The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 24, 1909. WHERE LIFE IS CHEAP.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2434, 24 February 1909, Page 4

The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 24, 1909. WHERE LIFE IS CHEAP.

The statistics of American crime for the past year throw a lurid light upon (lie insecurity of life in the United States. There were, Bays a telegram, 8,952 deaths from personal violence, 100 lyneliings, and 92 executions. If “deaths from. personal violence” mean cases of murder and manslaughter, as we presume they do, the -figures reveal a condition of lawlessness to -which it would be impossible to find a parallel outside Russia and unreformed Turkey. Tho public prosecutors’ figures for England and Wales show only 76 cases of murder and manslaughter in the year 1907. Allowing fox population, and for the fact that some murders did not lead to prosecutions, the figures on the same scale for the United States should bo somewhere between 200 and 300. They arc actually 9,000. Tho explanation must lie, we think, in the fact that there is in the United States little respect either for life or for law. Tho number of murders in the States is deplorably high, and so also is the number of lives lost- in railway and industrial accidents. The life of a worker crushed to death in a steel mill or a railway siding is of small account to the Trust kings who are tho real rulers of tho States. A public which has learned to ho indifferent to these industrial murders will not be moved overmuch by private homicide. So complete, indeed, is the indifference that there hardly yet exists oven the beginning of a compulsory system of compensation for accidents. Further evidence of tho indifference to life is afforded by the total absence in the Southern States of a 113’ regulation of child labor. L3 T nehings are after all onty a barbaric and extravagant outbreak of this general contempt for life. As for the law, it seems strongest when it conies to the assistance of some Trust, to crush a trade union. The State as we understand it hardly exists, and 011I3' the very rich are powerful enough to combine.

It is hard for New Zealanders to understand the position which obtains in the United States. Only the other day three men were killed and a fourth fatally wounded at a. town in Georgia in a sudden quarrel -which had its origin in a trifling dispute over a firecracker. Commenting on the incident a leading journal of New Orleans says: This unnecessary and inexcusable traged\’ is the more deplorable because it. belongs to a t3’pe of homicides which is apparently becoming commonplace throughout tho South. Of late scarcely a day passes without the report of slaying easily avoidable. Tho record of lives sacrificed in petty quarrels, of killings for trivial causes, is grown to 'appalling proportions. The sum of grief, of suffering, of poignant regret produced by these affrays, is past all calculation. Looking for the causes of this deplorable state of affairs the writer goes 011 to say : Closest to*the surface lies the concealed weapons habit. To th*e con-

venient knife or revolver, carried in -defiance of the law, may be charged, there is no doubt, the vast majority of these practically causeless killings. The leniency of juries, the technical loopholes of escape provided by established systems of legal practice and court procedure are also regarded with some reason as contributing causes. Back of these, closer to the source of trouble, lies -a wrongly developed, or an undeveloped public opinion, which tolerates the weapon-carrying habit, sways the juries and thus indirectly encourages the homicide with the hope of escaping the consequences of his act. Upon most of those who slay in sudden anger and hot blood, fear of the consequences would hardly act -as a deterrent. The savage impulse to kill must be educated out, and that is one of the tasks of an enlightened public opinion. Those, too/ who are moved to crime by drunken frenzy are rarely heedful of consequences. But public opinion, by setting itself against tho practice of juries who accept the plea of drunkenness in extenuation of crime or as ground for acquittal, may reform the individuals who prime themselves for trouble ■ with 'fighting liquor.” ■From the foregoing it is . evident that tho people of the United States whilst amassing vast wealth and much importance, have absorbed some very undesirable characteristics, and in the land which boasts of its freedom the liberty of one person to kill another and escape serious consequences is much too pronounced to be pleasant. This is one of many reasons why New Zealanders may well ho satisfied with their own country, where, if life be somewhat tame and

commohplaco in comparison with,the big world centres it is, at any rate, reasonably comfortable and secure.