Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1902 — Foolish and Impracticable Suggestion. [ARTICLE]

Foolish and Impracticable Suggestion.

It is fortunate that Congressman Crumpacker is in national and not the State Legislature. He declares that he would favor a law penalizing a county SIO,OOO for each lynching that occurs within its borders, $5,000 of the fine to go to the victim’s next of kin. The absurdity of the proposition is too manifest to call forth opposition argument, but it might not be a bad idea to penalize a county if within a certain time after a lynching her authorities had not succeeded in bringing some of the lynchers to justice. If such a law were now on'our statute books some of the “best citizens” of Sullivan county would be either in jail or hiding out.--Terre Haute Tribune. The Terre Haute paper is eminently correct in characterizing Crumpacker’s proposition as too absurd to be worthy of argument, but we can not see that the Tribune’s idea is any less so. Any measure to penalize a county either in cases of lynching or failure to punish lynchers would not only be absurd and unjust in the last degree but wEblly impossible of enforcement. Why not just as well penalize counties for any other violations of law or failures to punish the violators. Such a predoure would be just as logical and just as effective as the measurers Crumpacker and the Terre Haute Tribune propose. In regard to the latter, however we think the proposition was not made in good faith, but merely as an attempt to offset the folly and impracticability of the Orumpacker idea, by something else nearly as foolish and impracticable