The Express.
London, England, 1865-12-22 00:00:00

OUR CONTEMPORARIES.

(Tll.lB DAY.)

ERZ BRITISH ARMY LED THE JAMAICA MASSACRES.
Commenting upon a correspondence which has appeared
in its columns between Captain Chesney and Profaner
Goldwin Smith, the Daily News sees in both writers an
earnest desire to maintains or the army that delicate sense of
humanity which the profssor sees roues to think some
recent forms of service ha% e tended to impair. All the code
of the profession of arms is that of honour and chivalry,
and the more merciful system of modern warfare is but
the natural development of the sentiment of honour
and tenderness which springs up when war becomes •
profession. Those soldiers who axe most respected by their
brethren are those who have striven most to mitigate the
horrors of war. By the rules of his !service • soldier is
forbidden to address the public on matters of current
interest, and from their silence we have no right to hold
that the officers and soldiers of the British army would
approve such lots as are reported to us from Jamaica.
Captain Ford and Colonel Fyfe were civilian sal-
diets, though Colonel Robb', who commended the 6th
Regiment, presents a picture of justice which it is impos-
sible to think his brother officers would admire. If it
should appear that the regular troops in Jamaica perldesi-
paten in the hideous barbarities, we shall be bound to
believe that their deeds will be execrated by their com-
rades even more fervently than by civilians. They will
prove the truth urged by Professor Goldwin Smith. that
the services in which we employ our troops in the colonies
tend to rouse the savage passions of humanity, and to
lower them to the level of those with whom they have to fight.
If these things are not execrated by soldiers ; if it is not
shown that the army is still instinct with the tenderness
of honour which will not strike an unresisting foe, end
the greatness of compassion which will not inflict one
jot of needless suffering, then indeed the character of the
army is changed, and • gulf as wide lies between its
honour of to-day and that which its history has vindicated,
as will lie between its feelings and those of the com-
munity from which it springs.
The Herald says that the radical sympathisers with the
negro have terrified • weak and tottering government
into sending out • commission of inquiry to Jamaica,
and compelled Lord Russell, to • certain extent, to
prejudge the cue. It is evident that the government is
reedy to do almost anything to purchase the support of the
radical faction in parliament. The Herald asks for some
meetings and addresses of sympathy on behalf of the
whites, and congratulates the men of the conservative
borough of Cambridge, and the undergraduates who at-
tended the meeting eonvened in that town on Tuesday,
on the good example they have set in " putting an extin-
guisher on the clamour of the black fiction."

THU NURDZIEM SOUTHEY.
The Post questions the policy of acoaspting, as is
often done, in MIN of suicide the set itself as presump-
tive evidence of at least a temporary ►berration of rump.
It would be dangerous indeed if japes were to adopt the
same view when the murderer is charged not with slaying
himself, but persona to whom he is attached by every tie
of relationship and love. Of lase years there has been a
growing tendency on the pact of the medical profession to
*steed the meaning of the term insanity. A man, we are
told, may be afflicted with moral insanity, which, without
manifesting itself by any of the ordinary symptoms of mania,
would nevertheless exonerate the subject of it from legal
responsibility for his actg. The verdict returned yesterday
at Maidstone furnishes a satisfactory proof that the novel
doctrine has not yet found favour with the mesa of the com-
munity. The medical evidence given in support of
Southey's insanity was simply puerile, and the pretended
madness of the prisoner in the dock was so transparent a
sham that at times Southey himself appeared to be ashamed
of it.
The Telegraph characterises the madness of a man who
commits assassination by wholesale, without passion and
without motive, as the "medusas of bedtime," which is
totally distinct from the organic disease of the brain that
must exist in every case to maks a man insane. The die-
Unction is one between moral and mental madness ; but
the confusion slips in because we fasten the moral wive
on to the mind, and the mind again on to the brain, and
so get a chain of causation in which it puzzles as to
point out the particular link at which misfortune
ends and responsibility begins. No shadow of any such
puzzle can exist in the instance of Forwood, or Southey,
se he prefers to be called. Common geese suffices to pro-
nounce that mainees with such method in it mast answer
to the law under the name of murder. The only possible
alternative would be to alopt the Socratic idea altogether,
and treat the most villainous criminals as that which indeed
they are in one sense—the most nog :ramble of mankind.
Read Southey as a half-educated creature, eaten up with
self.coeceit, utterly selfish, vulgar at heart, lazy, with a
fixed idea that bombast is dignity and that fine words con.
statute morality, sad you have the portrait with which
every incident of his career previous to the murders bar-
I monism.
The Star sees no reason whatever to impeach the verdict
sf the jury. The murderer was insane, as every murderer
is insane, at the moment of his deed, and no more. It
is one of the many dangerous and demoralising effects of
our system of capital punishment that it has rendered ex-
mashie and almost necessary the modern theory of insanity
—the theory that every wicked person who commits
great crime is mad, and therefore irresponsible. Who
shall say how far the conduct of a man like Forwood is
governed by the conviction that if he only commits crimes
dark enough tt will be an easy task for him to make the
very blackness of his guilt his best means of securing im-
punity

LORD STANLEY AND THE CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE.
The Tipics has never been able exactly to learn what a
chamber of commerce is. There may sometimes be con-
siderable advantage in such a body, but the improvements
in the theory as well as the practice of our commerce, and
the simplificatioo of oar law, owe little to them—nay, they
ate not unfrequently found enlisted on the side of prejudice
and exclusiveness. At Liverpool, on Wednesday, the
chairman, Mr. Rathbone, made joist the mistake
which might be expected, in supposing that the
government can do a great deal so cure pauperimm,
so mach of which is the result of the inherent
improvidence and folly of mankind. Lord Stanley would
make thine chambers more authoritatively the exponents of
the trade interests of the particular localities, but he does
wisely to pause before recommending that they should be
intrusted with judicial functions. Their constitution most
obviously be entirely altered before this could be done.
' IThere may at some time arise among as a sound and ten-
, gilds commercial opinion different from the opinions of law-
.. . .