Morning journal and courier., 1885-01-19

| to pardon. In other words, the public are
 not at all mortified by the killing of a weak lad in order that he might be eaten.
 There is, we suspect, very powerful l cause at work which tends to diminish sym pathy for victims provided they are dead, and to develop sympathy for their assassins. l Of the general growth of sympathy no one doubts; it is the new and potent force which I is shaking institutions and raising the dim multitudes below; but few notice the inc | quality with which it works. The sympa- | thy of the many, to be strongly excited, re- | quires concrete object-a living being who can be watched, and whose emotions can in more or less perfect way be shared. The | law by itself is, except to the few, too ab- stract thing to call up sympathy; and | though reason may, even among the multi tude, consent to the punishment of the law
 breaker, sympathy is not roused against his act Torture is abhorred; but then to feel torture the man must be alive. It was mo-
 ticed shortly after Mime. Hugues had shot Morin that there was Hull in the chorus of eulogy upon her and her act, and that the eulogists seemed troubled and ashamed; and
 the reason assigned was that Morin's agonies ill the hospital from the wound in his head were very terrible. They had nothing to
 do with the matter, being entirely outside
 the intention of the shooter and not a nec- essary consequence of her act; but the on- lockers could realize them, could sympathiZe
 with them, and could, therefore, feel for the
 sufferer the sympathy at first confined to the
 slayer. If Morin had died at once his side
 of the question would have been simply. overlooked It was not till Morin was dead
 that feeling again took it's misdirection, and
 groups of ladies promised gigantic bouquets
 to Mime. Hugues. The irrational and wicked
 sympathy shown by 50 many among our
 selves with the guilty men of the Mignonette
 proceeds from exactly the same cause. The spectators, filled as so many of them are, with tales of the horrors of the sea, realize with painful acuteness the sufferings of the men in the boat, the gnawings of hunger, the tortures of thirst, the ever-deepening hopelessness, and fail to realize that the un- happy boy who perished bore all these suf- ferihgs like his comrades, and a violent death besides. He escapes by his death from the field of popular vision; and the abstract idea of law which is so solemn to a few that Sir w. IIarcourt's decision transported them with a kind of sacred fury, was for the null titude never fully within it! They see it, we suppose, little, or society would go to pieces, but it is by an effort and strain which 1t is difficult to keep up. The ordinary mur- derer, again, is an interesting figure. Men realize him and his danger and his fear and the terrible nature of his sentence, and feel for him the pity which his unseen, because buried, victim fails fully to excite. That one is dead and past; this one is living and here; and the public fixes it's eye on the lat
 
 times is clamorous for reprieve. It is this sympathy for the living because he is living to which all opponents of capital punish ment habitually appeal.
 It is of little use scolding at the action of a multitude when it is obeying forces of whose operation it is ignorant; but if our view is correct-and without it both French and English conduct have of late become hardly intelligible-a great responsibility is thrown upon those who are enlightened enough to feel both for the victim and the law. It is upon them, and especially upon such of them as are journalists, that the duty is thrown of keeping up the fortitude of the multitude, and educating the imagina- tion till it can something beyond the criminal on trial-can perceive his victim, andsbecome conscious of the majesty of law. The masses must be taught to recognize that killing with6at legal reason is of itself, and without relation either to circumstances or to the character of the victim of the gravest of ofenses, as well against society as against morals-against society, which ceases if private war is allowed to revive; against morals because their first law is self-restraint under provocation. Even in the very few cases where the moral law has not been bro ken the social law has, and acquittal should be accompanied by the fullest recognition of that fact. The publicists must help the peo- pie out of their moral muddle, or, so far from seeing society advance, shall see it relapse Into the old saVagery, when insult was avenged by assassination, and men cared nothing for life if only they might have full revenge. The respect for human life, if it increases at all, does not increase fast enough to protect civilization without the aid both of the law and of opinion, the latter of which, in the decay of certain punishment for murder, tends to become flaccid. If it is a tritie to kill man because you have only him to eat, what is it to kill him because his wealth would make whole families happy!- the very creed of the poisoners. We never before to have seen so much or such widespread evidence of the misdirec- ton of sympathy !