The Sun. — 1865-08-07 (London, England)

THE " SPECTATOR" ON CHILD MURDER.---The public, in its healthy horror of the crimes committed by Charlotte Winsor, the Torquay murderess, has we think rather missed the point of the ghastly story told by her accuser. It has fastened justifiably and naturally upon the sickening revelation involved as it were incidentally in the woman Elarvis's statement, upon the fact that in 1865, in a pleasant village of Devon, there lived a woman of forty-five to whom child murder was a profession, who would, by her own statement, " put by" any other woman's offspring if only she were paid, who was willing to kill " forty" children if it were made worth her while, who had put her finger under the jugular vein of one, and stifled another three weeks old, and put away a third " for her sister Poory," and killed a fourth while her accuser looked on by throttling it under the bed-ticking, who took " orders" for murder as other women take orders for washing, who when a doubtful commission arrived only bjected that her customer, had she been " honest, would have prepaid her fee, and who when asked if she had no supernatural fears, bade the questioner " go to hell, for she was doing good." Murders like those committed by Pritchard or Constance Kent are justly felt to be trifles by comparison with massacres like these, with a habit of murder contracted by a woman who had no motive other than a desire for very trifling rewards, who had no animosity and no remorse, who wept when her accomplice gave evidence against her, and who seems, by one of those awful perversions of nature which almost justify the Calvinistic view of humanity, to have been willing to commit a murder as an evidence of goodwill. Thugs do not reach that.point of degradation, and to see it reached in the present day in England, and among a village population, has given a shock to the community such as no murder ever gave—a shock deepened by an impression, instinctive rather than logical, that Charlotte Winsor may not be the only woman who increases her means by making a trade of the one great crime supposed to be stopped by civilisation. We do not wonder that the public, well aware that infanticide is one of the specially English crimes, that in Lancashire " overlaying" is one of the most frequent causes of infant death, the overlaying being deliberate, that the Coroner for Middlesex has affirmed and proved the existence of 12,000 women in London each of whom must have murdered a child, that no week passes without the police reporting the discovery of the bodies of infants, should have seen in the Torquay horror new proof of a condition of affairs it had all along suspected, should have fastened upon Charlotte Winsor, and altogether forgotten what seems to us the main sentence in Mary Harris's story,—the story, let us always remember, of a woman almost as guilty as Charlotte Winsor herself. She stood and saw her own child killed, killed " barbarously," to use her own words, from a ghastly curiosity to see what its death would be like, and then helped to strip the poor infant, not yet cold, and pack it away in a rabbit-box, all apparently without a sigh, though