504 MISCELLANEOUS RECOLLECTIONS-II 



causes of it discussed, the judge quietly remarked, &quot;The 

 taking of life, after a full and fair trial, as a penalty for 

 murder, seems to be the only form of taking life to which 

 the average American has any objection.&quot; Many of our 

 dealings with murder and other high crimes would seem 

 to show that the judge was, on the whole, right. My main 

 study on the subject was made in 1892, during a journey 

 of more than twelve thousand miles with Mr. Andrew 

 Carnegie and his party through the Middle, Southern, 

 Southwestern, Pacific, and Northwestern States. We 

 stopped at all the important places on our route, and at 

 vast numbers of unimportant places ; at every one of these 

 I bought all the newspapers obtainable, examined them 

 with reference to this subject, and found that the long 

 daily record of murders in our metropolitan journals is 

 far from giving us the full reality. I constantly found in 

 the local papers, at these out-of-the-way places, numerous 

 accounts of murders which never reached the metropoli 

 tan journals. Most striking testimony was also given me 

 by individuals, in one case by a United States senator, 

 who gave me the history of a country merchant, in one of 

 the Southwestern States, who had at different times killed 

 eight persons, and who at his last venture, endeavoring to 

 kill a man who had vexed him in a mere verbal quarrel, 

 had fired into a lumber-wagon containing a party coming 

 from church, and killed three persons, one of them a little 

 girl. And my informant added that this murderer had 

 never been punished. In California I saw walking jaunt 

 ily along the streets, and afterward discoursing in a draw 

 ing-room, a man who, on being cautioned by a policeman 

 while disturbing the public peace a year or two before, had 

 simply shot the policeman dead, and had been tried twice, 

 but each time with a disagreement of the jury. Multitudes 

 of other cases I found equally bad. I collected a mass of 

 material illustrating the subject, and on this based an 

 address given for the first time in San Francisco, and 

 afterward at Boston, New York, New Haven, Cornell Uni 

 versity, and the State universities of Wisconsin and Min- 



