Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1859-04-12
APOLOGY FOR ASSASSINATION.

Ambitious journals, aspiring to be the drant
coariers of exclusive intelligence to the whole
world have had the enterprise to announce
the acquittal of Mr.. Sickes as matter of
course, in anticipation of the decision of the
jury, and even of the testimony of the wit
nesses. They undoubtedly reflect the desire
of a large portion of the community who look
on the criminal as victim of unreasonable
provocation, and upon the murdered man as
the sole offending cause of all his desoation.
The counsel for the defence, in the elaborate
opening speech which has been already read
from one extremity of the country to the
other, gave fuller expression to that extrav-
agant and overweight feeling, He even
went so far as to argue from the Mo-
sale code and other primitive methods of
dispensing justice that it was lawful and re-
hgious for Sckles to shoot his offender in the
streets as if he were a wild beast and to send
him without whisper of warning to his last
account. And conscious that the office of
avenger of injuries belongs only to him who
has done no injury, the character of Sickles is
whitened and garnished by all the arts which
the passion of the friend and the ingenuity of
the advocate could command.
This excessive sympathy for one who COM
mitted deliberate homicide in the public streets,
by daylight, before witnesses, is manifestly an
acknowledgement that a man may with impu-
nifty distribute penalties for certain crimes, in
spite of and in defiance of law, according to
his passionate and unregulated impulses. 1t is
the doctrine of mobs carried into individual
practice. If any person were to go through
the streets of Worcester, having assumed the
functions of officer, judge and executioner,
visiting his vengeance upon all by whom he
thought he had been wronged, he would speed
lily find his progress arrested, and his temerity
punished. We should not suffer our laws,
which are the measure of the public conscience,
and were made to secure the public safety, to
be trifed with for any cause, nor should we
suffer the public morals to be corrupted by ex-
amples of murderous violence unrestrained in
our streets. The logic of Worcester is the logic
of Washington, if the spirit of their laws is
the same. Geography does not establish or
QUALITIES VI COuuuCtJ do II uOeb
degrees of heat and cold.
1t would be scarcely less difficult to find
defence for assassination in the fact that the
laws and the courts of the District, as well as
its social customs, are SO far degraded as to
furnish a cloak for crime and cover for flight.
There is something deplorable in that state of
society where the most atrocous and inexcusa
BILE violence is surest to secure immunity and
pardon. But this condition of things, this dis
regard of moral obligations this partial and
one-sided administration of justice, by which
vice has been fostered, crime encouraged, and
violence made safe and easy, has been produced
by the example of those fatterers and parasites
of Mr.. Sickles, who are pleading the inefficacy
of law as the justification of street murder
1t is an excuse which does not belong to them.
The result of this trial, which has been fore
Swallowed, would establish the precedent that
alleged adultery is to be hereafter punished by
instant death, without warning or trial. The on
ly qualification connected with it is that he who
ipficts the penalty assumes the risk of proving
the guilt. We trust the time has forever pass
ed when such examples of savage barbarity
could be tolerated or thought Of