But turning to the individual States, all comparisons must depend upon locality. New York, the landing place, that threshold of real America, with a predominating foreign population; the western frontiers of civilization, and the South, with its peculiar racial conditions, suffer by comparison with British standards far more than would one of the orderly communities composing the greater part of the Republic.
Recent mal-administration of criminal law in New York constitutes a subject of national mortification, but the existence of this sensitiveness is the best of reasons for believing that time will bring an improvement. Unfortunately for the good name of the country, foreigners do not comprehend, and can hardly be made to appreciate, that the instances of private assassination in that city followed by trials, which, whether owing to a vicious system of practice or to judicial incompetency, excite the indignation and ridicule of the world, are not typical of America but are expressions of purely local and probably temporary conditions. Foreign critics should be told that New York is not America, as many of them assume, and that temporary and local lapses do not prove a low standard. They may also be reminded, as showing that human justice is fallible, that even in London if a man walks into an Oxford Street department store, lies in wait for the proprietor against whom he has a grievance and blows out his brains, although he will be convicted in a trial occupying but three hours, yet the Home Secretary may intervene and prevent his hanging, upon a petition signed by tens of thousands of sentimentalists moved by the rather illogical fact that his wife contemplates an addition to a thus celebrated family.
In the far West, criminal practice is probably neither better nor worse than in any other rough frontier of civilization where men must largely rely upon their own resources, rather than upon the government, for the protection of their lives and property. Conditions in the South are so peculiar, owing to the sudden elevation to a legal equality of an inferior race which is in the majority, that no comparison with any other community is possible. Without in the least condoning existing conditions, it may even be said that lynching, unlike private assassination, involves some degree of co-operation and is the expression of public, rather than of individual, vengeance. The theatre of these outrages is, moreover, sparsely settled, beyond large cities or centres of education, and still retains some of the features of a frontier.
Throughout much the largest area, however, constituting the solid civilization and containing the bulk of the population of this immense country, no such conditions exist. On the contrary, crime is met with that steady and impartial justice, inherited from England, which neither partakes of the police oppression of continental countries, nor lapses into the barbarism of the exceptional localities above referred to. To commit deliberate murder in one of the eastern States, such as Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts, or in one of the great commonwealths of the middle West, means sure and reasonably speedy hanging.
But, bearing in mind the difficulty of accurate comparisons between such diversified sections and a compact unit like England, and endeavoring to arrive at a general estimate, it must be conceded that America, as a whole, has even more to learn from England's criminal, than from her civil, courts.
FOOTNOTE:
[B] He was hanged three weeks from the following Tuesday.