Weekly Arizona journal-miner., 1905-05-24
NAN PATTERSON, HEROINE.

If Nan Patterson would consent to take the lecture platform, and instruct the young women of America on '' How to Become a Heroine,' who doubts that for a few weeks of travel and talk she could get more money than the av- craze merely decent person manages to earn in a lifetime? Of course. somebody else would have to write the lecture, for by all trustworthy ac- counts Miss Patterson is as destitute of brains as of morals.
 In her retirement at the National Capitol, secluded in the bosom of her family, and surrounded by reporters and photographers and theatrical man. agers, this young woman thanks her fellow cOuntrymen and eountrywOmen for their admiration and sympathy during the long days of her jail and courtroom life, when the hangman menaced, affectionately tolerates the joyful pride of her parents in a daughter who has won fame, condes- cends to romp girlishly with the ehil- dren who come in awe to look at her, and finds time to give out interviews in which she snaps exultantly an. poisonously at the defeated wife of the murdered man whose mistress she was.
 Nan Patterson has legitimate inter- est for the psychologist, the moralist and the criminologist, but why she should appeal to the sentimentalist, unless tho sentimentalist is suffering from fiabby degeneration of what must be called his Cor hev) mind, is not aP- parent.
 Newspaper men who saw and talk ed with her in the Tombs shortly at- ter her arrest, wrote of her as beautl- ful and charming, that being their pro- fessional duty, but privately they say she was not even pretty, and was . of too limited an intelligence to really understand the peril of her position. They found her the perfect type of the kind of human female described as a "fairy y''-stupid, vain, depraved and greedy. That, too, has been the experience of Richard Le Galliene and other adult writers who observed her during her recent trial, and sought to tell the truth about her rather than to provide the deadful sweetstuff which the populace craves whenever wom- m is in dire trouble.
 Yet this worthless strumpet, whose habitat has been the social sewers, Tn her escape from the gallows is giveE ihe same popular sympathy that would % to a beautiful and chaste girl who should be unjustly accused and dragged through Nan Patterson prison expe- rience. To such girl that experi- ence would be hell, and acquittal. while saving her life, could not save 1t from being blasted forever. To Nan Pat terson the experience, though not with out inconvenience, has fed her appe- tIte for publicity, and her release, without aequittal offers opportunity ! for stage engagements that will be seized with both hands.
 If Nan Patterson had been convict | ed and sentenced, what would have l been the resulti A national elamor for elemency, and women by the hun | dred thousand mysteriously excited on her behalf. These women would have signed petitions, spent money, besieg ed the newspapers, and employed all . the customary agencies to bring pres sure to bear upon the Governor of | New York to commute the death sen tence.
 And the women so crying would be . passionately sincere. Most of them f would be good women, not one of whom would in ordinary daily life resist the impulse to pull aside her skirts to avoid contact with the passing Nan Pattersons that, not being murder esses. remain obscure.
 The best antidote for the imagin ary. the undeveloped Nan Patterson the beautiful, the innocent, the imper iIed-is the real Nan Patterson, the dull-brained. the bsd-hearted, the de