The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-05-15
AMERICAN JUSTICE OFT
 FAILS OF PURPOSE
Merciless English Eyes Watch Breakdown of
 United States Law.
OUR CRIMINAL MACHINE
More Murders in America
 Increa sng Year by


 ference. It would have made very lit tie difference even if Thaw had been convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be electrocuted. There is as wide a gulf between passing verdict in the criminal courts of Amer ica and carrying it out as there is be- tween passing a law and getting 1t en- forced, venture to say with all pos sible abruptness that the machinery does not exist in the United States for making a murderer of Thaw's wealth and social influence pay the penalty for his crime
 In the 12 years that have known America at all intimately l only recol- feet one instance in which the criminal law worked with anything approaching the English standard of swjftness and precision. That was in the case of the man who shot President Mckinley. Public opinion insisted on speedy trial and a speedy execution and pub lie opinion had it's way, Had the yic- tim been man of less prominence the odds would have been over seventy to one against his assassin ever being brought to the chair.
 The odds I have quoted are not to be taken as a mere figure of speech. They are a literal and appalling fact. Since 1885 there have been 181,951 mur- ders and homicides in the United States, and but 2,2S6 executions. In 1885 the number of murders was 1,S0S; in 1904 it had risen to S.482. In 1885 | the number of executions was 10S in l 1904 it was 116. There was nothing that I am aware of to make 1904 a | year of peculiar criminality Indeed, the figures for 1905 and 1906 tell an even more sinister tale-Americans seem now to be killing one another at the rate of more than 5000 a year. l Looking over the statistics of the last l 20 years one finds, roughly speaking, 1 that while executions have remained virtually stationary, murders and homi- cides have multiplied fivefold.
 There are over five times as many murders committed in the United States per million inhabitants as in Australia, more than fourteen times as many as lin England and Wales, eight times as many as in Japan, nearly ten times as many as in Japan, nearly 10 times as many as in Canada, and about twenty-five times as many as in Ger many. Only one European country, Italy, has ever shown in this respect a worse record; only one country in the world today, Mexico, exceeds the American average; and the United States has the further distinction of be- ing the only country where the pro- portion of murders to population is positively on the increase.
 These are facts as undeniable as they are portentous. The immigrant and the negro help of course to swell the fig ures; but the darkies and the aliens may be eliminated altogether, and the white native-born Americans will still be responsible for more than thre times as many murders in proportion | to their numbers as stand to the dis credit of any other civilized nation, ex- cept Spain and Italy What is the ex- plantation of so disturbing phenome- non? Is it nothing more than the law | lessness of a raw, vigorous and un- trammelled community, but barely merging from the backwoods stage of growth? Or is it the reflex action on matters of social conduct of that ex- ressive individualism, that state blindness" as H. c. Wells has happily called it, the pervasive lack of a civic and social conscience, which have al- ready wrought such confusion and deg radiation in the body polite?
 Here, however, l am concerned not so much with the commission of crimes as with the failure to punish them. If 1.-the frightful increase of murders in the United States stands in need of expla- lnation, the immunity of the murderers and their all but invariable escape from the full penalties of the law are facts 1 of a yet wider and more ominous sig nifcance. Nine months ago an Ameri- can judge in an address to lawyers association used these words: T say that our administration of the crim- l inal law has broken down, It is an unavoidable machine know we con- vict men and send them to the peniten- tiary but I state it here as a fair statement of the administration of the criminal law in America that if man has the means to employ able counsel, so as to make a fight, as we say, in the great majority of eases, he can escape punishment for crime"
 MT. Taft, former judge in the United States criminal court and now secretary of war in Mir Roosevelt's s cabinet, has been even more emphatic. Addressing the Yale Law school in 1905 he said: 'I grieve for my country to say that the administration of the criminal law in all the states of the Union (there may be one or two ex- Iceptions) Is a disgrace to our civiliza-
 tion' Justices Brewer and Brown of i the United States supreme court have
 said the same thing in other words. The leading legal journal of the coun- try is filled with similar admissions,
 No American lawyer of any standing
 would think or argue otherwise.
 Take few instances. Frank Steun-
 enberg, former governor of Idaho,
 was assasinated on December 30, 1905,
 It is hoped to bring his alleged mur-
 derers to trial next month. Not long
 ago a case was reported in the Ameri-
 can papers in which mob lynched a prisoner who had been held for two