er, whose career as a
criminal and natural wickedness may well rank him with Charles Peace in
the hierarchy of scoundrels. Like Peace, Butler was, in the jargon of
crime, a "hatter," a "lone hand," a solitary who conceived and
executed his nefarious designs alone; like Peace, he supplemented an
insignificant physique by a liberal employment of the revolver; like
Peace, he was something of a musician, the day before his execution he
played hymns for half an hour on the prison organ; like Peace, he knew
when to whine when it suited his purpose; and like Peace, though not
with the same intensity, he could be an uncomfortably persistent lover,
when the fit was on him. Both men were cynics in their way and viewed
their fellow-men with a measure of contempt. But here parallel ends.
Butler was an intellectual, inferior as a craftsman to Peace, the
essentially practical, unread, naturally gifted artist. Butler was a man
of books. He had been schoolmaster, journalist. He had studied the lives
of great men, and as a criminal, had devoted especial attention to those
of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Butler's defence in the Dunedin
murder trial was a feat of skill quite beyond the power of Peace. Peace
was a religious man after the fashion of the mediaeval tyrant, Butler
an infidel. Peace, dragged into the light of a court of justice, cut a
sorry figure; here Butler shone. Peace escaped a conviction for murder
by letting another suffer in his place; Butler escaped a similar
experience by the sheer ingenuity of his defence. Peace had the modesty
and reticence of the sincere artist; Butler the loquacious vanity of the
literary or forensic coxcomb. Lastly, and it is the supreme difference,
Butler was a murderer by instinct and conviction, as Lacenaire or
Ruloff; "a man's life," he said, "was of no more importance than a
dog's; nature respects the one no more than the other, a volcanic
eruption kills mice and men with the one hand. The divine command,
'kill, kill and spare not,' was intended not only for Joshua, but for
men of all time; it is the example of our rulers, our Fredericks and
Napoleons."

Butler was of the true Prussian mould. "In crime," he would say, "as
in war, no half measures. Let us follow the example of our rulers whose
orders in war run, 'Kill, burn and sink,' and what you cannot carry
away, destroy.'" Here is the gospel of frightfulness applied almost
prophetically to crime. To Butler murder is a principle of wa