The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-04-29
THE FATE OF MRS. FAIR.

but sbe has never combined her treasures in
more useful form than when on Wednesday
San Francisco jury pronounced Mrs. Fair to
be guilty Of murder in the first degree. 1t
remains still to be seen whether the Cover
nor of California will have the courage to uni
tate the frmness with which Governor Hoff-
man, in the case of the ruffian Real, who
murdered policeman, did his full executive
duty, with an equal superiority to the merci-
full movements of his own nature and to the
organized influences which were brought to
bear upon him to sway him from his loyalty
to lis oath and to bis trust.
With the single exception, perhaps, of the
murder of Mr.. Key by Slckles, the murder of
Mr.. Crittenden by the woman whom a Uali-
forBian jury have now most righteously con-
dem ned was the most thoroughly odiDus crime
of the kind which has been perpetrated of
late years in this country 1t closely resem-
bled the "WashlDgton tragedy of 1859, not
only, as we bave already pointed out, in the
elaborate care with which the dramatic acces-
sories of the deed had been considered aud
planned by the perpetrator, but in the cold
blooded and exquisite selishness of the mo-
tives by which, so far asst is given to mau to
analyze the motives of his fello reatures, the
assassin seems to have been governed in the
doing of the deed. As subsequent events in
terpreted by the light of revelations made
in the course of the trial have abundantly
shown, the murderer of Mr.. Key deliberately
determined upon attempting to convert to his
own personal political advantage, by an out
burst of simulated passion, a scandal in which
he bad acquiesced 80 long as it seemed likely
to slumber within the circle of his intimates,
but which he had sufficient kno Wedge of his
countrymen to feel would damn him we're it
to become public in tame and common
place fashion. His calculations, made for the
meridian of Washington, proved to be COR
rect. With the help of Edwin nj. Stanton he
emerged from his trial an injured husband
maddened by the delicacy of mis- sensibilities
into an irresponsible murderer.
The slayer of Mr.. Crittenden, after ex-
hausting her last hope of converting his re-
manning resources of property and of ability
to her own exclusive advantage, in like man
ner resolved upon refreshing her somewhat
worn and threadbare reputation as a siren by
surrounding herself with the blood-red aure-
ole of murderess Possibly she had read,
certainly she was far enough advanced in life
to remember, the proceedings in the case of
that remarkable young lady of Scotland, Miss
Madeline Smith, whose trial for the murder of
her lover and dismissal upon Scotch verdict
of mot proven" were Immediately followed
by no fewer than sixteen offers of marriage,
some of them from persons of means if not
of mind. But a woman who had passed
through life after the fashion of Mrs. Fair
needed not the hell of precedent and exam
pie to teach her a contemptuous confidence in
the power of insolence and indecency over the
imaginations of a certain proportion of what
we sarcastically style the stronger SEX" Mrs.
Fair, in her well-known and widely advertised
character OF woman scorned into transcend
ing the furies of hell, might be quite sure of
recovering all aud more than all that she had
lost by the miserable subserviency of Mr.
Crittenden to the yoke of the home which he
had madly dishonored but could not bring
aIf To hoI
to fear but the possibility of such verdict as
that which has now in truth overtaken her.
But how vague aud remote that possibility
must have appeared to her OF her male
prototypes the most distinguished had escaped
from the gallows to become the associate aud
friend of the Chief Magistrate of the Union,
and to he selected by him the fitting re-
preventative in great foreign city of Ams-
rican morals and manners. OF those of her
own sex the most conspicuous, the truly
heart broken Miss Harris, who came all the
way from Chicago by express train, stopping
at the best hotels to shoot another womaus
husband in the National Treasury because she
had wished to marry him herself, had been
surrendered by twelve sobbing citizens in
| jury-box to the tender embraces, damp with
manly tears, of her sympathizing counsel.
| Why should Mrs. Fair have anticipated
| less hattering fate than theirs? If we are
| to believe the reports of her trial, she
| is better looking than Miss Harris. Her
| histrionic talents certainly are not much
| inferior to those of Sickles. She made a
mistake, to be sure, in that TRADE which huug
her fiercely and brutally, the lie upon her lips,
| against the widow of her victim confronted
with her in the court. But then she had not
enjoyed such advantages of education as her
masculine predecessor. Perhaps, too, her
almost exclusive familiarity with hotel-life
may have misled her as to the universally of
that intolerance of conjugal fidelity which
seems to have been her nearest approach to
moral conviction. But at all events she was
attractive enough and clever enough to war
rant her in counting upon a triumphant ac-
| quittal 1t is recorded of duchess of the
Regency that she put down her confessor
peremptorily, when he sought to tame her
with eternal terrors into temporal restraint,
by informing him that in her opinion the
| Almighty would think twice before he
damned a person of her quality. What
French duchesses of the last century
expected of the Almighty, American
drabs of the present century seem to
expect of American juries. 1t is not very
easy to justify criminal legislation at all, ex-
cept its design be to benefit society, either bV
disciplining its members into restraining
their passions or by putting away those mem
bers who trample the discipline under foot
In our recent American practice it had come
near to be established as principle that to
prove the criminal transported by individual
passion over the limits of social discipline
was to excuse the crime. We cannot be quite
sure that this principle has really been set
aside in the case of Mrs Fair. Her condem-
nation may, perhaps, have resulted rather
from the belief of the jury that her passion
xrroa INN 1fofa al han frr..