THE DISCLOSED BLOOD. ISAIAH xxvi. 21. HE prophet announces the coming of the Lord out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; and of His so coming one result is this: that "the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain." Another prophet is the mouthpiece of the same Divine power, declaring of "the bloody city," that He hath set her blood upon the top of a rock, that it should not be covered. Woe to him that buildeth a tower with blood. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it. There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. And yet, as a matter of fact, the mystery of murder is not invariably cleared up. The rule of inevitable final disclosure has its exceptions. Nay, a Saturday Reviewer claims the assent of every one who, for any special reason, pays attention to such subjects, to the allegation that an immense proportion of the crimes which are committed escape detection; and that although, from several causes, murderers escape less frequently than other criminals, "a majority of the murders which take place pass unpunished, whilst there is every reason to believe that many occur which are never even suspected." Un 1 It would be easy, this writer says, to give a long list of undetected murders which have happened within a short time and a confined district, but which have been forgotten because there was nothing particularly interesting about them. Perhaps it would be possible to make out a list of fifty or sixty such cases within the last five or six years, to say nothing of trials for murder which have ended in acquittals, and deaths which, though really caused by violence, have not excited suspicion." See the entire article, headed "The Detection of Crime," in vol. x., p. 353; and compare p. 303. To the same writer probably, in a previous volume, may be ascribed an article on Undetected Crime, the drift of which is, that popular phrases, denoting the frequency with which great crimes are unexpectedly brought to justice, embody rather an opinion as to what ought to happen than a conviction as to what really occurs. To show that cases of murder which escape detection are, as he contends, really very numerous, he mentions a few examples which suggested themselves at once to his remembrance, certainty, he contends, cannot be eliminated from crime more than from any other human affairs; but the uncertainty cuts both ways it cuts against the criminal, as well as in his without any particular research. It is many years since Eliza Grimwood was found with her throat cut, and from that day to this "no traces of the murderer have been discovered, though the crime was committed in one of the principal thoroughfares of a very populous district." Twenty years since, a Mr. Griffiths was shot dead by highway robbers, as he was driving into Brighton in his gig, and the criminals have never been found out. In 1854, a man was shot dead on the road a few miles out of Leicester; a year later, an old man was cruelly beaten to death, for the sake of a sovereign, in the north of Derbyshire; in 1855, another person was similarly murdered, and all for a pair of shoes; while about the same time a Scotch lady was strangled not many yards from a public footpath in Yorkshire, in broad daylight. "In none of these cases have the murderers been detected, and in all probability they never will be." Who murdered Begbie? was once a common cry,-now forgotten, never answered. It was in an early edition of his Traditions of Edinburgh that Mr. Robert Chambers observed, on this remarkable and exciting mystery: "Up to the present day the murderer of Begbie has not been discovered; nor is it probable, after the space of time that has elapsed (forty years), that he ever will be so. It is most likely that the grave has long closed over him." Crimes cause their own detection, do they? is the cynical query of Count Fosco; and murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, he adds: ask secretaries of life assurance companies; read the newspapers. "In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found; and what conclusion do you come to? This that there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that crime causes its own detection! Yes-all the crime you know of. And what of the rest?" Count Fosco loquitur, but to some extent the author presumably speaks in or through him. All the more reason, maybe, for bearing in mind what the author says, strictly of himself, or for himself, in a later book: to wit, that nothing in this world is hidden for ever. "Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the telltale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature : the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen. There is a parallel passage to this in the ablest work of one of the ablest of living American writers, which notes how that which keeps the delicate links safe in the dead rock, whereby men spell the secrets of old cycles, takes care also of all, minutest, marvellous, most precarious links whereby a knowledge is to come. "Nothing is strange or difficult in Look favour, for though it be never certain that he will be detected, "Abhors the cruel, and the deeds of night The hue and cry of Heaven pursues him at the heels, Many persons have, as Jeremy Taylor says, betrayed themselves by their own fears, and knowing themselves never to be secure enough, have gone to purge themselves of what nobody suspected them; offered an apology when they had no accuser but one within; which, like a thorn in the flesh, or like " a word in a fool's heart," was uneasy till it came out. "Murder and treason have by such strange ways been revealed, as if God had appointed an angel president of the revelation, and had kept this in secret and sure ministry to be as an argument to destroy atheism from the face of the earth, by opening the secrets of men with this key of Providence. Intercepting of letters, mistaking names, false inscriptions, errors of messengers, faction of the parties, fear in the this old world, written all over with frail records, yet unperishing, of life, and fate, and human deed. There is nothing hidden but shall be made manifest, when once the hour has come." Time sees all, hears all, and tells all,-is the pregnant phrase of Sophocles. actors, horror in the action, the majesty of the person, the restlessness of the mind, distracted looks, weariness of the spirit, and all under the conduct of the Divine wisdom and the Divine vengeance, make the covers of the most secret sin transparent as a net, and visible as the Chian wines in the purest crystal." Virgil's intimation of the murderer's prolonged success in secrecy, factumque diu celavit has yet its speedy sequel in the line: Nudavit, cæcumque domus scelus omne retexit. And Pembroke exclaims, in King John, on discovering the corpse of Arthur, "The earth had not a hole to hide this deed." Salisbury, in the same strain : "Murder, as hating what himself hath done, Doth lay it open, to urge on revenge." Hamlet, in one place, says of murder that, though it have no tongue, it will speak with most miraculous organ. Just as Macbeth, again, muses moodily on the, to him, appalling truth, that "It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood : By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks,1 brought forth 'Or, notably, so as to become in fact a proverb,-the Cranes of Ibycus. The proverb had its rise in what Archbishop Trench calls one of those remarkable incidents which, witnessing for God's inscrutable judgments, are eagerly grasped by men. The story runs, that Ibycus, a famous lyrical poet of Greece, journeying to Corinth, was assailed by robbers: as he fell beneath their murderous strokes he looked around, if any witnesses or avengers were nigh. No living thing was in sight, save only a flight of cranes soaring high over head. He called on them, and to them committed the avenging of his blood. A vain commission, as it might have appeared, and as no doubt it did to the murderers appear. Yet it was not so. For these, sitting a little time after in the open theatre at Corinth, beheld this flight of cranes hovering above them, and one said scoffingly to another, "Lo, there, the avengers of Ibycus!" The words were caught up by some near them, for already the poet's disappearance had awakened anxiety and alarm. Being questioned, they betrayed themselves, and were led to their doom; and The Cranes of Ibycus passed into a proverb, very much as, adds Dr. Trench, our Murder will out, to express the wondrous leadings of God whereby continually the secretest thing of blood is brought to the open light of day." 66 Hamlet's own disastrous experience has brought home to him, with shattering force of conviction, the assurance, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes." La Bruyère observes that the dénoûmens which disclose the most secret crimes,—the perpetrators of which have been at the uttermost pains to conceal their guilt from the eyes of men, -appear so simple and easy, that it would seem God alone could have been the author of them;1 while the cases in point are so very numerous, that if any one please to ascribe them to pure chance he must also go on to maintain that the chance of all time has merged in custom and rule. So numerous, as Eugene Aram in the poem can bear record, the instances of bloody men, whose deeds tradition saves; of lonely folk cut off unseen, and hid in sudden graves; of horrid stabs, in groves forlorn, and"-as in his own case-" murders done in caves; "And how the sprites of injured men Shriek upward from the sod,— Are seen in dreams from God." 66 The earth should disclose her blood, in his case, and he knew it knew his secret to be one that earth refused to keep, -or land or sea, though the corpse "should be ten thousand fathoms deep. "So wills the fierce avenging Sprite, Till blood for blood atones. Ay, though he's buried in a cave And trodden down with stones, 1 The author of the Ingoldsby Legends, the moral of one of which runs "This truest of stories confirms beyond doubt That truest of adages, 'Murder will out,' in another finds scope for this jaunty stanza : "For cut-throats, we 're sure, can be never secure, And History's Muse,' still to prove it her pen holds, |