The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1876-05-11

Lie Durl0l Oh EeSacn NlSAn ltuD6uSLcln
yesterday closes the last chapter in weird
story of crime. From the day of his arrest,
four months ago. it was instinctively be-
lieved that justice had laid its hand on the
man who had committed the hideous murder
in the cornfeld. Every circumstance that
has come to light in connection with the
death of Sara Alexander has but deepened
that belief, and the verdict Of the jury upon
the evidence was but the reflection
of what everybody thought. It was muir
der in which the cowardice was even more
marked than the brutality. The wretch who
howled and moaned and uttered long He
brew prayers in his cell came of an ancient
and long prosecuted race. Clinging to an
old, old creed through ages, when scorn was
the most lenient treatment they received,
small wonder that fanaticism and supersti-
ton should grow among the trampled Jews
of Europe to strange proportions and make
them insincere and tricky in their dealings
with those who had always treated them as
objects of divine and human wrath To
mystic dreams and obedience to stern dog
mas among themselves they joined a devious
stiffness to the GENTLE world OF
mental organization clearly resultant
from these sad conditions of his
race was the murderer who died SO
wretchedly in his cell on Tuesday. The girl
Alexander, his cousin, was with child and
his wife was coming from Europe to him
He had offended against the Hebraic and the
statute law. Intensely sensitive to the first,
we know that by compact with another Jew
he proceeded to buy his way out Of his sins
past and to come in q manner rudely sug-
gestive of the time when the sins of Israel
were laid by the High Priest upon a goat
sent to perish in the wilderness, and which
evidently survives among his class in the
Talmudic writings. To the law of the land
he felt no such compunctions, so he took the
girl to the cornfiold one December Sunday
she died. he returned to his home, and, if
we may be permitted to trace the course of his
thoughts his mind hung shuddering over the
weltering form that lay outstretched as he
left it; trying to figure to himself how
it could be hidden away how perhaps it
could be buried with Jewish rites, 10 that
there might be less upon his soul /; how the
CORY show might be ended, SO that he could
forget it. All the next day wore on and the
body had not been discovered. He must
have begun to congratulate himself on the
one hand, while his religious fears became
| intensified on the other. Between his
worldly cunning and his superstition at
k,1 L.. sx,xo .ck ~.c..
be caught so fast that he should be taken
out of it only rs he was on Tuesday, corpse.
lie told his father next morning he had
dreamed his victim lay dead in cornfeld
eight miles from Now York, and the
fnther, in his blind belief, repeated the
story to ears without illusions. Of the
subsequent bearing Of the wretchcd
creature in his prison cell, his prayings, his
lamentations, his curses, his wild oath in
court and his HASTINGS that finally broke
down his miserable frame, we can only speak
as the same mixture of short-sighted cum
ming and religious mania that led him from
his first crime to his second and finally to
his death. He escaped the gallows, but in
the sight of tho vermin-covered, emaciated
corpse over whose face sorrowing father
drew the prison blanket there was evidence
enough that human and divine law had been
avenged. 1t was SO miserable death that
the rope he deserved can scarcely be said to
have been cheated. In many years no such
crimes rs Rubcnstein's have been more sig
nally punished.
THE MAY ANNIVERSARIES. Although the