Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 187]

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179 flinging of bombs charged with fearful explosives will not, in this country at least, make the laws for the protection of life and the security of property less stringent in enactment, or less rigid in application. There is nothing which proves so conclusively that our civilization and our power of self-government have not in fact reached that stage of development which we are wont to assert for them, as the frequency--it is feared a growing frequency—with which the people override the law, taking its execution into their own hands and out of the hands of those who are lawfully entrusted with its execution. Every instance in which a human being is whipped, or maimed, or spoiled of his goods, or deprived of his life, by the violence of the mob, is an evidence of barbarism as pronounced as is either slavery or polygamy. The assertion that crime cannot otherwise be prevented in any community is an admission that that community has not advanced in civilization enough to protect itself. Good may come to a people by their uprising in the execution of lynch law, but no good that can possibly balance the evil done in the destruction of law itself. The plague in London and the rats in Chicago were destroyed by fire. The French Eevolution was one long carnival of lynch law. Mobs and mob law merely expose and cultivate the savage elements that still linger among us. Some are indigenous, some imported. That there is occasion for its display is evidence of deficiency in the law or in its execution. But this is because the people will to have it so, or at least do not will to have it otherwise. If the laws concerning juries are deficient, the people have the power to change these laws. If judges distort law and prejudice justice, other judges who will not emulate their evil practices may be found for their places. Thus do I illustrate. On a summer evening not many years since, in the northwestern metropolis, a man and his wife went out for a drive, found one against whom they had enmity, forced an altercation upon him, and left him wounded and dying on his own door-stone. The assailant was arrested. Under the provisions of our laws he chose from the nine judges of the Superior Court the one who should try his case, he falsely swearing that the other eight were prejudiced against him. A tale of more than an hundred jurors was exhausted by methods known to the law, and—so was I informed by a leading merchant of that great city—a bailiff found gathered in one saloon the men who, as a jury, should acquit tlie accused, and, under the rulings of the judge, they did so acquit him. Surely this acquittal was a travesty of justice, and a sorer stab at the integrity and the protecting power of the law than was the original murder. But when, in a subsequent legislature, an attempt was made so to amend the law that some steps at least of this mockery of justice could not be repeated, the amendment was not permitted. The criminal escaped through defects in the law and the administration of justice, and these are not better because the people wall it so. When the people of Illinois want better jurisprudence they can have it as certainly as they can have good election laws. That we may respect the laws, we should respect those who mnke the laws, and see that they are men worthy of our respect. The customary flippant remarks about those who represent the people