Helpless Victims Research Articles

ON THE IMMORTALITY OF EXAMINATION PESTS

THERE was a time when the touchstone of the hopeful high school graduate's fitness to enter cloistered college halls was his fluency in declining in faultless German the biological curiosities, Reptil, Animal and Fossil. A little search among old and happily forgotten examination papers might easily add Amphibium and Krokodil to the list. I am tempted to suggest in passing that the examiner, in spite of appearances to the contrary, was not wholly void of humane and scholarly intentions. Let us credit him at least with the well-meant attempt to furnish his prospective student with a correct and adequate nomenclature for the academic menagerie that was to furnish him a doleful amusement during the more tedious hours of the coming college years. Lest one linguistic field should prove insufficient for his entertainment, we took care to provide him with a few joujoux from somewhere else: a few cailloux to throw at the Animalien, or if he preferred a less deadly missile, a chou or two. These might serve to scare away at least the hiboux and still leave him sufficiently helpless for ordinary disciplinary purposes before whatever other pests the faultless rhythm of the deathless list might suggest. Fuss enough was made over these pedagogic joujoux in days gone by to keep the minds of the helpless victims in lifelong confusion about them. Did you ever have trouble on the spur of the hectic and unhappy fraction of a moment in instantaneously recalling whether it was s or x that these beasts took with them when a whole lot of them went off on a witches' Sabbath together? If you did, you know how it feels to be the joujou of fate and pedantry in its playful mood.

The Suicide of George Victor Townley

Certainly it would have been more agreeable to those gentler feelings which the occurrence of death rarely fails to produce in men, and more in harmony with that charity which willingly covers over the sins and evil behaviour of an erring creature, once he has paid the last debt of nature, to have made no mention more’ of the convicted murderer, George Victor Townley, but to have allowed him to pass in silence to his suicidal rest. That he whom an audacious intrigue saved from the extreme penalty which the law metes out to the murderer should have become his own executioner, was, perhaps, the last small act of justice which he could do to outraged society; and of him, therefore, it may not untruly be said that nothing in his life became him so well as the leaving of it. But it has been the misfortune of Townley–a misfortune which pursues him even after death–to have been cursed with injudicious friends, and to be the helpless victim of some who, after the manner of parasites, would feed upon his notoriety and make to themselves capital out of his crime. It becomes then a duty not to keep silence under these circumstances, but truthfully to expose the passionate, though unsuccessful, attempt which has been made, by taking advantage of his suicide, and the vulgar prejudice in regard to such act, to set up a sort of justification of that foul disgrace into which, not the medico-psychological speciality only, but the whole medical profession, was mercilessly dragged on the occasion of his trial, and subsequently to it. Furthermore, since Townley's eventful life now constitutes a pathological fact in the annals of great crimes, and since tender feelings of compassion can have no place in pathological investigation of a felon's nature, it is necessary, in the cause of science, however much we may regret the necessity, to present the issue of a case the previous course of which has been recorded and discussed in the numbers of this Journal for January and April, 1864, and more fully in a special pamphlet on ‘Insanity and Crime’ by the Editors. The following is the account of his death and of the inquest upon his body as given in the daily papers: