The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-06-22

exist in most men may be stimulated and
developed by familiarity with the exciting de-
tails of any particularly striking crime, and
SO, arousing the initiative faculty, may load
directly to the preparation of a similar act
The proposition is obviously plausible, and
if it could be established to demonstration, il
might warrant, perhaps, the interference of
grand juries and district attorneys to suppress
the strictly sensational journalism of human
wickedness. But it strikes us that this is
eminently one of the many cases in which
there is Ga great deal to be said on both
sides"
If we assume, in the first place, the truth of
Quetelets doctrine, extended and formulated
by Buckle, concerning the averages of humln
feeling and action, we must be prepared to
believe that the impulses which propagate
special form of malefaction at any given time
are much more subtle and lie deeper down in
human nature than our prophet of infection
would have us to suppose As a certain aud
an ascertainable number of persons in a given
region of country will every year at given
time provide themselves with white hats or
order cucumbers with their salmon and this
without consulting the daily journals or the
menus of Baron de Brisse, precisely so will
certain and ascertainable number of persons
in like manner coincidently elope with the red
haired goyernesses of their children OF put their
grandmothers TO death with 'extenuating cir
cumstances, which in legal French means
blue cotton umbrella or a trombone. These
people obey a mysterious and ire
sistible proclivity, conditioned, doubt
ess upon atmospheric, social, and
political influences, of which we have a very
inadequate notion as yet, or, one may more
truly say, no notion at ALL 1t is quite as pro-
bable, to say the least of it, that person
laboring under these influences, uncon-
sciously to himself, may be suddenly braced
up into n state of moral horror which will
enable him to resist them, as that a person
not laboring under these influences should be
seduced into crime by the perusal of the full
true, and necessarily shocking story of an ex-
ceptiopally brutal offense OF course. no
account is to be taken, in considering this
question, of crimes committed for specific
and easily Ineligible reason--crimes Of self
interest deliberately weighed or of passion
specifically inflamed We are examining now
the genesis of strange and irrational crimes;
of the morbid otfenseS against property or
human life which make iuries hesitate 50
often so clumsily decide between the gallows
OF the penitentiary and the asylum.
Our own belief is that upon vast maio-
rity of people elaborate and narrowing mar
ratives OF crime act rather as safety-valyes for
brooding and inchoate fancies of evil within
them than as provocations to sin. The ina
gination in many people serves a purpose of
what we may call moral perspiration. 1t car
ries off, through sympathy and terror and the
delight of conscious emotion, pent-up
forces which might else accumulate and turn
to humors in the soul, if we may so speak,
and at last explode III crime For one Cour-
voisier moved to cut his masters throat by
reading the wondrous tale of the deviltry and
the daring Of Jack Sheppard, we venture to
say that we have a hundred Smiths
on Browns who live out in fancy over Aims
worths pages many dire suggestions of
wrong, and faint hints of the ferocious
creature within them pent, which had festered
else into horrible fact. Besides which, it re-
mains to be shown that Courvoisier told the
truth when he foisted upon his imagination
the responsibility of deed which more pro-
badly originated in his pocket. An empirical
but not unsatisfactory way of throwing light
on the point would be to ascertain, if we con-
veniently could, how large proportion of the
most startling crimes annually committed
among men take place within the subscription
lists of daily newspaper, and how large a
proportion in lonely hamlets and isolated
neighborhoods, divided not, like Sydney
Smiths Norfolk residence, 'by twelve miles
from lemon, but by hundreds and thou
sands of miles from reporter and printing
press,