DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 128, 20 August 1927, Page 16

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

THE FORGOTTEN MAN . (Copyright, 1927) £JHIEF JUSTICE TAFT, of the U.S.A., in an address the other day said: “If there is not somebody or organisation to look after the forgotten man—that is, society at large—we are not going to have such an improvement in the administration of the criminal law as we ought to have.” The trouble with most people’s sympathies and opinions is that they are strictly personal. It is easy to raise a hullabaloo about punishing a criminal because our interests are centred in one individual. The criminal, however, may have swindled hundreds of people in a stock jobbing deal, or killed many people in a wreck, or done some other dastardly wrong, but his victims are largely anonymous. Because of their vagueness we do not have much interest in them. The criminal is concrete. People do not get much kick out of a God or a devil who are merely malign forces. They want a personal God and a personal devil if their belief is going to bite into them very much. Too often in the trial of criminals there is thought only of the man, and our thought of him is equally wrong, whether we think of him who ought to be pardoned or upon whom vengeance should be wreaked. We forget that other man, that is, society at large, whom he has injured. We are sympathetic with the drunkard or the dope fiend. He is a man like us, we can see him and feel him, but the number of people whose lives he has made miserable is somewhat indistinct. So the “wets” utter more piercing cries than the “drys” and the condemned criminal who is the object of persecution by policemen, lawyers, judges and juries arouses more sympathy in us than the victim of his crimes, who is apparently forgotten. Law ought to be something to protect the forgotten man and it ought to be so administered as to look after his interests. In every trial by jury there is an indispensable third person present. He represents the person who has been wronged and the common interests of all of us. The question at law is not merely how much one man has wronged another, but how much wrong a single man has done against the interests of us all.