The Psychology of Poisoning.

boldness. He kept his public faith. He was influential in affairs of the greatest moment. He vigorously spent his fortune and his talents in the cause of Independence. He

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strove to restore order, to create a nation. He enjoyed the confidence of his fellow citi zens. He won the esteem of Washington.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POISONING. III. BY J. H. BEALE, JR. IT is probably not difficult for any of us to feel a certain sympathy with those unfor tunate creatures whose passions of love or loathing have led them to crime. We all have moments of longing for a complacent con science which would permit the painless re moval of a hated obstacle to our just desires; moments when we can understand how a re spectable and ordinarily moral person could do the acts charged against Mrs. Maybrick or even Dr. Pritchard. But another class of poisoners have reached a depth of moral degradation to which one who lives an or dinary life can hardly follow, even in imagi nation. The man or woman who could mur der a relative or a friend to gain money from his death is an unsexed and brutish creature with whom we must believe ourselves to have nothing in common. Yet such men and women, apparently ordinary persons, sane and respectable, have poisoned their rela tives or their friends, for a legacy, for insur ance money, to conceal and avoid paying a debt : some of them have formed a habit, like the Italian poisoners of the Middle Ages, and have numbered their victims by the halfscore. Of the two great primary passions, Jove and covetousness, the meaner one is not the less powerful. A few years before Mrs. Maybrick's trial at Liverpool, Mrs. Sarah Robinson was brought to the bar in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, charged for the sec ond time with murder; she had previously been tried upon another indictment, and the

jury had disagreed. Indictments were at the time pending against her for the murder of six persons by poisoning with arsenic, and evidence was presented at the trial tending to show that she had killed a seventh in the same way. All but one of these persons were near relatives and members of her family; her husband first, then her sister, her brotherin-law, their son, and her own son and daughter. Mrs. Robinson's story, according to the theory of the government, seems almost in credible. Left early an orphan, she had cared for her younger sister until both were able to support themselves. She had worked industriously at her trade of dressmaking, gaining the good will of her employers. She married early and lived in apparent happi ness with her husband for more than twenty years; she gave birth to five or six children, to all of whom she was devoted. She was a constant attendant at church and regularly devout in her family. Suddenly, in the sum mer of 1882. her husband died. His life had been insured, but owing to some informality she was unable to secure payment of the amount, and sued for it in vain. In Feb ruary, 1885, she was called to the house of her sister, who was ill with pneumonia. Her sister's husband, Prince Arthur Freeman, had an insurance on his life, amounting to $2.000, in the "Order of Pilgrim Fathers." Mrs. Freeman, who had seemed convales cent before Mrs. Robinson's arrival, grew rapidly worse afterward and in a few days