Mr. Rutherford Hayes, ex-President of the United States, and now
President of the Congress of Prison Societies, has recently made a strong "deliverance " upon the state of the criminal law in the States of the Union. He declares that, owing to the technicalities still maintained, the multitude of appeals, and the absurd demand for unanimity in juries, there is no feeling of certainty as to the operation of the criminal laws, and that this is the ultimate cause both of lynchings and of murderous duels. He proposes, therefore, as a beginning, that a large majority of a jury should be able to give a verdict, but makes no suggestion as to the abolition of the legal sources of delay. The magnitude of the evil denounced by Mr. Hayes is acknowledged by all impartial men in America; but the representatives appear indifferent, and it is not probable, unless public sentiment is stirred by some conspicuous failure of justice, with a most popular citizen or a well-known woman for victim, that anything wilt be done. The puzzling element in the matter is that the failure of justice does not arise from any wish that it should fail, but from a kind of imbecility in the Legislatures. The mob hangs murderers without scruple, but the repre- sentative bodies will not.
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