CRIME IN FRANCE AND OTHER COUNTRIES.
By D. T. Taylor
War being a crime, France herself is a huge criminal. Since the year A. D. 1300, she has spent three hundred and twenty-six years of her national existence at war; 80 of these bloody years being times of civil war, and the remaining 246 foreign. She spent nearly half (43 years) of the thirteenth century in war; 71 years of the fifteenth century, 85 years of the sixteenth, 69 years of the seventeenth, and 58 of the eighteenth, in slaughtering humanity. A nation thus trained to deeds of strife and blood can place but little value on human life. Killing becomes a trade. France originated a St. Bartholomew, and gave birth to the Reign of Terror and the Commune. Should it be claimed that war’s slaughterings are legitimate, and cannot be reckoned as criminal, we demur in the light of the gospel, and pass to other facts. In 1868 the Journal Official gave a statistical report of crime in France. There were more crimes in 1867 than during the previous year; crime was asserted to be on the increase, especially among the lower classes, the uneducated. That year twenty-five persons received the death sentence for murder, and a host of murderers escaped. More murders had been perpetrated in the empire (and in Germany too, it was said) in 1867 than ever in a year before. The actual number of homicides was 307. At the same time France was freer from the murderous spirit than was Spain and Italy, and any increase caused alarm. Coming to self-murders, we find their increase in France actually frightful, Paris in this respect distancing all other cities. A report to the Institute of France, by M. Decaise, a few years since, gave London 1 suicide in every 175 deaths; for New York, 1 to 172; for Vienna, 1 to 100; while mad Paris had 1 self-murderer to every 72 deaths. In 1870, Prof. A Von Oettingen gave to the public the following table of increase of self-destruction in France, thus: In 1830 there were 1,730 suicides; in 1840 there were 2,574; in 1850 there were 3,446; in 1860 there were 4,002; in 1865 there were 4,700. He showed a steady increase which was nine times as rapid as was the increase of population! In 1874 the cases of self-murder in all France ran up to 5,617; of these 29 were by persons under sixteen years of age. This is on an average sixteen cases each day! A general increase over all previous years was reported from the office of Criminal Justice, and the increase was attributed in a great measure to the increased consumption of absinthe, an intoxicating drug that induces madness. There occurred also in the above year 168,835 arrests, 35,000 robberies, 18,000 cases of poaching, 13,000 cases of assault on law officers, and 15,000 deadly assaults by cutting and wounding. (See Edinburgh Scotsman, Oct. 21, 1876.) The following year, 1875, the suicides increased. Of those who killed themselves nine were fifteen years of age, six were fourteen, nine only thirteen, one was twelve, two were eleven, one ten, and one but nine. Twenty-nine children committing the crime of self-murder! I will only add what Edward King says in a letter from Paris to the Boston Journal, under date of Jan. 5, 1877: “Such a frightful tempest of crime has swept over France in these latter days, that the judges show no mercy, and the executioner is kept traveling all the time. In France there is but one official who can inflict capital punishment, and he is a much overworked man.” In France there are thirty-seven Romanists to one Protestant. Who will undertake to convert this mass of drunken, gay, giddy, ignorant, self-destroying people, who, if not utterly atheistic and godless, have at the throne and in their affections substituted the Virgin Mary for our Lord Jesus Christ? A few facts will serve to show that this spirit of Cain is everywhere rampant. I have no statistics of Switzerland, but religion and morals must be low there, if the case be true recently reported of a man acquitted of the charge of murder on the ground that “he had always fulfilled his religious duties”! He had killed his own wife! In Syria, in 1871, a Druze woman, because she was disappointed in a love affair, wreaked her vengeance on the innocents, and poisoned to death and cut to pieces eight children. On her arrest it was alleged she had committed no less than fourteen murders. She manifested entire heartlessness in regard to these bloody deeds. In Chili, S. A., during June, 1877, nine bandits came upon a peaceful dwelling, seized three helpless boys in sleep, stabbed the eldest till he was literally hacked in pieces, ripped up the second and cut his hand away in piece-meal, then thrust their sharp knives into the mouth of the youngest, turning them round and round till the tongue, palate, and cheeks were perfectly minced! In India, in May, 1876, a man named Kahden was arrested who confessed to having murdered sixteen persons in the last four years. He had poisoned all his victims and then robbed them. It was called the most serious and alarming crime in India since the suppression of Thuggism.—D. T. Taylor.