344 ANNUAL REPORT 



others could apply a remedy. But, no; the father kicks his erring 

 daughter out of doors for crimes that he bequeathed. All evils hang on 

 the same string ; one evil begets another, and it is on, on — no stopping 

 point. Moral once let go is as a ship adrift on a w^ide sea fancy forms 

 his moral code, and he builds a heaven to suit his fancied needs; hence 

 the nations' turmoils, thefts and slaughters, the thieves climbing up to 

 heaven by the back way. 



Hence it is that the murdered victims of rum sellers loom up to more 

 than 50,000 annually in the United States alone, yet the nation feels no 

 shock ; no alarm is sounded ; but let a band of unchartered raiders make 

 a drive, as was done at Northfield, and the whole nation feels the shock; 

 the alarm is sounded, and hundreds join in the pursuit, as money and 

 sympathy are poured in to sooth the wife of the murdered victim. But 

 had the chartered dram-selling assassins made the assault and done it in 

 their usual way — struck a fatal blow, a lingering death of years, stolen 

 his money, cut away self-respect, destroyed his character, drove his faniily 

 into obscurity beyond the veil of sympathy, the kind messages and chari- 

 ties that saluted the ears of Mrs. Heywood would have been the wrangle 

 of hard shells to get her children for cheap servants, and the rattle of 

 an old rickety cart as she jostled over to the poor house. And the only 

 shock that society would feel would be an additional two-mill tax on every 

 $10,000 to foot the bill. 



So you see that from the American standpoint of morals, the crime at 

 Northfield was not in the killing of Heywood, but in the off-handed man- 

 ner in which it was done — done without license, and before the vict4m 

 and his family had been disgraced. 



(^ur laws are a mystified mass of riddles, solved only by experts in 

 technical phrases, with jurors sworn that they are either knaves or fools, 

 and the decisions in our courts frequently vie in enormity with the dep- 

 redations of a band of Hottentots. The whole thing is a legerdemain of 

 fraud, that nothing but a long purse can solve. Common sense and 

 common justice measure crime according to the misery it produces, but 

 not so the American standard. The question is not the enormity of the 

 crime ; but did the violator have a legal permit — a license ? and if so, he 

 is only guilty in the proportion as he violated the charter in the commis- 

 sion of the crime, and if found to have committed it strictly within the 

 limits of the charter, then no criminality attaches; the legality strips 

 the crime of all moral turpitude in the eyes of American morals and jur- 

 isprudence. 



Legality, the letter of the law, is the highest criterion of morals known 

 to our nation, as a nation, even to the wording of a damnable whisky 

 license, the face of which is so heinous that no departure, though ever so 

 abhorent, can far transcend the face of the bill in enormity, and so treat- 

 ed by the law courts, no departure being deemed a very serious offense. 

 Great God! what a shame ! What a perverted state of morals and jus- 

 tice. And yet our rumsellers can boast of a thousand crimes to one 



