Baltimore Evening Sun (7 January 1913): 6.

Another hair-raising victory for the Greatest Living Lawyer!

July 2. Nov. 5. Jan. 6.

ANTIS, TAKE NOTICE!

I have not found a respectable reason why women should not vote, though I have read almost everything that has been written on the subject on both sides.—The Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage.

The Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, in the course of an acute article upon the defects of our criminal law:

* * * the doctrine of our good friend, the Free Lance, that anybody may disobey with a clear conscience a law which he personally thinks foolish or oppressive.

A statement, I fear, somewhat misleading, and particularly in its application to the case of the dynamiters lately convicted. So far as I can remember, I have never advocated murder as a means of redress for alleged economic wrongs, though it has been so used throughout all history, and many men who have employed it on a large scale—for example, the so-called patriots of the American Revolution—are today held in high honor for their enterprise and ferocity.

Murder in itself, indeed, is not forbidden by the moral code of Christendom. In many forms (as when it is performed by a soldier or a sheriff) it is regarded as a decidedly laudable act, and in many other forms it certainly carries no odium. I know a man who once killed a tramp who tried to hold him up. The coroner’s jury, in acquitting him, passed resolutions congratulating him, and those resolutions, elegantly engrossed, now repose proudly in his archives, along with his college diploma and his two or three marriage certificates. And everyone knows, of course, that even the law, for all its asininity, distinguishes between degrees of murder and that there is an ancient doctrine of justifiable homicide.

But all the same, there remain a few forms of murder which the law punishes. What are they? In brief, they may be divided into two classes. First, there are the murders based upon avarice, jealousy or sudden rage, in which the victims are innocent of counter wrongs, or in which the counter wrongs they commit are palpably insufficient to be worthy of the death penalty. Upon such murders we are severe, and justly so: their perpetrators, if well-to-do, are imprisoned, and if poor, are hanged. It is society’s wise verdict that persons so violently anti-social, or so little able to control their passions, are too dangerous to life and limb to go at large. In the same way we lock up many maniacs who have never actually committed murder or any other crime of violence, but are obviously likely to do it.

To the second class of abhorrent murders belong those which, while free from any element of personal hatred and from any purpose to rob the victim, are based upon considerations not yet approved by a majority of the community. Until the official outbreak of the Civil War, for example, it was a crime for a Northerner to shoot a Southerner, and John Brown, I believe, was hanged for doing it, but the minute the majority of Northerners, acting through their chosen representatives, gave approval to the act, it became moral at a stroke, and not only moral, but even honorable. If John Brown had waited a couple of years, he would have been paid for his work instead of being hanged for it. In the same way a sheriff, by waiting until the majority of the community, acting through a jury, has approved the business, is paid for killing a blackamoor. But if he did the killing too soon—i. e., before instead of after the trial—he would be punished for it.

Obviously, this is a sound doctrine, whatever its surface absurdities. It is all well enough for an individual to perform a murder on his own account when there is no time for him to consult his fellow-citizens--for example, when he is attacked by a footpad, or when he has to choose between himself and some other man in an open boat at sea--but when there is no hurry, and the justification for murder is not self-evident, it is plainly better for him to take counsel before he proceeds. If, as a result of this counsel, he converts the majority of his fellow-citizens to his views, he may murder all he pleases and take no harm thereby. But if he fails to convert them, then every murder he commits is against their protest and best judgment, and unless he can bribe them to let him alone they will probably punish him.

This is the error made by the dynamiters just convicted. They themselves, I suppose, were convinced that they were acting laudably. They got no personal profit out of their murders, and had no personal grudges against the men they murdered. The one mistake they made was in proceeding to action before they had convinced the majority of their fellow-citizens that they were right. It is possible, of course, that no amount of persuasion would have ever won that majority to their way of thinking. But it is also possible that a discreet campaign of argumentation would have snared the necessary 51 per cent. Had that 51 per cent. been snared, the murders these gentlemen committed would not have been murders at all, but acts of war, and hence highly creditable.

But why has society the right to intervene in such matters? Why should you and I, who have no apparent personal interest in the row, restrain John Smith from killing William Brown? The answer is simple enough. We have a personal interest. On the one hand, we have made an agreement with William to protect him against the rages of such hotheads as John, and it is our duty to deliver the goods. On the other hand, William is a very competent shoemaker or author or bartender, practicing diligently an art essential to our happiness, and so we would be damaged by his premature exitus. Thus we are doubly justified in protecting him.

So much for John’s plan to murder William. We have a right to respond when one citizen yells for help against another citizen, if only in common humanity. But suppose there is no yell for help? Suppose John, instead of trying to kill William, merely invites him to a poker game, and there essays to trim him? Suppose William consents willingly to the trimming? What then? Suppose, again, that John doesn’t monkey with William’s rights and yearnings at all, but does something alone--say, smoke cigarettes, or go fishing on Sunday, or read a spicy book, or drink alcohol? How now?

Alas, space goes! Let us return to these lofty problems of jurisprudence tomorrow.