people. In Germany and America, the witchcraft delusion, with all the horriole torments which were inflicted under its influence, was maintained entirely by the apparently disinterested testimony of a considerable number of respectable wit- , nesses. ; A similar phenomenon occurred in England during : the ■ prevalence of the Popish plot" panic-There seems to-be little ■ doubt that the same kind of halfconscious taste for perjury prevails just now among a considerable number of girls, especially very young girls. Several instances

have occurred recently in which such accusations have* been plainly proved to have been the mere fruit of whim or malice, and there have been many more in which their groundlessness was very apparent, though not distinctly proved. A particularly flagrant case came before the public a short time ago. One Caroline Barker,." a tall, well-dressed young woman, of prepossessing appearance," presented herself at the Coventry Police Station, and made a charge of indecent assault, accompanied. with robbery, against a man with whom she had had travelled from Rugby, and who had left the train at Coventry. She minutely described his appearance, and the police were already in quest ofthe alleged offender, when the superintendent, by a little judicious cross-examination of the complainant, extracted from her a confession that the whole story was a fiction, invented to cover the loss^ of her railway ticket. The intended victim of this infamous fabrication had great reason to congratulate himself on having had a very lucky escape of imprisonment or worse. It is not every magistrate, nor even every jury, that would have displayed the sagacity with which the Coventry Police Superintendent detected the falsehood of a plausible and circumstantial invention.

It is one ofthe most cruel features of this class of charges that the ordinary presumption of law is practically reversed in respect to them. Uiiless innocence is positively made out, guilt is inferred. Juries make it a point of principle always to believe the woman, and they are careful to avoid any risk of tampering with their principles, or confusing their minds, by listening to evidence. Some of.the magistrates seem to look upon perjury of this kind, even when it is decisively proved, as a weakness of lovely woman-which rather exalts than diminishes her charms. So that the accused on such a complaint is in evil case. Virtually he is called upon to prove a negative— to show that that which a woman asserts to have taken place at a given time did not take place. If he fails, the chances are that he is absolutely lost. A soldier, or sailor, or an M.P. for a populous borough, might recover from such a conviction, with no worse damage than a standing joke against him. But a solicitor, a barrister, a medical man, or a clergyman would be irrevocably ruined.' "Yet, according to the practice of magistrates and juries, it is of no avail for him to pit his word against the woman's. Practically, the presumption of law in this case is, that the man is guilty unless he is proved to be innocent. It is worth while to examine the ideas upon which this curious perversion of justice rests. The notion seems to be that the woman can have no interest in making such an accusation unless there be some ground for it. The same kind of reasoning used to be applied to the law of affiliation. It was the fashion with philanthropists of a certain sort to maintain that a woman could never be so untrue to what are called her " womanly instincts " as to father a child on the wrong man. Pacts, however, were too strong for the admirers of womanly instincts. . . . Social reformers used to be guilty of the same error when they placed under their ban all who were accused of the worst of all offences against morality, whether it were proved or not. Such tampering with the most rudimentary principles of justice for a presumed public good always ends in oue way. It invariably breeds a race of extortioners, male or female, who trade upon the penalty which has been affixed, not to the offence, but to the mere accusation. The trade is a very lucrative one. The victims of these plunderers have been known, in several instances, to pass their lives in buying from time to time a short respite from" the dreaded disgrace, at a price rising with each demand, as each payment seemed to furnish a more conclusive admission of guilt. There must be something wrong in our administration of justice when any man's whole prospects iv life are at the mercy of any girl's idle talk. The radical evil is' the facile credit which is given to young girls in these cases. The idea seems to have possessed jurymen and magistrates that they are less likely to lie because they are youno-. A kind of traditional theory concerning the innocence of childhood, and a confused recollection of tho texts in the baptismal service, seem to float across their minds; and the result is a fixed idea that truthfulness may be counted on in the inverse proportion to age. No calculation can be more fallacious. Other things being equal, young people will genernlly lie much more freely than their elders; and the reason of the difference is that they are more ignorant. A child has no knowledge of the world, and therefore has no conception ofthe injury it is doing to itself or others. Such words as " ruin," "disgrace," " blasted prospects," are mere words to it. The most powerful motive for telling the truth is consequently absent from its mind ; and nothing remains which will not be easily overcome by the desire to escape from a momentary embarrassment. Another strange delusion on the part ofthe administrators ofthe law is shown by the value they seem to attach to the circumstance of two or three children supporting each other in a story. Children fear other children a little bigger than themselves a great deal more than they fear parents or schoolmasters, or the whole executive staff of criminal justice. They are much more afraid of the bullying which will be the penalty of telling tales than of any punishment which they think their superiors are likely to inflict. Cases have recently occurred in which two or three children have combined to bring disgusting charges against respectable men, and in which, by some accidental -circumstance, the falsehood of their evidence has been discovered in time. It is reasonable to suppose that a large proportion of those who have been condemned upon similar unsupported evidence have been condemned unjustly. And it is equally reasonable to conjecture that a certain number will yearly be coudemned to unmerited punishment upon charges which rest only on the testimony of their accusers, until juries and magistrates shall have revised their present views of the infallible veracity of children and young girls.