THE MOTOR CRIMES.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1437, 11 May 1912, Page 6

THE MOTOR CRIMES.

SYNDICALISM AND LAWLESSNESS. FRANCE OF TO-DAY. Tl>o Trench to-day (writes the Paris correspondent of tho "Daily Mail") do not hesitate to put a finger on tho causes of the prevailing reign of terror. They recognise that France is reaping the whirlwind of anarchy fostered by a period ot truckling to revolutionary Syndicalism mid by an epoch of sentimentality in tho ■administration of tho law. People seem to think that the "unwritten law is an American innovation. It is nothing o> the kind. For nearly two decades Hie benevolence of the juries of the Siene has been denounced in word and writing by clear-sighted Frenchmen who recognised whither the system was leading France. The particular form of homicide winch we, for want of a native phrase, are- forced to call a "crime passionnel" receivedthis name in tho Paris Courts, which in their interpretation of tho unwritten law" antedated America by a generation. Right up to a few years ago, when tho guillotine was still rusting in Deibler's sinister shed of the Hue de la Folic Mcriccurt, it was declared that tho safest crime to commit in Frimce was murder. What can be tho inevitable result of ft system which re-, prieves a lustful wretch like boleilland, a responsible citizen, convicted beyond the possibility of doubt of the atrocious murder of an innocent little chnd? It was only in 1909, when the insistent clamour of the public led to tho execution at Bothune of the four notorious bandits known as the "Chauffeurs de la Drome, that the due measure- between capital crimes and their punishment began to be re-established. Yet eighteen months ago two soldiers who confessed with bruta» cynicism to the murder of a poor woman in a train for motives of robbery were reprieved, it being an open secret that ''political considerations made it undesirable that, under the system just abolished, they should be shot by their comrades of tho garrison of Sevres. And it was only under a threat to Tesign that in 1810 M. Lepine secured the execution ot the apache liabeuf, who had killed one policeman in cold blood and maimed several others. The Liabouf case Iβ an excellent example , in fixing tho connection between revolutionary Syndicalism and the state of anarchy which has produced criminals ot i tho stamp of the motor-ear bandits. Lia- '. beuf was the apache who donned spiked gauntlets, and, armed to tho teeth,. set i out to slay a detectivo of the police dc moeura who had secured his conviction as