of Esther Hibner is familiarized to all ears by its infamy. The sum of her history is, that she treated her apprentices as the most barbarous and depraved of slaveholders treats his slaves, whom he would rather torture than make a profit of. She starved them; she beat them; she pulled out their hair; she had them ducked; till, happily, one died of the ill-usage, and the others were in consequence rescued. Esther Hibner was hanged. In this case, protection came when only one life had been sacrificed; but the succession of cases that was revealed at this time, and the general impression conveyed by the evidence, caused a conviction that the pauper apprentices were too many and too helpless to be properly cared for; and that there must be something intolerably wrong in the state of society which permitted them to swarm as they did. During the same period, a case here and there appeared at the police-offices, or came to the knowledge of inquiring men, which showed, that, if the amount of pauperism was becoming unmanageable, so were the abuses of pauper funds. The corruption of morals caused by the parish allowance for infants was more like the agency of demons than the consequence of a legislative mistake. In many rural districts, it was scarcely possible to meet with a young woman who was respectable; so tempting was the parish allowance for infants in a time of great pressure. And then again, there were the pauper marriages; old drunkards marrying the worst subjects they could find in the neighboring workhouses, for the sake of the fee of two or three pounds given to get rid of the woman. The poverty of the industrious, the violence of the exasperated, the cruelty of the oppressor, the corruption of the tempted, the swindling of the corrupt, and the waste of the means of life all round, to a point which threatened the stability of the whole of society, these were things which could not long endure, and which made the thoughtful look anxiously for a change. The amount of poorrate expenditure for relief at this time was between six and seven millions annually, and incessantly on the increase. First among the changes needed was the introduction of an abundance of food. While, however, men, women, Game laws. and children were actually wan and shrunken with hunger, they saw a sight which turned their patient sighs into angry curses. When the poor Irish lay hands on grain about to be exported, we do not wonder at the act, though we would fain make them understand that by the sale of that grain comes the fund which is their only resource for the payment of their labor, and their consequent means of bread, and hope of next year's crop. But, when the hungering peasant sees whole breadths of wheat devoured or laid waste before his eyes by the hares and pheasants of his rich neighbor, what can be said that shall deter him from putting in for his share? During this period, the jails were half filled with offenders against the game-laws; and besides the melancholy stories, so frequent as to weary the newspaper reader, of poaching affrays, in which men of the one party were killed by violence in the night, and men of the other party were afterwards killed by law, we find a new order of offences rising up under the vicious system. We find that men prowled about in the fields near the great game covers, strewing and sowing poisoned grain. Country gentlemen were not then so well aware, as later events have made some of them, of the danger of suggesting to the ignorant peasant the use of poison, in any kind of self-defence against his neighbor. But, if the evil had never spread beyond the poisoning of pheasants and hares, there was enough in it to induce any thoughtful and humane man to inquire whether he was not pursuing his sports at too great a cost. If he did not know, and would not learn, the amount of social injury that he was causing in the useless consumption or destruction of food, it was clear to all eyes, that he was causing his brother to offend by his persistence in the pursuit of a mere amusement. Some transactions of this time between the country gentlemen and their peasant neighbors remind us but too strongly of the days before the first French Revolution, when the great man of the chateau kept the neighboring cottagers up all night, whipping the ponds, to silence the frogs. Subsequent events showed that these cottagers were of opinion, that, as they were to toil for the great man in the day, he should have protected, instead of forbidding, their sleep at night; and events were now at hand which indicated something of the feeling of the ignorant and suffering peasantry against the landed interests of England. It is during this period that we come upon the traces of the practice which is, beyond all others, the opprobrium of Poisonings. our time, the practice of poisoning for the gratification of selfish passion. The perpetrators are of a different order from those of whom we read in the history of past centuries, of whom we read with a shudder at the thought of living in such times; but the crime is as desperate in our day, and, it is to be feared, more extensive. Then, it was the holders of science and their intimates that did it, those who ought best to have known the value of human life, and the irredeemable guilt of cruel treachery. In our day, it is the lowest of the low who do it; people whose ignorance and folly, offered in evidence on their trial, make us aghast to think how, when, and where we are living, with beings like these for fellow-citizens. We look upon these fellow-citizens of ours as upon ill-conditioned children, killing flies for their amusement, and breaking windows in their passion. They know nothing of the sacredness of human life, of to virtue, decency, good fame, or of doing as they would be done by. They want something, money, or a lover, or a house, or to be free of the trouble of an infant; and they put out the life which stands in the way of what they want. Time and experience appear to show that this is but the beginning. Their sluggish faculties seem to be pleasurably animated by the excitement of the act; and they repeat it, till, at the present time, we find cases of men and women who have been poisoning relations and neighbors by the score, during a period of ten or fifteen years. The guilt and the shame lie with the whole of society, which has permitted its members - hundreds of thousands of them grow up as if they were not human beings at all, but a cross between the brute and the devil. We can see the horror of the existence of such a class in another country, and shudder at the atrocious mental and moral condition of the canaille at the time of the first French Revolution; but it may be questioned whether France had at that time any thing to reveal more sickening than our wholesale child-murder for the sake of the profits from burialclubs, and the poisonings which sweep off whole families in the hamlets of our rural districts. In the year 1828, the idea seems to have been so new and appalling as to make us feel, in the reading, ashamed of the familiarity which has grown up in ten years. In 1828, Jane Scott was found guilty, at the Lancaster assizes, of having murdered her mother by poison. She had been previously tried for the murder of her father; but had escaped, through the death of a witness. Before she was hanged, she confessed both murders, and also that she had poisoned an illegitimate child of her own, and one of her sister's. The object of her parricide was to obtain property, which might tempt an acquaintance to marry her. Her age was twenty-one. She seems to have acted under the superficial excitability of a child, rather than from any fury of passion. This first case of a long series is here given expressly as such. Henceforward a general mention must suffice; for the crime becomes more and more frequent. Next to the pain of the fact is that of hearing what is proposed as a remedy. Far and wide now, men are proposing to restrict and impede the sale of poisons, as if any mechanical check could avail against a moral mischief so awful! It is not in barring out any knowledge once obtained that safety can be found, but in letting in more without restriction or delay. We have had warning of this for many years now; yet no system of national education is in practice, or likely to be so. Sectarian quarrels have come in the way. To this hour, men are disputing about the order of religious education that shall be given, and insisting upon the right to communicate exclusively each his own views; while one generation after another passes off into the outer darkness, and beings, called human, are, after leading the life of devils, dying the death of brutes. Let this case of Jane Scott be preserved and perpetuated till we have done our duty by the living of her class, and then forgotten as soon as may be; for, in holding up to view her dangling corpse, we are gibbeting ourselves. Burking. At the close of our last period, mention was made of the affrays caused by the practice of body-snatching. In the present period, we have a long array of such narratives, and something worse. It had been for some time suspected, that various ingenious methods were constantly in use to meet the demand of the hospitals for subjects for dissection. Among others, the detection of a single case of fraud in obtaining the body of a person unknown, dying in a workhouse, caused a suspicion that such frauds were frequent. A man and woman presented themselves to claim the body of a man who had dropped down dead on Walworth Common, declaring that the woman was the sister of the deceased. From their appearance of anxiety and grief, and the circumstantial story they told, no doubt of the relationship was entertained, till it was accidentally discovered that these people had sold the body to St. Bartholomew's Hospital for eleven guineas. The only way in which the culprits could then be reached was by prosecution for stealing the clothes of the deceased. It had become pretty evident now that the requirements of science must be met by some arrangement which should facilitate the procuring of bodies for dissection; and already individuals here and there were doing what they could by making known that they had by will left their own bodies for dissection. Some few had even sold their own bodies for that purpose, receiving at once a portion of the sixteen guineas, which was then the average price of such an article. But, in the year 1828, a disclosure was made, which, while it startled everybody, warned such negotiators as we have mentioned to be careful as to the parties with whom they made their bargain. By an accidental discovery of a dead body, recognized as that of a woman in good health a few hours before, in the house of a man named Burke, at Edinburgh, it was revealed that a system of murder had been going on for some time, in order to supply "subjects" to the dissecting-rooms. Burke himself confessed fifteen murders which he and his accomplice Hare had perpetrated together. Their practice was to note any helpless half-wit and unfriended persons in the streets, invite them home, make them first merry, and then stupidly drunk, and then suffocate them by covering the mouth and nose, and pressing upon the body. The medical men do not appear to have noticed any suspicious appearances about the corpses brought to them, or to have made any troublesome objections to the stories told in each case to account for the possession of the body. The only observation on record is, that Dr. Knox, in one case, "approved of it as being so fresh." The horror of the medical men must have been extreme when the truth was revealed. The consternation of the public was excessive. Probably it was not known to any one, or ever will be, how far the practice of burking as the offence was henceforth called -extended at that time; how much was true of the dreadful stories of murder current in every town and village in the kingdom. Most people believed at that time, that it was the custom of not a few gangs of murderers to clap plasters on the mouths of children and unsuspicious or helpless persons, to strangle them, and sell them to the doctors; and it is probable that the crime was suggested by the fear, and by the notoriety of the case of Burke and Hare; while the practical jokes instigated by the general apprehension were, no doubt, numerous. The crime was superseded by improved care on the part of surgeons, and by legislation, which supplied them with what they wanted. But the memory of the occasion is kept alive by the new term which it supplied. Since that date, we have had the verb "to burke;" which means to stifle or extinguish any subject or practice, from motives of self-interest. The execution of the murderer took place at Edinburgh in January, 1829, when the spectacle of popular rage and vindictive exultation was fearful.1 Shouts arose from a multitude vast beyond precedent, shouts to the executioner of," Burke him; give him no rope; burke him!" And at every convulsive throe, a huzza was set up, as if every one present was near of kin to his victims. When the body was cut down, there was a cry for “ one cheer more!" and a general and tremendous huzza closed the diabolical celebration. Notable This was not the only crime of this period which stimulated legislation. A shock was given to the general feeling crimes. by the execution of a man known and habited, though disowned, as a Quaker, for forgery. The case was so clear and so common, a case of rash embezzlement, covered by the forgery of bills, in the hope of retrieval before the time came round, that there could be no doubt about his punishment while others were so doomed; but the peculiarities of the case quickened the efforts of those who disapproved of capital punishment for forgery. Hunton was executed on the 8th of December; and, on the 27th of the same month, a case of embezzlement occurred which eclipsed all prior adventures of the kind. A member of Parliament, Treasurer of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and a partner in 2 1 Annual Register, 1829, Chron. p. 19. |