Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1904 — Where The Law Represses Crime. [ARTICLE]

Where The Law Represses Crime.

Sir William Van Horn, of Montreal, the great builder of Canadian and Cuban railroads, had occasion last week to revisit Joliet, 111., his early ben hood home. While there he wm interviewed by the newspapers, of course, and here 1,8 .what he said to one of them: vv hen asked when Canada would be annexed, r-ir Williaca laughed and said: “1 think that the annexation is more likely to be th- other way Canada is very well satisfied as it

I * Yes, it is true that the administration of the laws i much mors prompt and just than in ths United States When a crime is committed, punishment fol'ows, swift and sure. ‘•The contrast is strongly presented in the mining cam pH of the two countries, even though they may be only a few miles apart i “It was noticable at Skagway, which was claimed by Canada, though nobody wanted her people. “The cheerful .prack of the revolver was heard every day, and everybody was ar mol to the teeth. But when the rush to the Yukon began, the Canadian government sent down a customs inspector and half a dozen mounted police, and the revolvers and kniv s dropped at the border line, and north of it those terrors of the town were as meek as-Sunday S'-h •<>! children “This is not a Canadian char ac'eristic only, but similar ■ onditions prevail where v-r Great Britian’s flag flies, it is this that makes her so successful as a colonizer,

I “Conditions are improving, greatly in the regards iti the United States also. But< ’anailiHns feel a comforting security as to life a id property.” What Sir William says about the enforcement of dhe aw< and the pinishment an 1 repression of crime in tfie British dominions, all over the earth, is only what hundreds an I thousands h ive said before. Moreover it is what is as generally sai 1 about Germany, France an 1 var ous other foreign countrie-. in all of which the courti are vastly more effective than in this country Whether Sir William’s remark, that these conditions ar, im proving in the United States is inten 1ed to apply to the whole country or only to that part of it ma, th«* Canada line in Alaska, h not very clear. It is to be hope I tint he can see e/idence of such improvement ' throughout th*’ whole country, for surely it is grea ty needed.

As an illustration of how universal is this failure of justice in this country, is a sentenc ■ in a editorial in the New York i.lmpendent, the great anti-lynchi paper. The Independent is c i nenting on statistics for 1904 g re i by the Chicago Tribuiv -r open» the articles with t i.m»-nt that the public ’’snly concerned with figures about .benevolence and , uchinga. Towards the end of the . icle appears this sentence, ‘Che rep<>rt-

ed murders and horn ?id-s are 8,976, and the legal exe utiom 12.3, showing how safe it is to kill a man.” In other word- for, every 73 murders commit!<•<’ no mutt was legally execut-1! Wiiat wonder is it that the people resort to lynch law and how ►ir-mt’r it is that the Independent d i u»t perceive that in this one it..nee it said more to justiL lynching’ than 100 pages of eloquent editorials against it could interact? The lynchings dunu rhe year, by the way, number. 104 lu view of this vast numb- > otherwise unpunished inti-J. r-« arid ravishings thtU took p >. ••• during this same period. the s inge fact is not that lynchings u ■*o many but that they-were so i« w Where the laws are elective iot repressing crime, lynchings are unknown.