lessen our abhorrence of the crime, though it does of
the criminal; for it has the latter effect only by showing him to us in
different points of view, in which he appears a common mortal, and not
the caricature of vice we took him for, or spotted all over with infamy.
I do not, at the same time, think this is a lax or dangerous, though it
is a charitable view of the subject. In my opinion, no man ever answered
in his own mind (except in the agonies of conscience or of repentance,
in which latter case he throws the imputation from himself in another
way) to the abstract idea of a _murderer._ He may have killed a man
in self-defence, or 'in the trade of war,' or to save himself from
starving, or in revenge for an injury, but always 'so as with a
difference,' or from mixed and questionable motives. The individual, in
reckoning with himself, always takes into the account the considerations
of time, place, and circumstance, and never makes out a case of
unmitigated, unprovoked villainy, of 'pure defecated evil' against
himself. There are degrees in real crimes: we reason and moralise only
by names and in classes. I should be loth, indeed, to say that 'whatever
is, is right'; but almost every actual choice inclines to it, with some
sort of imperfect, unconscious bias. This is the reason, besides the
ends of secrecy, of the invention of _slang_ terms for different acts
of profligacy committed by thieves, pickpockets, etc. The common names
suggest associations of disgust in the minds of others, which those who
live by them do not willingly recognise, and which they wish to sink in
a technical phraseology. So there is a story of a fellow who, as he was
writing down his confession of a murder, stopped to ask how the word
_murder_ was spelt; this, if true, was partly because his imagination
was staggered by the recollection of the thing, and partly because he
shrunk from the verbal admission of it. '_Amen_ stuck in his throat'!
The defence made by Eugene Aram of himself against a charge of murder,
some years before, shows that he in imagination completely flung from
himself the _nominal_ crime imputed to him: he might, indeed, have
staggered an old man with a blow, and buried his body in a cave, and
lived ever since upon the money he found upon him, but there was 'no
malice in the case, none at all,' as Peachum says. The very coolness,
subtlety, and circumspection of his defence (as masterly a legal
document as there is upon recor