Year: 1876

Il pT1OfI reasoning as TO Lne eHect OF pro-
posed legislation is extremely liable to be re-
futed by results, as Herbert Spencer has very
cleverly shown. This fact is once more
strikingy illustrated by the failure of the
anti-hanging law of last winter to produce ex-
traordinary bloodshed. The advocates of the
gallows predicted that the law would prove to
be an enactment for the encouragement of
murder. They saw, in the carvoyant frame
OF mind excited by disappointment and pos
sibly little anger, the rivers running blood.
They saw the frenzled murderer sitting down
for studious hour to con the statutes of
Maine, and when he had spelled out chapter
ia of the laws of 1876, madly whetting his
knife or loading his pistol and going forth to
pursue his human prey. But up to this time
not one deliberate homicide! Through all
the shining days of this centennial year hu-
man life in Maine has been secure from the
assaults of that malice which is the essential
element of the crime OF murder. If we are
not mistaken no one of the rare cases of
homicide. which have occurred so far during
the year, has afforded sufficient evidence of
generalization or mental capacity for crimi-
nal intention to warrant a prosecution. The
trial of Page of Chelsea for wife murder did
not proceed beyond the initial stages when
by order CT the court he was sent to the In
sane Hospital, and has since succeeded in
committing suicide. Finn of Waldoboro had
long been known as madman who was in
the habit of threatening not only to kill but
to devour his children, as possible safeguard
against death by starvation. He has been
taken to the Insane Hospital. The Canaan
murderer" was another lunatic, on whose
mind the legislation touching capital punish
ment could have had no more effect than
could the blue laws of Connecticut. Lois
Tibbetts, poor woman of Boothbay, arose
one morning, took one of her two children
out of bed and threw it into the dock, where
it was drowned. Whether the woman is
still in Jail or has been taken to the Insane
Hospital, we know not. It would be as ir-
rational in either of these cases to attribute
the splling of blood to the humane law now
on our statute books as it would if the homi-
eide had taken place in the wards OF an asy-
lum, and had been committed by any of the
great numbers OF patients who are prevented
by confinement only from committing vic.
lence on themselves or others. 1t is not pre-
tended by anybody that threats of the gallows
will restrain a man whose insanity takes
the not infrequent homicidal form from she'd
ding blood, and it is by such persons alone
that blood has been shed in the seven months
of 1876 during which the presumed restraint
of the gallows has been removed.


This state of things is quite exceptional.
In some years while the capital punishment
law was in force and occasionally executed,
the number of murders for which the perpe-
traitors were tried and convicted rose as high
as five or six. Even last year, when the
bodies of Wagner and Gordon swinging
from the same gibbet were expected to afford
spectacle which would paralyze the murder
ers arm and stifle the half-formed criminal
purpose at its very birth, lin that year when
the terror of legal vengeance was to preclude
the possibility of private vengeance, our
careful contemporary, the Advertiser, says
that "several shocking crimes were COM
mitted," and it records no less than three
acts of apparent deliberate murder in conse-
quence of which there were two convictions,
besides three abortive attempts at the same
crime, in Que of which a whole family was
to be destroyed by the poisoning of well.


Now it is not contended that the singular
and happy decline of the homicidal tendency
in Maine is in consequence of the substitu-
tlon of Imprisonment for hanging as the pen
atty for taking life, or that the no less re-
markable coincidente of an extraordinary
outbreak of the same tendency with the sew
eral executions of Spencer, Harris and Wag.
ner was due to the enforcement of the death
penalty. These circumstances. striking as
they are, may be merely accidental But
they do prove one thing conclusively and
overwhelmingly, namely, that the idea of
capital punishments preventing bloodshed
is utterly and ridiculously futile, and that if
any inference is to be drawn from the in
sufficient statistics as to the prevalence of
the higher crimes under vindictive and ra-
tional penalties respectively, it is that mur-
der by the state is an encouragement and
suggestion 10 persons of criminal tendencies.


To be sure the advocates of capital punish
ment will join issues on the facts from which
this conclusion is drawn. They have already
classified the four homicides of the present
year which have given our courts of law so
little employment as 'three murders;" and
one of them has tie impudence to refer to
the Lucy Mink murder in Massachusetts,
carefully suppressing the fact that she shot
her first man in Maine when IT was hang
ing state and removed to Massachusetts to
kill her second in another hanging state.
Such monstrous and wilful perversion of
known facts can be accounted for only by
supposing that the gentlemen who predicted
sanguinary consequences from the legislation
of last winter feel bound to make their PROM
ises good at all hazards. They were so sure
Of their future crop of murders and of argu-
ments that they almost distinctly recon-
mended lynch law as a.sort of homeopathic
remedy for the anticipated efusion of blood.
Accordingly they have coddled and petted
the murderers of 1876 with the same zeal as
they reproved and underrated those of 1875.
1t might be almost said that murderers have
commanded a premium. They have been
watched for with as much anxiety as the pa
tient astronomers of both hemispheres are
now watching from morn till eve the
SUMS broad disk, in the hope of catching
sight of the long sought planet Vulcan, which