Hadfield feel when they address the Men of Sheffield, and declare themselves proud of the constituency which returns them? How many of their hearers at their great public meetings do they suppose may have been cognisant of a murder? And, of the honourable constituency who are praised and thanked by their members, how many have tried, earnestly and persistently, to put a stop to this special Sheffield practice? Is there anybody doing anything towards penetrating to the causes of the crime, and dealing directly with it? Or do Sheffield citizens think that they are not their brothers’ keepers? But we are told that there are schools and churches and public reading-rooms, and other edifying institutions, providing for the extinction of vice by the growth of popular intelligence. It is true,—there are those good institutions, and popular intelligence is advancing; but people’s eyes are still blown out by midnight explosions, and workmen are liable to be shot in the back in entering or leaving their own homes. Sheffield has made a good appearance in the Census of this year, having increased in population 50,000 in ten years. There has been eloquence and patriotism and complacency among public speakers and municipal magnates this year; but on the 23rd of last month two women were blown up and burnt by the ordinary Sheffield mode of attack—an infernal machine thrown in at a window; and a warehouse was partly blown up by the same means that day week. Is there anybody walking Sheffield streets to-day who can tell who did these things, and why? How many of the respectable citizens may have looked in such an one’s face, or been brushed by his coat, since Saturday morning, the 23rd, and Saturday, the 30th of last month?
Such facts remind one of what Prince Talleyrand said of the Russians: “Scratch a Russian, and you find a Tartar underneath.” It strikes us that, from some cause, there is a scratch on our civilisation in Sheffield, and we find savagery underneath. Is Sheffield like our other settlements of men, urban or rural, or is it no rule for others? In either case the answer leads to very serious thoughts.
What do we see elsewhere among us of the regard to human life? What has an old man like me seen in his time?
There were pressgang murders in my youth. Nobody can wonder at that who remembers the terrors of the pressgang within a dozen miles of the coast. Nobody can wonder at it who considers what it was to a sailor to be virtually outlawed, kidnapped, and carried off, on his return from a long voyage, just when his heart was in a glow at the thought of meeting wife and children in a few hours. The excellent Addresses of the Naval Reserve forces of England last month to the mariners of the country recal to mind the days of the pressgang, and congratulate the community on the arrangement which will man the fleet with willing and well-paid seamen instead of with resentful men whose liberty has been outraged. Thus we may dismiss the subject of the pressgang, as society has dismissed the thing itself, agreeing that if ever murderous assaults could be excusable, it would be in such moments of agony as many a kidnapped sailor had to endure in the wars of sixty years ago.
Then, there were smuggling murders. They were not very wonderful either. Get together the conditions, and see. There was the midnight season, with its chances of impunity. There was a party of vagabonds, strong and reckless men, provided with fire-arms, and well plied with drink. There was some revenue cutter, with a crew which hated the smugglers as the smugglers hated them, and both hated the French. There was wealth at stake; contraband goods on the one hand, and rewards and forfeitures to be shared on the other. There was an intense party spirit on both sides, and a fierce ambition. The smugglers had the eyes of the whole coast peasantry on them for miles on either hand, and future observance and profit hung on the issue of any conflict with the guard. The guard contended for honour and reward. No wonder the barrels were run in under cover of a brisk fight; no wonder there was a stand made at the entrance of a cavern where an assortment of silks and laces and clocks and snuff-boxes was stowed away. No wonder that the temptation to take life was overwhelming when it was of importance that no tales should be told. No wonder that an active pursuer was shot, here and there, or a coast patrol thrown over the cliff. The case was usually one of manslaughter, and not murder. Men’s passions were up, and they measured their forces, without thinking or feeling about the value of human life, one way or another. That chapter of owe experience is closed. Free-trade has rendered smuggling an obsolete institution; and the murders have become a horror of the olden time.
I wish we could say as much of the analogous game-law murders. These are worse in character than the smuggling violences, because they follow upon acts of more palpable theft. To the popular mind it is more like theft to take game from coverts and fields where it is fed at a neighbour’s expense on his own land than to bring in merchandise from over the sea—merchandise which would be sold in the market but for troublesome and oppressive laws which everybody disliked. Poachers are thieves; and they know themselves to be so: and, if we protest against a system of game-preserving which subjects a poor peasantry to overwhelming temptation, we do not admit that the murder of gamekeepers is at all palliated by the badness of the system. Poaching assaults are, like murders by burglars, violence inflicted by thieves, for the selfish purpose of saving the perpetrators of the theft. The circumstance which sustains the murderous poacher at a somewhat higher level than the murderous burglar is, that there is an open air fight in the case, between men who are up and awake. Their blood is up on both sides: and they fight for adventure and victory, though nothing can obscure the essential difference between them, that the one party are thieves and the other watchmen. Poaching murders are thus very vile; though not necessarily involving that savage indifference to human life which shows itself under the skin-deep civilisation of certain parts of our social system.
My next recollection is of successive seasons of Irish murders. I cannot dwell upon the scenes of
