Only seven were hanged
grades in responsibility?"
"Never mind what he argued. There is one law and one consequence for
those who take life. I do not admit that I subscribe to the
conclusions of any theorist. I insist that man has free will."
"Alas! one may insist too much. You must know that there are two
forces that govern conduct. A low mentality, urged forward by low
hereditary instincts and inclinations, will break into crime sooner
than a high mentality influenced by higher considerations. At the
same time it is true that temptation plays a powerful hand in all of
us. There is a point in everyone that marks the limit of our
resistance to external and internal urgings. Society, the social
system, made The Mole what he was externally. His heredity largely
made him what he was internally. He knew the effect of the
contributory causes of his criminal inclinations without being able
to diagnose them--gambling, ill-health, drink, unemployment, poverty,
and so on. He laid the blame for these conditions on society. The
mistake of which the penal code is so often guilty is that it is
retaliatory when it ought to be reformatory. Force proves nothing.
So long as you continue to believe in the existence of a criminal
class you will make criminals; and so long as you make them you will
be compelled to kill them. Therefore the penal code had no moral or
logical right to make Abe Lammie and to take his life for being what
he was. In not a few cases society ought to stand in the dock
instead of the prisoner. Therefore I claim and take another point."
The waiter put out his hand and added a third glass to his collection.
"With regard to Jeff S. Connolly," he continued with a kind of bland
impertinence, "there was the unreasoning, terrible motive of jealousy
at work. When this is allied, or applied, to the sex impulse it
becomes irresistible. Is love a species of madness? The divine
passion! Even Jehovah, the Jewish tribal God, declared that he had
pangs of jealousy. Is not all deep emotion a sort of madness? It is
an excess; and excess means lack of balance. In several European
countries there never would have been any judgment of death on
Connolly. Has not the unwritten law been successfully advocated?
That is not to say that Connolly would have been allowed to go free.
But tell me, has your lordship's life been so blameless that unruly
passion has never overthrown all else?"
The judge started; his hand fell on the table and remained there. He
was about to cry out in protest, but the other's voice restrained him.
"What profound truth," cried the waiter, "was in the exclamation of
Richard Baxter, the preacher, when he saw a criminal led to his
doom--'There, but for the grace of God, go I!'"
The waiter paused impressively.
"Really, it was not much of a triumph for the law to hang Jeff S.
Connolly. Hunted and harried, there was no place for him in this
world. In a moment of frenzy he had reverted to the primitive and
had visited unfaithfulness with death. The penal code retaliated by
setting all its machinery in motion that it might inflict a second
death. Did the execution of Jeff S. Connolly protect society in the
very slightest? Protect? Did his decease alleviate in any degree
the anguish of the first death?"
The waiter seemed to be carried away by his own vehemence. His long
forefinger pointed accusingly at the judge.
"Fool! Don't you see that here is an answer to those who say, like
you, that imprisonment would be no punishment to a murderer?
Tortured to extremity, Jeff S. Connolly asked for execution. He
desired death as a release. You gave it him as a punishment!
Futility of finality!"
Again the waiter's mood changed. He assumed an air of judicial
gravity, an air that reminded the judge of his own manner on the
Bench.
"I give a verdict against the plea for judgment of death in this case
also," he said as he lifted a fourth glass. "Will your lordship
please open the next case for the defense?"
The waiter leaned back in his chair.
The judge stroked his chin, a trifle nervously, but thoughtfully.
He was not afraid of this man who seemed to have lost his senses; but
he did not wish to arouse any hostility. The truth was that the
judge did not know whether to take the waiter seriously or as a
preposterous lunatic. A little of the self-assurance of the judge
was departing from him, however, and he was smarting under the
reproofs he had received. His legal mind, trained to argument, was
strongly opposed to surrender. His life was one of domination, in
his court he was supreme. Even if this was a crazy man who was
baiting him, he was a crazy man with whom the judge was beginning to
get really angry.
The judge had been insulted. He had been called a fool. Moreover,
the judge felt the advantage of the discussion--the mere logical
advantage--slipping from him. He regretted having accepted the
challenge of this waiter, but, having accepted it, his self-respect
cried aloud to him to smash his opponent by argument.
"May I remind your lordship that time is passing? Have you any other
case to offer? You made a remark a moment ago about the judgment of
death being a deterrent----"
"As a matter of fact," interrupted the judge, harshly, "I was
thinking of that very statement. If I recollect clearly, it was that
very declaration that brought forth your contemptuous laughter. You
must know the old proverb about he who laughs last. The murder which
Nathaniel Gore committed will prove my point that execution is a
deterrent. I sentenced Nathaniel Gore to death in spite of a plea of
insanity that was ill-advisedly put forward. It was the last time I
put on the black cap before going for my long vacation the following
morning. Gore was hanged in due course, a man whose vanity brought
him to the scaffold."
The judge turned over the leaves of the minute-book, read a few
words, and threw back his head as if to sum up to a jury.
THE VAIN MURDERER
One point that I have repeatedly observed about criminals brought
before me for sentence [said the judge, ponderously] is not their
cleverness in covering up their tracks, but the amazing carelessness
they exhibit in providing clues for the police to work on. This
subject has on more than one occasion been discussed by the members
of this club. To put the matter quite frankly, a great many
criminals--indeed, practically all--might just as well leave their
names and addresses so that the authorities could call and arrest
them at home. This lack of precaution is well known to the police
both here and in America.
What is the reason for this seeming indifference to consequences? We
have talked it over many times in this very room and we have come to
a definite decision. It is that in all these lawbreakers there is an
inordinate amount of vanity.
In every class of crime this vanity may be observed, and not least in
the crime of murder. Some people are so ill-balanced that they
actually invest the murderer with a kind of romanticism that is as
false as it is misplaced. As for the murderers themselves, they
often exhibit a conceit, even in the dock, that is truly amazing and
truly ostentatious folly. The most vain man who ever received
sentence at my hand was Nathaniel Gore.
To begin with, Gore was brought into court on a stretcher. He had
sustained certain injuries at the time of his capture, and he had the
questionable distinction of being the only criminal who was saved
from death by drowning and brought to police headquarters by
airplane. The whole circumstances of his crime and arrest had a
certain amount of pictorial sensationalism that caused the court
during his trial to be crowded to overflowing. All this added to his
vanity. But the law was not to be moved from its pursuit of justice,
and Nathaniel Gore was hanged.
Lord Brougham said once, with his usual acuteness, that the whole
machinery of the state ended simply in bringing twelve good men into
a box. In no case that I remember was this majestic simplicity of
the Law revealed more tersely and directly than in the trial of Gore.
The cheap notoriety in which he bathed was a tawdry advertisement for
him and was, in the end, completely submerged in the stark
unaffectation of the scaffold.
As might be expected, Gore was not a common, petty criminal. He went
after glittering prizes, and when the news of the find of a great
diamond in the South African fields came to be known it attracted him.
The diamond was not so big as the famous Pitt gem, which was over
four hundred carats weight when taken from the ground. It was not so
big as the cut and polished Koh-i-noor, which is now in the British
Crown and turns the scale at one hundred and six carats. But it was
the biggest that had come out of a South African mine for generations.
The illustrated journals printed photographs of the diamond on view
in Johannesburg behind barred windows, guarded by a squad of armed
police. Then came the information that the diamond was being sent to
England. It was this news that made Nathaniel Gore form his resolve.
By diligent and diplomatic inquiry he discovered the name of the ship
on which the diamond was being transported, and also the amount of
the premium the insurance people demanded during transit from the
Cape to Hatton Garden, London's diamond market. When he had found
out from the shipping list that the liner had sailed, he realized
that he had less than three weeks in which to plan and execute the
theft. Once the diamond was landed, it would be so well guarded that
no attempt could be made with much hope of success; the place to
snatch the diamond was on the high seas.
Nathaniel Gore had not the appearance of a burglar. He was small,
and he looked and dressed like a successful man about town. He was
known in the West End of London as well as he was known on Fifth
Avenue, New York. He had at one time actually been a guest in a
house on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, when he lifted precious stones
from a shop in that city and got away with them. He boasted about
this. There is no doubt that, in spite of his vanity, he certainly
knew gems and their values with uncanny thoroughness. Peculiarly
enough, he never bragged about this expert knowledge, the one thing
that was his real accomplishment. He seemed to "lift" gems without
any more swagger--except in the Chicago case--than an ordinary
business man exhibits about his business capacity. He could tell
offhand the weight of the Orloff, the Regent, the Florentine, the
Hope, and other famous diamonds and could name their owners and their
histories.
He had been a convict, which means that he had been cared for by the
state. He had been housed, fed, clothed, steam-heated, nourished,
and made entirely healthy. But his vanity went everywhere with him.
In prison he regarded himself as superior to his fellow prisoners.
Out of it he posed as if he were superior to the law and general
rules of conduct. He had worked very little in his life, and when
asked to make mail-bags during his period of incarceration he
protested that the labor would injure his hands. He was therefore
sent to the quarry, where his hands suffered considerably more.
But when he returned to freedom he became the same dandy he had been
before he was convicted. He had the appearance of an overgrown
jockey. In his vanity he employed perfume to add to his conceit. He
was a great favorite with women. If they did not love him they
certainly had affection for him; as for him, he loved himself too
well to spare any for anybody else.
One thing his imprisonment had done for him: it had taught him more
than he had ever known about the methods of the police. In court the