WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 209, 13 December 1910, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

(Conducted by "Eileen")

A WOMAN'S CRIME.

AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY.

London, October 28,

At Bodmin, Cornwall, last Monday there came to an end a criminal trial which, had it not been for the intervention of the notorious Crippen case, would have attracted a great deal of public attention. The prisoneV in the dock was Mrs. Olive Willyams, sometime tenant with Jier husband, Captain Hugh Willyams, of Tregorland-street, Justin-the-Rose, and she pleaded guilty to four indictments charging her with forging the name of her husband's uncle, Mr Brydges Willyams, an ex-high sheriff of Cornwall, and formerly M.P. for the Truro division.

Mrs. Willyams' crime was a particularly wicked one. This tenderly nurtured, highly educated lady, not only stooped'to wholesale forgeries of promissory notes, deeds and letters, but deliberately set up the story that the promissory notes were the wages of her own shame, leaving it to be inferred that she -was the mistress of her husband's uncle, and that her husband was cognisant of the fact. Moreover, she contrived her forgeries m such a way as to implicate her husband, who found himself charged with uttering one lor £2OOO. He, however, was able to prove to the satisfaction of judge and jury that he was the innocent dupe of his wife, and was discharged amidst loud cheers.

Altogether Mrs. Willyams' forgeries in promissory notes amounted to over £II,OOO, and in. addition she had forged a mortgage deed for €IOOO in her husband's name, and had forged his name so often that the captain admitted that he had now grave difficulty in swearing to any signature purporting to be his. | The plea on behalf of Mrs. Willyams amounted to asking the jury to treat her as a woman rendered irresponsible for her actions through over-indulgence in morphia. Her counsel declared that she took the almost unheard-of quantity of between 45 and CO grains a day, and stated .that all the parts of her body which could be reached by the hands were covered with the pricks of the hypodermic syringe. He maintained that although not insane, Mrs. Willyams and other victims of the morphia habit are not quite on the same plane as,,the person who sits down in cold blood to plan a crime, and that one of the first things that happens to them is that thev lose all sense of truth. They seem to live in a complete dream of their own, and in time come to 'believe what is simply the product of their own imagination. Mrs. Willyams' plots, said counsel, were of the kind which would be woven by a person who had fancies in her mind which in time she came to believe were facts. She invented a story .which, if true, would bring upon her infinitely more condemnation from her own people than if she had confessed to the forgeries. Counsel was fane to confess that having carefully investigated those stories, her lawyers had found them entire fiction from beginning to end.

Mr. Justice Eldon Banks—our newest judge—did not pay much heed to Mrs. Willyams' counsel's morphia plea. Addressing the woman, who sat cowering, shivering, sobbing and half-fainting in) the dook, he said sternly: "I do not desire to add by my words to the misery and degradation you must feel. You know as well as I do what a wicked woman you have been. Yours was a carefully though-out plan not only for robbing your husband's relative, but for blasting his reputation in the most wicked manner one can conceive. I have been told you are a victim of the morphia habit, but I do not believe that you could have carried out these elaborate forgeries and have kept it up as you have done •with such ingenuity and daring if your nerves had been worried in the way your counsel has suggested as some extenuation of your guilt. The sentence I must now pass on you is that of three years' penal servitude." Mrs. Willyams made an effort to rise as the judge passed sentence. Her face was clay-colored, and her mouth twitched painfully. Her lips moved, but no sound came, and in a faint she was carried from the Court, as Captain Willyams was called up to hear from the jury of his acquittal.

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. There are nearly as many monuments to women as to men is the great historic pile of Westminster Abbey, some because of their association with Royalty, some because of their prominent social position, and some because of the conspicuous merits of their husbands, but many—a great many—because of their own claims to greatness. The latest instances of the honor being done to distinguish women are those of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Mrs. Gladstone. Less than four years ago Angela Georgina, Lady Burdett-Coutts, was buried in the Abbey beneath the statue of Lord Shaftesbury—a tribute to one who had served her generation well. She was the only woman who had been interred in the nave since the eighteenth century. In May, 1898, Mr. Gladstone was buried in the centre of the North transept, this being the first State funeral since that of Pitt, similar honor having been offered and declined in the case of Lord Beaconsfield; and in June, I!K)0, Mrs. Gladstone was laid in her husband's grave.

JAPANESE WOMEN,

ABANDONING HQME LIFE

There are many stories of heroic women in Japan, but however loud the call to other things, the main sphere of the Japanese women must remain her chief responsibility. As the Japanese are a race attaching great importance to cleanliness, the wife must see that the house is daily aitended to and kept scrupulously in order, and that not a speck of dust is albwed to collect within tihe dwelling. In accordance with the Japanese\habit of devotion, there is in every home a little altar shelf, where the spirits of the ancestors receive daily homage. Before the ancestral tablets, as well as before the favorite gods of the family, gifts of saki or rice must be laid and prayers offered before the shrine. The wife must attend to these religious duties though all others fail. Since the restoration some of these old ideas have been modified somewhat; but the man principles of the civilisation remain. In olden times woman's education was inclined toward the moral rather than the intellectual, and she kept her mind upon the home rather than society. This tendency has within the last few ' years been moderated, and to-day the intellectual and social atmosphere of the world is attracting the women of Japan to an unusual degree. The effect is beneficial, because it is leading our women to see that they owe a duty to the State and society as well as to the home. This change has been effected chiefly through the influence of Occidental philosophy and literature, and the ideas of some few of our women are becoming so Westernised that they are beginning to discuss the independence of women, and advocating the Occidental custom of having newly-married couples live in separate houses from . their parents. Not only so, but the increased intensity of the straggle for existence has led many women to S-ck employment in factories and offices, an) thus to abandon home life altogether. Industrialism is thus bound to have an important effect upon the future of domestic life in Japan.