The Haslingden Gazette. — 1904-01-30 (Haslingden, Lancashire, England)

THE AVHNOING SPRITZ.  Outrage.; of every conceivable description are but the common incidents of every-day life in times of revolution and social anarchy and the manycoloured pages of history in all countries are stained with polluted scenes, the fields of war, and dungeon horrors. I ant rather like the boy who was visited by Clio, the strong-eyed muse, who invoked gentle poesy to save him from the contemplation of history's bloothetained peace, for I am one who willingly would love his fellow-kind. But Clio chides him for his maudlin, low-sick maidenishness, and asks: Was it for this I wakened thy young mind, 6.9 it for this I made thy swelling heart Throb at the deeds of Greece, And thy boy's eye Sll kindle When that glorious Spartan &Lel?  Aye. yes, if our murderers were heroes like that our hearts niight not sicken at man's misde:de, and we might nurse our nature's better feeling. Yet, in the mysterious workings of Providence, it seems almost to be stamped as a law that human nature most be perpetually contracUcting itself, that highlystrung, nervous, sensitive teniperament3 must ho subject to the torture of witnessing deeds and como into contact with characters from the very muterm• plation of which their whole being shrinks. This idea of contradictions F.MS to be endorsed by Byron who, in his "Manfred," speaks of fatal things pawing harmless by those wearied of life and would °enter into rest," and falling on things that would lire:  The young, flourishing forest. And the tut and hamlet of the harmless villager. However this may be, while by nature I am Optimistic, and would by the exercise of imagination seek to harmoiii, all life. Fate has decreed that I should ,ome into close contact, not merely with what is commonly described as the shady side of existence which is a comparatively mild aspect of humanity's weaknesses and failings but that I should sit cheek by jowl with some of our most notorious criminals, enter into dens of infamy and outrage, and generally become an associate of the " sanseulotte." A journalist's life is indeed a varied and exciting one, and lel marked by the most vivid contrasts. From the slum to the colon, from the ballroom to the scaffold! Politics and society, riot and religion, rosemary and rue! I might add pawnce for pansy, for it is necessary in such a life that thought —" there's pansy for thought," says Opticlia—grace, memory, should come to the aid of this creature of circumstances, no less than society's victim. Everybody seems to know him, but nobody does in reality. He is a very ordinary mortal among his fellow-men, somewhat reserved perhaps, but he is too illusive and übiquitous, and  WIELDS THE MAGICIAN'S WAND  too surely to lie understood if the people. But murder is my theme, and the tragic deeds of the criminal my present topic. I shall assuredly wri!e about every other subject under the sun but this, and shall simply play around the epidemic to avoid the heart of this sinister aspect of life if I don't bring my mind to its right bearings, and acknowledge at once that the lesions of notorious criminal cases are among he deepest and most instructive in life. To what abysmal depths of degradation may humanity descend, and what it is capable of in its worst moods let Fish, the Blackburn murderer, and Deeming, the English and Colonial slayer of his kith and kin, his own flesh and blood, in elmest and most sacred of human relationships. declare. It was my lot to have something to do with both these cases. I have seen life  mamiNG FORTH IN BLOOD;  have seen the bed of sin, delirious with its dread; but these were tumultuous horrors compared with the cool and riles' preparations for the sacrifice of , his victims in the case of the latter, who murdered two wives and families, and the untold and nameless infamy of the former. I have often wondered since that dread period, when the eyeu of the whole country were turned upon Blackburn as the scene of one of the most terrib!e outrages of modern tim, though twenty-eight years will have elapsed since then on the 26th of March next, what the state of that notorious barber's mind must have been when, in his lock-up shop in Moss-etreet, I said to him, with scrutinising glances, "You are suspected of the murder of little Emily Holland!" His nervous twitches and the restlessness of the eyes indicated some perturbation, but is not iesensibility to a great extent destroyed by the infringement of the moral code?