The Paris tribunals have decided that murder is not a
political offence, at least when the victims are Russian subjects. After General Seliverstoff had been murdered, a journalist named Labruyere heard that the guilty man was Padlewski, and wishing to give himself repute as a pressman of American energy, he took charge of him, and carried him, as " his friend Dr. Wolff," over the frontier into Italy. He then revealed the whole story in the newspapers, which, of course, made him magnificently notorious. The enraged police, who had been completely outwitted, prosecuted M. Labruyere before the Ninth Police-Court on the charge of " harbouring " a criminal, and he was condemned on Wednesday to thirteen months' imprisonment, which, however, will not be accompanied by hard labour. Considering that M. Labruyere gained the notoriety he wished for, the sentence is far from severe, a more outrageous defiance both to the legal and the moral code being difficult to conceive. General Seliverstoff may have deserved hatred to any extent ; but his " execution" was a planned and, in its details, singularly treacherous murder.
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