UNSPEAKABLE CRIMES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 267, 14 June 1878, Page 7

UNSPEAKABLE CRIMES.

(Prom the Brooklyn Catholic Review.) The wretched event which has formed the sensation of the week in the!pages of our daily contemporaries has a moral which they have neglected to draw. An infamous woman, having lived a long life of crime, grows weary of existence, and cuts her throat. To escape a trial before men, and possibly a short imprisonment, she rushes into the awful presence of the Supreme Judge, and hastens to receive from. His divine lips her sentence of endless punishment. But this woman died rich— very rich. She had amassed a fortune of nearly a million of dollars. Her residence was a palace ; the reporters of the daily press regale us with glowing descriptions of the magnificence and luxury or its .appointments. When the corpse of the miserable suicide was discovered, gorgeous diamonds were sparkling on her fingers and gleaming from her ears. She began her life in New York forty years ago, a very poor woman. How had she grown so rich ? It was because she furnished facilities for the safe commission of an awful crime— infanticide. Who were her clients ? Not the poor— for fees from the poor could not have made her a millionaire. They were the rich, the well-to-do, the respectable and the fashionable. The frus- • tration of the will of God ; the negation of the chief end of marriage the prevention of maternity ; the destruction of human life—this was the trade of the miserable woman who has now gone to her account and it was for these purposes that the rich, the well-to-do, the respectable and fashionable came to her. The plague-spot must have e\ten deeply and spread widely— or the clients would not have been so numerous nor the profits of the infernal trade so great. It is notorious that the non-Catholic population of certain regions of our country is undergoing an abnormal and mysterious decrease It is too plain that crime is preferred to duty. And this is the moral that our daily journals neglected to draw out. There is still another thinoto be said of this woman's crime and its visible punishment. We have catalogued above some of the features of that crime which make it hideous in the sight of all whose natural instincts have not been blunted or perverted. To frustrate the will of God ; to thwart the chiet end of marriage ; to prevent maternity • to destroy human life —this was the infamous trade which would have made -her who practised it odious in the sight of the rulers of a pagan State, and an object of execration to all of their people who loved and practised the natural virtues. But her traffic was not merely a crime against society. It has still another and a far more appalling side, and to Christians there will seem something higher than mere " poetic justice " in the end to which her own hand, her own deliberate purpose, has consigned her. It was not simply womanly virtue and human lives in which this woman traded. Her business was that of a procurator for hell. The sins of how many generations of those who turned away from God and forgot His law were visited on the heads of the unhappy victims whom she helped to shut out for ever from the vision of God ! Not the shame of the mothers, nor the guilt of the fathers, nor the loss to society which her hand concealed or caused, is the chief thing which makes the heart ache in thinking of her career The souls of the little ones whom she thrust into darkness might well have risen up and invoked the visible justice of God which we have seen exercised against her !