Margaret Shepherd

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 19, 7 May 1903, Page 1

Margaret Shepherd

Death has a thousand doors. And not one of them, we ween, is pleasant to pass through. Dut whether it conies as ' a short, sharp shock on a big black block,' or as a long-drawn agony on a feather bed, matters very little in the end. The essential thing is to die well. Thackeray, in his ' Vanity Fair,' paints a dark picture of the death-lied of the angry, sleepless, suffering Miss Crawley. ' Picture to yourself, O fair young reader,' says he, ' a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you be

old, learn to love and pray.' But in God's goodness there are hope and pardon for worse sins than those of the peevish and worldly Miss Crawley. The gates of mercy are shut upon none that seek Him, and we trust that they have been opened wide to receive the soul of Margaret Shepherd, that (according to our American exchanges) took wing some weeks ago in the Harper Hospital, Detroit. She never rallied from the shock of an operation. ' She died a honibki death,' sajs a Dctioit correspondent of the Philadelphia ' Catholic Standard,' ' unattended by a minister of religion. Before she died she requested that her body be cremated. Her remains were interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery, this city, on the 4th inst ' (March). • Margaret Shepherd was one of a curious set of freaks of the law of demand and supply. She was a bright particular ornament of that branch of professional criminals, sham ' ex-nuns,' who cater for a taste for the horrible, the impossible, and the preternaturally immoral that prevails among the Orange and kindred societies and the lower class of unorganised anti-Cathok*:s fanatics of both sexes. ' Sin,' as the gentle Autocrat of the Breakfast Table reminds us, ' has many tools, but a lie Is the handle that fits them all.' And Dryden has remarked that ' Bold knaves thrive without a grain of sense, But good men starve for want of impudence.' The remarkable impostures of the poor, half-witted non-Catholic gaol-bird and fallen woman, Maria Monk, proved that there is money — nay, shekels galore— in the sordid business of lying appeals to the prurient sense of the lewd and the bigotry of fanatics at ' front seats a shilling, back seats sixpence.' The chief blame of this evil trade does not, however, rightly fall upon unfortunates like Margaret Shepherd, whose moral sense is warped or blunted by life-long crime and contact with crime, and the evil associations of prison life. The real offenders are the rabid societies, thoughtless and gullible clergy, and the prurient rag-tag-and-bol>-tail of various minor denominations that ' blayon evil deeds and consecrate a crime ' nnd furnish audiences and special funds to this noisome and dangerous class of impbstets and gaol-birds So long as there's money in the business, our prisons will continue to supply f-ham ' ex-nuns ' of the Margaret Shepherd type to the no-Popery pulpit and platform, just as they furnish ' crooks ' and ' ciib-ci ackers ' and ' magsmen ' to the mote risky and less h.\poci itical walks of professional ci mie. The career of Margaret Shepherd has long been before the public in pamphlets, newspapets, and the tepoits of the police and criminal courts We ha\e been following it on and off for the past eight \eais, and had gathered together materials tor an interesting biography of this bold impostor in % iew of her threatened return visit to New Zealand. Biief.lv : She was bom in India, but at the assi/e court in Toronto (in the Manun-You-man libel suit) she was unable to trace her paternity ' It I had fifty children/ said the Maiden Aunt, as she perused the police-court news, ' I'd ne\er name one oi them Alias. Seems as it they're sure to go wrong ' Margaret Shepheid, like the rest of her cla'-s, had a whole collection of aliases Ihe llev. I,ord Auhib.ilil Douglas was one of the many persons whose dai'irhtet she claimed to be She had been arrested tcr tot gum his name, and when the distinguished convert appealed m court, on a subpoena, it was seen that he was \ounger than his alleged daughter. Jn addition to lorgoiy, <-he was guilty of swindling and sundiy other c-t uncs and was sentenced to various terms 'o! imprisonment in Millba'ik, Bodniin, and other places in Great Britain She n<-\ c r was a Catholic, much less a nun. Her sole annection with any Catholic convent was as an n reionnable inmate of the Good Shephei d Home for fallen -women at Amos Court, Bristol. She was taken in hand b\ Mis Ballington Booth, of the Salvation Army, while leading a life of shame in England But she was found so hopelessly incorrigible that the Army had to cast hi r out The versatile advenUuress next appeared upon the lectuie platform in the United States and Canada as an ' exnun,' and — iiH the Rev J. A. McDonald, a Pi esbv to i,m clergyman at St Thomas-, Ontario, declaird in the 'Canadian Presbytei ian,' of Decemlu-r !><>, 189:5— proved herself ' one of the worst frauds, one oi the most dangerous agents of political and social strife and moial

corruption that— whether as a journalist or preacher— l had ever come in contact with.' On April Bof last year a warrant for her arrest on a criminal charge was issue/i at Brooklyn at the joint instance of the International Catholic Truth Society and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. When the police went to her address to execute the warrant, the bird had flown. This is what led to her appearance in Australia and New Zealand. The unhappy woman rtied a fugitive from justice. She was, after all, merely a shareholder m what we may call the gioat joint-stock company of infamy that conducts this evil business of moral filth and no-Popery defamation through the medium of gaolbirds and fallen women. Of the worldly, prayerless, duelling, hard-drinking squire of the olden time, who met his death in the hunting field, it was written that ' Between the 6tirrup and the ground He mercy sought and mercy found.' And the final word of Catholics for Margaret Shepherd is the prayer that God may have mercy on her soul.