The San Francisco call., 1899-03-05

In New York woman has been con-
demned to electrocution. I have no
idea the sentence will be carried out,
and hope it will not be. Even to be-
levers in capital punishment there IS
something unSpeakably repulsive in the
idea of visiting upon female murderer
the extreme wrath of the law. In the
first place, women do not need to be
held in check as men do. Without Of
fetal statistics at hand, I venture the
assertion that a thousand Wanton muir
ders are committed by men to a soli
tary one by women. In the second
place, no woman falls so low that she
does not seem to masculine human
judgment to merit more consideration
than a member of the sterner sex. 1t
is a phase of the same feeling that
causes a gentleman to yield his seat
in a street car to a lady, although he
may be tired and have no reason to
think her leg-weary. The position is
perhaps not one to be upheld logically,
but belief in the principle is deeply i'm
planted.
The Rev. Frederick C. Lee of the Cal
ifornia NJ. E. Church preached last
Sunday a strong and practical sermon,
in which he paid attention to the men,
ber of society known as a criminal law
yer. 1t is a pleasure to agree with
what he says concerning this person. 1
do not think that a lawyer who takes
the case of an assassin whom he knows
to be guilty, and endeavors to clear
him by keeping out evidence, by abus-
ing witnesses or twisting the law, is
one whit better than the assassin; but
do think the pair should be hanged on
the same scaffold.
My good friend, Edward Cahill,
Frenchman, as his name implies, has
been indulging in mixed metaphors. He
was inspired by the circumstance that
a babe had been ordered out Of court,
charged with being a disturber of JUS
tice He, as the proprietor Of lot of
babes, objects. He wants to know II
the ordinary babe is calculated to make
justice slip a cog. There is no answer
to this, as no parents ever yet have
confessed to the possession of an ordi-
nary baby. Then he wants to know If
Justice sits so unsteady on her throne
that the hand of child may upset her
ballast l cannot conceive of Justice
slipping a cog and then sitting on
throne and having her ballast upset.
If all these things happen to Justice she
will be in a bad way.
Some person writing for an afternoon
sheet recently termed the dramatic
critic of The Call Miss" Ashton Ste
vens Splendid! Ha, ha! Ho, ho! This
was taken to be the climax of jest until
the same person in an unparalleled fit
of jocosity changed the designation to
Mrs Ashton Stevens. What a merry
wag! Meanwhile Mr.. Stevens, as the
best dramatic critic of San Francisco,
goes on about his business precisely as
though nothing had happened. His
time is too much taken up to be di-
verted to the rabble yipping at him,
but having little leisure to-day, 1
have ventured to employ it to show
that their success in the attempt to be
funny has not gone unnoted.
Mrs. Dora Fuhrig seems to possess
many, of the essential elements of
pestilence There have been charged
against her lately the deaths of four
women, and urged on by his grief, the
taken his own life Mrs. Fuhrig can
with propriety add him to her list of
triumphs Just why offenders of the
Fuhrig type should be arrested is not
clear. however. The process is never
more than an idle and expensive for
mality. To be sure, they ought to be
sent to prison for life. but to be sure,
they never are. On the contrary, they
have no more need to be afraid of the
courts than has Piggott, the pocket
picking scoundrel, to whom arrest is
merely joke.
Expert evidence given by doctors is
a WEAKNESS. When a physician of ex-
perience views the wounds on dead
body, and swears their result must
have been of certain specific charac
ter, which he minutely describes, the
layman naturally thinks the doctor
knows what he is talking about. Where
the mystery comes in is at the advent
of the doctor swearing for the other
side, and who from the same set Of
facts deduces conclusions exactly con-
trary to those already pointed out. 1t
is impossible to avoid one of two be-
liefs, neither of them to be entertained
with pleasure. One is that doctors are
painfully ignorant, and the other. that
there are members of the profession
willing to perjure themselves for hire.
This has been demonstrated anew in
the Brandes murder trial, which from
the first has been conducted in fash
ion rejecting no credit on the lawyers
for the defense. One set of experts IS
certain that the child Lillian Brandes,
died from the impact of blows on the
head, and that her body was subjected
to post-mortem hanging, none Of the
visible effects produced by strangula-
ton having been present. Another set
declares that the child hanged herself,
and the bruises on her, head were not
caused by blows which in themselves
could have had serious effect. A third,
with rare intelligence, ascribes the un>
happy girls taking off to pneumonia.
This last theory has peculiar features.
If she was victim of this malady, did
she hang herself before or after? Had
death been due to natural causes, on