The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-11-25
MURDERs BY "pOCTORs. .


dom could give him in ten years.
MURDERS BY DOCTORS
From the Chicago Rcpubtcdn.
With the rush of life in our crowded streets
we are too apt to leave the deaths and the
tragedies that end in death so far behind that
they slip out of our memories in an hour.
But the two terrible sensations Of the past
week must cling tenaciousy to the hardest
heart in the community, and spur 1T to the
hottest sort of righteous indignation. The
murders of Theodosia Patterson and Jennie
Sterchel are too fresh, with all their hideous
details, to be easily forgotten; and while the
city glows with the unutterable shame and
the undisguised wrath that such frightful afro
cities should be possible here, just now is the
time to show the inexcusable tolerance which
has allowed such men as Stratford and Mac
Rae to practise their awful business in our
midst.
The slaughter of unborn children is not
one whit more pardonable-not one whit
more open to extenuation-than the murder
of adults When the criminal hand which
attempts to extinguish the breath of life in
its feeblest condition drags down into death
the sturdier existence of the mother, the
atrocity is twofold. 1t is too old a world,
this of ours, to be over-fastidious about the
truth There is too little truth in the world
to be swathed in the fustiau of ''delicacy,n
out of our sight and mind When such
horrors asthese which form our te xt occlr it is
the accomplice in crime who blinks it, and the
sympathizer with the criminal who wants to
bury it beyond recovery. The Christian
community turns up its eyes at the Chinese
infanticlde, and shudders in its broad
cloth at the corpses which fringe the
sacred Ganges. But the Christian congre-
cation turn not single shoulder from him
or her who Stays the unborn in its mysterious
first life and anticipates the intentions of the
Creator with murderous barbarity, until po-
pular sentiment is ignited and popular wrath
frighfully afame. The murder of those who
die in the early dark is getting to be so COM
mon a crime that it is hardly reprehended as
anything worse than an indiscretien. With
such apathy, who can wonder that the fre-
quency of infanticde increases? Who can
feign surprise that the abOrtiOnist retires on
his rapidly accumulated fortune! In New
York Madame Restell has raised her infamous
hospital on Fifth avenue. In Chicago such
butchers as Stratford and MacEae boast that
they have perpetrated their hundred crimes
year. The frightful enormity of
their acts, and the inhuman
disregard of life and suffering which nerves
their hands, are but insuihciently appreciated.
1t is only when one imagines a wife or sister
in the frightful agOnies, which continually end
in death, caused and fomented by these
Pariahs of an honorable profession, that the
thrill of CONSERVATION, the shiver of heart
sickness, urge one to call in the stern ven
geance of the law. We do not only regard
what the statute prescribes for such monsters
as these We feel that the shadow of the gal
lows is scarcely dark enough to match the hue
of their crimes. The law itself says that ''if
any person shall, in the attempt to produce
the miscarriage of a pregnant woman,
thereby cause and produce the death of
such woman, the person so offending shall
be deemed guilty of murder, and shall be
punished as the law requires for such Of
! fense.' This is the law. We have tried to
urge the moral bearings Of the case. The
men who are now in Jail must have known
| the fatal tendency of their operations. They
must have known that theywere undermining
| law and morality. They must have known
the awful risk they ran. They gambled for
high stakes and they have lost. Should q
jury convict them, they should be punished
to the fullest extent of the law. With such
q foul atmosphere, nothing short of moral
thunderstorm avails anything The indi-
viduals are lost in unpardonable generality.
These men have each hacked at least one
woman to pieces, have each tortured one
sensitive organization to a horrible death,
and have each done their cruel deeds in the
shadow of the law. When men are convicted
of such crimes, under such conditions, and
so glaringly as these, nothing should stand
between them and the yengeful grip of the
law. The abortionist is a murderer, doubly
so when he butchers to death the woman as
we'll as the child, and his punishment should
be even more stern and inexorable than that
of the ordinary assassin. 1t is impossible to
oyerestimate the enormity of his olfense.
| In demanding that the law be vigorously
executed in both the cases that now shock the
| public sentiment in Chicago, we lose sight OF
/ the miserable criminals who have deliberately
/ exposed themselves to the stroke of the sword
of Justice. If an abortionist lad been hung
! before now, the two double crimes we are
deploring would not have been attempted
Let these men he unrelentingly punished,
that many lives may be hereafter saved
! There is no crime known on earth more hor-
rible than these, and none which discloses sc
| little eXtenuatiOn. LET Us STOP THEM.
! THE TRUTH ABOUT THE METHODIST