Secrets of the Prisonhouse Author:Arthur Griffiths Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: mite. 5 not be over- Jfial themselves, ; a rj u i y in others of )15 n o mitted to gain foliatthlir Iliiictlinl:igation. They '-:-:''''i.i the money... more » is I MjJsp " 1 .'Qigijti'iife their caprices,although they may shrewdly guess its origin, and in their inner conscience know that men have been driven into crime by them. Crime in fact is largely committed for them if not by them. Sometimes indeed they have taken the lead, and are the prompters and originators of the crime. This is as old as the Garden of Eden, as true as when the great poet created Lady Macbeth. It was " the woman who tempted" the man when the two Mannings planned to kill the ganger O'Connor, over whose still reeking remains they eat their hot roast goose ; it was the woman Catherine Hayes who hired the murderers, and who herself cut off her husband's head ; the woman Miss Blaudy who instigated the death of her father. There have been as many or more such cases in France. Rosalie Lecat induced her lover to murder her husband; the moving spirit of the horrible tragedy at Sologne, when a poor old woman was put on the fire and burnt alive, was the woman's daughter, who inspired and assisted her husband and brothers to do the deed. A Spanish woman, who had lost her place as servant to the cure, persuaded a gang of men to break into the house and rob him of a considerable sum of money. Females in durance belong to three broadly defined categories or classes. There are, first, the impulsive criminals, whose misdeed is more or less unpremeditated, born of some sudden overmastering access of fury—a momentary madness, not sufficient to satisfy the courts of their irresponsibility, but only toCLASSES OF FEMALE PRISONERS. 7 be explained as the temporary withdrawal of all barriers in a nature too easily inf...« less