I have sat beside such men as they lay in bed, I have watched the expression on their faces, and I have listened to heavy breathing, for words they had none. I have seen them rise from bed in a state of stupor and do some foolish or childish thing. I have been ignored as if I were not present, and I have been made aware of the strange fact that maddening excitement had been followed by the suspension of mental faculties. I have known men in this condition wander from home into the streets, where a special Providence seemed to care for them and protect them from serious accident. Frequently men of this description are arrested by the police and charged with violence or disorderly conduct. Sometimes the magistrate, noticing their strange behaviour, remands them and asks the medical officer at the prison to examine and report upon them. Invariably the report is to the effect that the prisoners have shown no indication of insanity. The detention during remand is generally considered sufficient punishment, but an admonition from the Bench on the evils of drink very often precedes the prisoner’s discharge.
Back to their homes they go, confirmed in their delusions and made more bitter by their arrest and detention. Especially is this the case when a long-suffering wife has herself appealed to the police for protection. It is small wonder that some of these unfortunate men are eventually executed for wife murder.
It is well known that even educated and well-to-do women are sometimes afflicted with what, for want of a better word, I will call “acquisitiveness,” though some people call it “kleptomania.” Under the power of this mania, vice or habit women become positively helpless, bringing disgrace upon their respectable friends, and ruin upon themselves.
A pitiful problem they present. People smile incredulously about them. Judges and magistrates sometimes inform the culprits, and the public, that they sit in court for the purpose of curing this habit, vice or crime. And an admiring public always endorses, and acclaims the heavy sentence of imprisonment awarded.
But neither judge nor magistrate can cure it, for a sentence of five years’ penal servitude given by a judge is quite as futile as a sentence of three months’ imprisonment given by a magistrate. Women of this kind exist among the poor even as they do among the rich, and they are just as responsible as acquisitive jackdaws. They steal, store up, and hide all sorts of portable articles, and, like jackdaws, they make no use of the articles stolen.
