A "BAD” NATION.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4826, 6 May 1925, Page 3

A "BAD” NATION.

SUMMING UP AMERICA. A TERRIBLE INDICTMENT. K is a most terrible indictment against the United States, but not so terrible, perhaps, as the accusation that tire American people are accepting the indictment almost , with complacency,.and that the average citizen moves not at all to remedy a situation which is threatening their moral existence. The public apathy is said to be witnessed everywhere—in the jury room, in the lack of respect for law among the young, among the people in their private lives. And it is this, not the lax enforcement .of the law, we are told, which explains why America leads the world in man-killing, in all the crimes of violence; why murder news appears almost as regularly as the stock market Quotations ; why—and it m horribly significant—the United States Government has had to contract for the building of 3000 specially-designed armoured cars for use in the mail service, and put one through a test of its serviceability under actual /conditions, .with men hired to pose as bandits. So, we are told, there is a melancholy suggestiveness in the widely-quoted words of Judge Alfred J. Talley, of the Court of General Sessionp-dmNew York City, on. recently inducting into office a new jurist. He said “One of the things that you will come to learn is that you have come on the bench of the greatest criminal court in the world, and the oldest court in the United States, at a time when this country is suffering under an indictment which proclaims it. to be the most lawless on earth. A CHIMB-WEARY MAGISTRATE. “You will find that the United States must plead guilty to that indict. Most of the desperate criminals are mere boys. You will be heartbroken at discovering that the yapt majority, of defendants are under nineteen or twenty years of age. That is. going to be your most distressing problem." . ■

The crime-weary magistrate, Judge Talley, has served for years in General Sessions, witnessing the tragedies of lust and malice, of envy and passion, and he takes .up the story in an article to the New York Tribune, in which he states some, ugly facts and points out some of the causes which bring America before the bar of the world’s opinion. On a conservative estimate, he tells us, there are not fewer than 10,000 murder cases in a year in America. A recent investigator. lie goes on,-writes that if the victims of murders in the United States were buried in a single row, ten feet to a grave, their bodies would cover a trench some twenty miles in length, and. if the ratio were preserved for a period of teii years the trench would extend to 200 miles. It is of great significance, points out the eminent New York jurist, that the upward trend in the American murder record is assuming such proportions that .the principal life Insurance companies are becoming concerned-sover it just as they would be concerned.over an epidemic of smallpox o’r typhoid fever. Judge Talley continues:

BUSY YEAR FOR MAN-KILLERS. “A recent bulletin. _of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company declared that the homicide rate in America is about twelve times as high as it is in England, and points out that the. year 1923 was a busy year for man-killers, and that while in 19236.3 per 190,000 of the industrial policy holders in Canada and -he United States were slain, this figure was increased in. 1924 to 7.3. “Frederick L. Hoffman, statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company, recently published a very’careful and illuminating homicide record for 1923 in which he analyses the murdens in twenty-eight of our principal cities, and, summarising It, says :. ’This tabic is the most amazing murder record for any civilised country for whicn data ai.e available. It Indicates a state' of affairs .so startling and bf such significance that no Government, Federal or State, can rightfully ignore the situation. Compared with the beginning -of the period, the murder death-rate has practically, doubled in twenty-four years.’

“He points out by way of contras: that in all England and Wales in 1923, with an approximate population of less than half that of the United States, there occurred 200 deaths from homicide, as against approximately. 10,000 in the United States. This would be, therefore, equivalent to about lour deaths per million in England and Wales, as against a rate of 102 per million for 28 cities of the United States. In all. Scotland in 1922 there occurred but 18 deaths from homicide. AMAZING COMPARISONS. ' Does anyone arise to deny the assertion that we are the most lawless nation on the face of the earth ’ Even he who runs may read and understand the figures given below for the tenyears period from 1911 to 1921, for which statistics are available. They show that the average homicide mortality per 100,909 of our population was 7.2. In our neighbouring provinces of Ontario and Quihec it was 0.5 In England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland it ranged from 014 to 0.9. In Australia and South*Africa it was 1.9.

"The fault, we are told, does not lie with lax enforcement of the law or with lax officials. The great difficulty in the administration of the criminal law in this country is attributable,” writes the jurist, “to two reasons. The first is the unsympathetic attitude of the people towards the strict enforcement of thCj law and the punishment of the criminal, and the second is the unwillingness of the. people themselves to respect and obey the law of the land and to train the children of the country to obedience and respect for lawful constitutional authority.”