The great West. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1889-18??, 1893-09-01

Human Race to Destructiven Ma MIA
of the Fire-Bug.
Man has been called an animal
with the privilege of self-destruc-
tion," but the criminal anomalies of
the human mind are by no means
limited to a penchant for suicide.
When wolf rends flock of sheep
or q mink depopulates a whole poul-
try farm in single night their in
spring motive is not gratuitous
cruelty as much as a wish to make
the best of a lucky chance and pro-
vide supply of food for the need of
less propitious times.
In beings of our species, on the
other hand, the propensity of de-
structiveness has often assumed a
form that appears to make the lux
ury Of murder its own reward. In
the default of other victims the
buccaneers of the seventeenth CEN
fury would attack one another, aud
the troops of the Ghengis khan
howled for carnage like the Roman
rabble for the blood of the arena
victims and the idle pelados of Ma
drid for the bonfires of the inquisition.
There have been amateur assassins
who disdained to avail themselves of
a chance of plumber, but stabbed
strangers in the dark for the sole
purpose Of enjoying the consequent
sensation; and the mania of Jesse
Pomeroy is by no means without a
precedent.
About the end of the sixteenth
century country baron in the neigh
borhood of Auxerre, France was be-
seiged in his own chateau by a mob
of peasants, who, with more and m ore
emphasis, demanded the return of
their children, or at least satisfac-
tory explanation of their fate; Men
sieur lie baron, it seems, had, under
some pretext or other, enticed at
least twenty youngsters to his castle,
and failed to account for their disap-
pearance till the feudal submissive-
ness of his serfs exhausted it's re-
sources of appeal, and the dis
tracted relatives of the missing chill
dren were joined by a vendetta mob
of several hundred armed rustics.
The magistrates of Auxerre had
postponed the proposed investigation
in Difference to the protests of the
barOn's brother,a wealthy abbot, who
denounced the whole matter as
marotte jacqnere-a clodhopper's
craze; but the formidable spread of
the revolt had at last obliged the
baron to surrender himself to res
cuing party of militia, and an impair
tial trial established the fact that the
defendant had spent a considerable
sum in bribing his domestics to kid
nap twenty two children and assist
him in torturing them to death with
every refinement of. cruelty.
Judge Armstrong, of Leeds, has
made study of the arson mania,
tending to prove that in three out of
five cases the motive of the firebug
is not revenge, but an unexplained
and apparently irresistible penchant
for mischief. The supposed delight
in the pyrotechnic grandeur of a con-
flagration is only a secondary factor
of that propensity, for in Northern
Italy numerous individuals mere
boys, some of them have been ar
rested and punished for mischievous
tampering with the dikes that line
the principal rivers of LON hardy.
In some cases the offenders pretended
to have resisted the evil impulse for
weeks, in the firm belief that the in
stigator of crime must be il demonio
in person, but were apparently un-
able to resist the temptations of the
fun to inundate whole township by
few minutes of midnight work
with a spade.
There are strong reasons to sus.
pect that the freaks of Judge Lynch
are occasionally due to similar mo-
tives, and it is a suggestive circum-
stance that the white-cap outrages
are less frequent in the lawless and
regulation-needed border lands of
the Southwest than in the states
where the scarcity of game and in
frequency of social sensations de-
prive the natives of ready-made
chances for exciting pastimes.
In the Pyrenees bands of rustlcs
camp for weeks in the wilderness of
highland forests, living on roasted
beech nuts and enduring untold hard
ships till their scouts at last report a
fair chance of running the blockade
of the frontier guards, and a cargo
of contraband can be spirited across
the border at compensation of six
reals (about seventy-fve cents) per
week of danger-sweetened toll
Game stealing exercises an analogous
charm on Austrian farmers, abun-
dainty able to afford the small ex-
penses of hunting license; but in
recognition of the difference between
manias and ordinary crime, the law,
on the whole. deals leniently with
such offenders, though they may not
be backed by the social influence
that saved the members of the Wen
ma association of amateur shoplifters.
Some of the fair kleptomaniacs
were girls in their early teens, and
nearly all could plead the doubtful
excuse of disinterestedness from a
form and penny point of view. They
never patronized pawn-shops, rarely
enriched their private wardrobes with
their ill-gotten dry goods, but con-
fonfo1 thomco1uoc with hoor1;r.