The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-09-09

to the governments OF Europe. The future of
the Pspacy is one of the incest questions of this
nineteenth century, and it remains to be seen
whether the Emperors can do anything
towards its final and satisfactory solution.
Tho Groat schoeppe-steinecke Poison
Trial-Its Romance and Its Moral.
Murder by poison has proved to be the most
powerful of oil modes of ''taking off, in at
tracing interest to the trials resulting there
from. The insidiousness, the deliberateness,
the devilish knowledge above all, the mysteri-
business of the crime, drape it in every garb
that can win the morbid to it's study. How, in
old times, the fear that it inspired made it
sister to witchcraft and son of alchemy need
not be narrated. Brinviliers or Lucrezia
Borgia representa- in a later stage; romancists
of the thrilling school seized upon it. and with
these and the Medicl it rules realm of
CHASTITY fiction that might easily develop
an old lady's dyspepsia into mania.
In our own times it calls new element to its
aid-namely, science. The murder is the vul-
gar crime, the surrounding circumstances fur
nish the romance; but science comes or is
supposed to come, and with tests and reagents
brings it back to o commonplace matter of
books and opinions. We have had great
poison trials, and the result, in face of all the
technicality employed, has been doubt to the
public mind. Professors have come forward
and sworn to the presence of such and such
poison in the body, and doctors have deposed
to the ante-mortem symptoms as those pro-
duced by the poisons named. Here was Death
grasping the prisoner by the throat. Pres
emily another professor comes forward and
swears that the tests applied were fallacious,
and another doctor comes to depose that the
symptoms were not those produced by the
poison at all. Science we believe in. 1t must
be exact or be valueless, and hence where in
exactitude is shown Death loosens his clutch
upon the throat of the prisoner 1t is, then,
natural that doubt should still remain in the
proportion of the disproof being positive or
proven" This was the lesson Of the Wharton
Ketchum trial and Providence alone can be
thanked for the train of circumstances that
made Paul Schoeppes innocence q tangible
reality.
All this shows that criminal looseness in
the mode of dealing with such cases is the
rule in the very first stages of the inquiry.
The elimination, around which, in such cases,
every legal safeguard should be placed can be
done without authority. The post-mortem
and analysis can be entrusted to the first village
doctor and third-rate toxicologist at hand.
From these first steps all the after evils flow.
Poison may in the first place be either forced
into the body or developed by the so-called
tests. The doctor half does his work; the pro-
fessor does less, and yet these individuals, evolv-
ing poison from their moral self-consciousness,
will swear in the strongest Latin and Greek
derivatives that poison was administered and
found. The terribly uphill task of bringing
all this misstatement and logged, egotistical
ignorance back to the groundwork of unas-
sailable fact has been demonstrated time and
again. Its importance to society can
never be lost sight Of; for the prisoner at the
bar represents society at the mercy of scientific
quacks and ignoramuses as much as the dead
body represents society at the mercy of the
poisoner. This is terrible fact to look in
the face. It is one of the morals of the latest
poison trial. What we want to help set mat
ters right in such cases is a sacred govern
mental guardianship of the dead and an as
surance that nothing but positively the highest
known scientific skill shall be brought to bear
in pronouncing upon the presence or absence
Of poison in the exhumed body
From this grim view of the subject we may
turn while to the romantic or lay side Of the
late trial. 1t is the story of maiden Of sew
enty summers, buxom and active she is said
to have been who became enamored Of good
looking young doctor. The snow-capped pas
sion Of this susceptible old damsel took the
direction of marriage, and while the fame
played around her ancient heart she made
Paul Schoeppe sole heir to her Penn
sylvania fortune, not very large
one, and so, with Rhein wine and
mineral water on the physical side and love
on the psychical, matters progressed until
Maria Steinecke took her death-sickness and
died Certain relatives, who, as relatives
will, probably had built upon the old ladys
early demise as the foundation of their for
tunes, found themselves thereby cleft out in
the cold" with strange young doctor about
to console himself for the loss Of prospec-
tive bride by appropriating the property
Of the deceased. Relatives under such
circumstances are sceptical brood.
There must be something wrong. In
olden times they would have contested the
win on the ground of the old maids insanity;
poison being now in vogue. they were not
long in making up their minds that she had
been foully dealt with, q conclusion they
could easily reach from imagining they had