The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1857-09-24
THE PACIFIC
Commercial Advertiser.
THURSDAY. SEPTEMBER a.


THAT there is such a thing as MORAL INSANITY,
no one can question. The increase of daring
crimes, ehronicled in the teeming newspaper
press, only t~estifes to it, Every one that reads
the news of the day must be convinced of it. 1t
is not the daring crimes of the robber, the pirate
or the highwayman, whose lives are devoted to
plumber, but the hardly less aggravating crimes
among the refined and wealthy, in the high walks
of sodff6ty, in the domestic circle, ard in common
business transactions. 1t seems confined to no
city, no country, no continent. The police records
of every country show that the disease is univer-
sal. From San Francisco TO London the same re-
port comes to us, that the laws OF the land are
set at defiance by men and women, from various
motives, but principally from motives of gain,
which lead them to commit crimes with which
humanity is shocked. In California this spirit
became so rife, and was INDUCED with such i'm
punity, that the better disposed felt themselves
justified in taking the law into their own hands,
and suspending for the time the existing govern
ment. The state of things was scarcely worse
than that which exists in some of the Eastern
cities, at the present time, particularly in New
York city, where Vigilance Committees have
been organised to restrain vice.
We do not refer here to that species of aban-
doned deprayity which appears almost beyond the
bounds of morality, though, if the rule of moral
insanity is laid down, it must include all kinds of
crime; but rather to those now frequent chimes
committed in high life, which create the more
sensation, because unlocked for. The Palmer
case has scarcely a parallel in its cold-blooded
atrocity. The Dublin murder was strikingly
4. ~ NJ
York Bond street tragedy, and both still remain
mysteries. The defalcations and railway frauds
in England equal the stupendous transactions
that have been carried on in the United States.
The garotte toe, which is the current mode of
highway robbery is just as common in the metrop-
oils and the provincial towns of Great Britain as
in New York or Mexico. Life and property have
become alarmingIy insecure
Ell 1856 had any religion, - exclaims, with charac-
teristic point and exaggeration, one Of the abiest Of
the London journals, lit was the religion of the dirt
lest of divinities, " 10 never before counted such n
host of enthusiastic rogues in his service. The year
was . Uttered under Mercury like Autolycus; but
the Autoloci who distinguished themselves were am
bilious knaves, far above the shipping up of uncon-
sidered trifes. They snapped up fortunes as common
pickcockets snap up pocket handkerchiefs; planned
their robberies over champagne, and executed them
in curricles and tandems- Such was the astonishing
Sadlier; such the dashing Robson and refined Red
path; such was Sir John Dean Paul, whose house Of
business was n shouse OF prayer and a den OF thieves;'
such were the Gordons and Cummings; and the wor-
shipful Company of the Royal British Bank-giants
of fraud, titanic swindlers, men with maws for
widows houses, and who deyoured the portions of
orr hans like ogres in psntomines- 1t is difficult to hnd
a week in the last year not infamously distinguished
by some huge commercial defalcation, some daring en-
bezzIement, some startling bankruptcy, some afro
cious breach of trust, some huge shape or another of
avarice or rapacity. Senators, bankers, doctors,
clerks. servants, alternately figuring in the drama Of
crime. occasionally diversified with an appalling sui
eide, (real or fcficions) ON Hampstead Heath, or a
frightful deed of blood like that still mocking justice
In Dublin"
BY moral insanity we mean that perversion or
binding of the intellect, that lee ds a man TO COM
NIT a deed which his ordinary unbiased reason