An Epidemic of Crime.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 408, 5 October 1889, Page 6

An Epidemic of Cri me.

We have seldom, says" the Glasgow ' Mail ' J of August 3rd, had to record a more painful and shocking affair than that which occurred on Saturday .evening in West Campbellstreet, Glasgow. A young man, 21 years old — a mere lad— occupying a respectable position in life, stands charged with the awful crime ot matricide, and no stronger or ' more gruesomo contrast could be imagined than/ that which we find -on comparing the overwhelming gravity of the charge with the utter triviality and insignificance of the circumstances so far as they are known, which led ,up to the commission of the deed. The accused youth went to, his home early on Saturday evening, and had a '.tifl ' with his mother about the meal provided for him. Such small quarrels were apparently not unusual, and, as far as can be seen, there seemed no reason to fear that this would not blow over liko other domestic ' breezes.' But out of this trumpery little disagreement hassprungthefrightful tragedy which ended in the death of the mother by the hand of the son. It is stated that the youth who is a member of. a volunteer crop.*, went to his bedroom and fofcched hi 3 rifle — whether ho loaded it then, or whether it was already loaded, may prove to be an important point which will have to be determined at the trial — and returning to the kitchen, where he had left his mother, he discharged the weapon, wibh the result that the unfortunate woman was shot through the body and mortally wounded. She died in about twenty minutes. Such is the outline of the story that now comes before the public, and a more shocking tale has seldom had to be told in Glasgow, and its painfulness is accentuated when we note that the deceased woman was a widow who kept the house for four of her sons, and that the family had borne an estimable reputation. It is often said that crimes, like diseases, run in epidemics. Whether it be the actual number of crimes or the amount of attention devoted to them, in which the variations occur from time to time, is a question we need not stop now to discuss, but certain it is that the past few weeks have been marked by a succession of particularly shocking tragedies, several of them illustrating a savage propensity to the use of lethal weapons on merely trifling provocation which is frightful and sickening to contemplate. There are some half-dozen cases which we might find without going further back than the present month. One, for instance, was reported from J arrow, where a man almost decapitated his wife with a razor, and afterwards tried to commit sucide, for no apparent cause except that he had been drinking heavily. The facts of the Garscubo Koad tragedy are still frosh in our readers' recollections. Two wife murders have been reported from Liverpool. In one caise the woman had refused to go ba^k to a cellar when her husband told 1 her to do so, and fqr that reason the man, having no razor and no gun, simply kicked her to death ; in the other instance the man and the woman quarrelled, and the quarrel resulted in the death of the wife, in a most shocking manner, and the attempted suicide of the husband. In both cases, however, the old cause — drink — was at the bottom of the tragedy. There is a case at Birmingham in which a man, 58 years of age, went home and attackdo his landlady, she being an old woman, battered her head with a coal hammer, and inflicted other injuries upon her with a knife, attempting himself to commit suicide afterwards. These — not to mention other shocking affairs in which th,e motives lor crime are more apparent — such as the tragedy reported this week from Kilburn— surely illustrate a readiness on the part of morbidly disposed or passionate, or perhaps half-insane, persons to avenge trivial quarrels with the most desperate means of retaliation they can find, which is not a little startling to contemplate. Is it possible thob such brutal outbursts of violence may become, so to speak, infectious by the force of an example onco set ? We know that the Whitechapel murders produced a host of wonldbe imitators throughout the country. Suicides, it is common knowledge, run in epidemics ; and possibly brutal crimes may tend to reproduce themselves by the influence of imagination and example upon morbid or diseased minds.