tion. It is right that your local authorities should protect you in your home against the spread of infectious disease through the carelessness of your neighbors. And it is also right, if on the national and international scale the food supply is deleterious to health, that there should be some form of public intervention and protection. With the complexity of our more mature social conditions, these new problems present themselves one after another. They must be faced as they come up and must be solved honestly and intelligently.

Government will inevitably become more costly, because there will be more things in the future than in the past to be done collectively for the common benefit. And so, while trying to solve the problem, how to secure a more equal distribution of private wealth among citizens, we must also learn better ways to supply local and State and national governments with the revenues that they need for the carrying on of their increasing functions.

All these are not things for you to worry about, young men of Trinity College, but they are things for you to take an intense interest in. Do not shrink in fear from the problems before us. Do not lose faith in our people, or our country, or our institutions. But glory in the fact that you may all bear some part in helping to do the work of your generation; so that, as the pioneers before us saw the wilderness subdued and peopled, and gloried in the country's swift material progress you may live to see an intensive progress where the pioneer saw an extensive one, and may feel that you have helped in your day and generation to re-establish on firm foundations those things that have always belonged to the best ideals of American life.

Lynching and the Criminal Law

BY JAMES WILford Garner, PH. D.,

Associate Professor of Political Science in University of Illinois

The recent lynching at Tallulah, Louisiana, of a white man charged with murder, adds another case to the already long list of lynchings due to miscarriages or delays of justice, and affords further evidence of the truth of a very recent statement ascribed to Justice Brown, of the United States Supreme Court, that lynch law is the natural result of the failure of the courts to discharge their natural functions. A good man in a peaceful community had been murdered, the evidence against the perpetrator of the deed was overwhelming, he was arrested and after lying six months in jail was brought to trial, convicted by the unanimous verdict of a jury of his neighbors, and sentenced to death. Upon appeal to the Supreme Court of his State the verdict was reversed on a technicality, a new trial was ordered and a change of venue was granted. The second trial was interrupted by the death of a member of the judge's family and when the third trial was begun the defendant's counsel set up the plea of "double jeopardy," which the judge blunderingly sustained, in order, as he said, that the Supreme Court might pass upon the point involved before the beginning of a new trial. Thus after a delay of two years and three months the case had reached a point where it was to be disposed of on a mere technicality without reference to the question of the guilt or innocence of the accused. Disgusted and enraged at an administration of criminal justice which had come dangerously near being a farce, the friends of the murdered man took the law into their own hands, and, in attempting to deal out that justice which the court had failed to render, committed a still greater outrage against the community and the State. It was mainly the fear that he would escape on a technicality after lying four or five years in jail that recently led a Tennessee mob to lynch the negro Johnson after the United States Supreme Court had allowed him a right of appeal from the decision of the

State court. The lynching record for the last few years is full of similar cases.

The conviction is rapidly growing that the administration of the criminal law in most American communities operates in practice more to protect the criminal than the public. Judge Amidon, of the United States District Court for the district of North Dakota, in a recent address before the State Bar Association of Minnesota, said: "The administration of the criminal law has broken down. It is an unworkable machine. I know we convict men and send them to the penitentiary; but I state it here as a fair statement of the administration of the criminal law in America that if a man has the means to employ able counsel so as to make a fight, as we say, in the great majority of cases he can escape punishment for crime. The trial can be so protracted and enmeshed in such a complication of pleading and evidence as to result—not in every case, oh, no, but in the majority of cases-in error, which, under the pernicious doctrine of presumed prejudice, will nullify a conviction." A somewhat similar opinion was recently expressed by ex-President Andrew D. White, who declared in a public address that the United States is among all civilized nations the country in which the crime of murder is most frequently committed and least frequently punished. In proof of this statement Dr. White quotes statistics to show that during the last fifteen years the number of homicides has increased from about 3,000 to about 10,000 annually and that at the present time only about one in seventyfour suffers capital punishment. With nearly five times as many homicides in 1904 as in 1885 there were, according to Sydney Brooks, an English writer, who has collected statistics on the subject, only two more convictions (110) in the latter year than in 1885. From a table prepared by the New York World it appears that in 1905, of 295 persons held for trial on the charge of murder in New York, only five were capitally punished. Last year there were, according to the Record-Herald, 187 homicides in the city of Chicago, or only about 60 per cent less than the number reported for all Germany, with a population twenty-five times as great and one-half as many as England and Wales, with sixteen times as many inhabitants.

The cause of this apparent breakdown in the administration of the criminal law, according to Dr. White, is sham humanitarian sentiment, which seems to be on the increase, that society has no right to put murderers to death, and laxity of administration "by the facilities given to every sort of chicanery and by the influence of the petty criminal lawyers in our various legislatures."

Few things are more calculated to try the patience or vex the soul of one who watches the procedure of a criminal trial than the interminable delays which usually mark its progress from the first to the last stage of the act. First of all, there is the usual delay in bringing the case to trial-it is seldom less than three months, and frequently as much as a year. Recently in Milwaukee a man who was charged with an offense, the maximum punishment for which was only ninety days' imprisonment, was kept in jail ten months awaiting trial. On June 20 of this year he was released by the judge, who declared with just indignation, that it was nothing less than an outrage to thus deprive a man of his liberty. It would be easy to duplicate this case in almost every State of the Union.

After the case is called, days and sometimes weeks are consumed in impanelling the jury. Recently in Chicago eight weeks were consumed in selecting a jury to try a notorious labor union "slugger," the cost to the State aggregating about twenty thousand dollars. Hundreds of veniremen were examined. They were asked every conceivable question about their lives, their characters and their opinions, with a view to establishing a cause for challenge. With lawyers interested in delaying the trial the selection of the jurors proceeded at the rate of one and a half a week.

The selection of the jury, however, is usually fast sailing compared with the progress of the trial thereafter. Every step is hedged about with technicalities, many of which to the layman mean nothing, and all of which are designed to provide loopholes of escape for the criminals rather than to protect society against murderers. In some States if the judge neglects through oversight or other cause to charge the jury on every point involved in the case the attorney for the

defendant may move for a new trial. In others, if the judge charges the jury on points to which his attention has not been called by counsel, the defendant has the right of appeal. If the language of the indictment does not go into the most absurd degree of particularity in describing the circumstances of the crime-the time, the place, manner, character of the weapon used and other largely immaterial facts, the indictment will be quashed. In some instances the courts have thrown out indictments for the failure of the prosecuting officer to spell out in full the name of the State whose peace and dignity was violated-an omission which would be regarded as wholly immaterial by anybody but lawyers more interested in delaying than in enforcing justice and in encouraging rather than discouraging litigation. Not one indictment in a hundred prepared by a prosecuting officer fails to contain all the information necessary to enable the accused to prepare his defense, yet on account of the slavish adherence of both bench and bar to antiquated legal forms, with their useless tautology and verbiage a large proportion of indictments are quashed and the cases continued. Ingenious lawyers, who have bad cases, frequently refrain in the beginning of the trial from demurring to indictments which they know to be technically faulty, but after their clients are convicted they move for a new trial on the ground that the indictment was bad. Everyone who has observed the workings of the courts will doubtless recall instances in which cases have been continued from term to term on account of the inability of the State's attorney to frame a charge in which the piercing eyes of the opposing counsel could not discover technical flaws, until finally the popular demand for prosecution subsided and the prosecuting officer, through sheer worry or lack of interest, dropped the case and the accused was allowed to go free, although there may have never been any question as to his guilt.

It is somewhat strange that with a system of jurisprudence founded on that of England, and with a procedure essentially the same, the administration of criminal justice in American States should be attended by so much greater delay and uncertainty. Justice Brown, recently retired from the United States Supreme Court, declares that our criminal