The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-01-29
4 LETTER FROM MR. sp1NE11o.

Alleged connection or the Mailh Wltn
 the Deed-Mr. spinelIo Offers Few Re-
 ilections to Correct Wrong Impressions.
 To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER.
 No one dares deny that under the
 strong imperative of a moral ideal it
 is mans duty to do all in his power
 to foster the realization Of such an
 ideal, Some philosophers go even so
 far as to assert the Justification of liv-
 ing and of deception to prevent any
 thing that might come as an obstacle
 to the actualization of the moral end.
 While others maintain that under no
 circumstances whatever is man justified
 to withhold the truth. Emanuel Kant,
 for instance the prince of modern in
 tuitive philosophers was convinced that
 in no wise should ever the truth be
 withheld much less exchanged for false
 hood: "It is eternal right to tell the
 truth, as it is eternal wrong to falsify
 it. But we will not dwell much upon
 this so strongly contested a point; we
 will leave it to the casuists as wholly
 pertaining to them. We must add'
 however that while man has right
 to truth this ought not to be told, II
 conducive to evil. In other words, man
 has no moral claim to an immoral act
 If we can say this concerning truth,
 what shall we say concerning pure
 falsehood? Yet the practice of living
 and deceiving is so common nowadays
 that the honest and truthful citizen
 cannot fail to realize that society is go- ing from bad to worse. This practice IS
 by no means confined to certain well
 known individuals, whom you could
 probably guard against, or to fiction only but it has become the sole method
 of certain American publicists to ln- struct their readers. Never in the whole
 history of the journalistic literature or any country do we find such conspic- uous instances of Heinz and deception as we daily see in our newspapers.
 Would that all our jouI nalists were 9c- quainted with the memorable page of Carlyle in the essay on Voltaire, which
 begins with that awe inspiring sen
 tence: Tt is high, solemn, almost aw- ful thought for every individual man,
 that his earthly influence, which has had commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have and end!' In that case they would be a little more careful about fabricating their news.
 With these few preliminary remarks I will now come to the main subject of this letter. One of the contemporary newspapers of New Haven published a very long article in the issue of Jan uary 20th. The aim of the article was to lay bare the gloom and the atrocities of an alleged association made up eX- clusively of Italians, La Mafia. Our contemporary spent fully two columns of printed matter to give all the details of the constitution of the association. The motive of this very interesting ar ticle was the much 1amented murder of young Del Grego. It is now pretty well established, as it appears from the item itself, that no crime can be perpetrated among the Italians without it being the result of some gloomy conspiracy of the would-be association, La Mafia. In vain do they tell us that the awful deed was committed in the heat of wild passion. In vain do they tell us that the actors of the tragedy were always SoOpNl selves together No; Del Grego could not be killed if Caruso had not been chosen by the association to accom- plish the deed. ''The murder of Del Grego, while apparently committed in the heat of great passion, was really | the result of a deliberate plan for assas- | sination. and Caruso, or some fellow member would certainly have found | some excuse for killing the boy within a short time had that plan miscarried." " If there is any truth in this statement ! it presupposes the existence Of three | things: Q) That the sect exists in this | beautiful city (2.) That Caruso must | be a member of it. (3.) That the lament ed youth, Del Grego was an individual l so dangerous to the interests of the | sect as to force upon it's members the dreadful sentence of death. Nonsense! From incontestable facts and sources it appears that, if there is any such thing anywhere as the Mafia, it certainly does not exist in these quarters. Even if Caruso were a member of some branch existing in some other town, it does not rule out the necessity of the fact that Del Grego must at some time or other have expressed ideas or actually acted contrary to the aims of the asso- citation. This evidently could mot be the case, for Del Grego was an exem- plary boy, and, from what we have learned from his afflicted parents, he never knew even of the name of the sect. The reader will draw from this his own conclusions. But we cannot stop here Having established that Del Grego could not in any way be vic tim of the Mafa for want of any serious or even slight motives, we must go on the whole truth of the arti- cle. It is a matter of vital interest that the intelligent, but extremely credulous American reader should not be sophis- ticated on this point. It might com pletely alter his attitude toward many a truthful, laborious and honest Italian, who, as such, has the right to a fair of his individual worth.
 The society as the article tells us Is most terribly secret The least revelation of any of its secrets com nands the death of the traitor. "While the murderous weapons are held close to the face and body of the candidate T1OiJntc