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PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN xix

learned gentleman who had then contended that a whale
under no circumstances was entitled to be called a
fish was now no more successful in his view that a
negro might be the father of a white child.

In passing the death sentence on Robert McConaghy
(p. 601) the judge told him that for barbarity, treach-
ery and depravity, his cruelty and wickedness had not
been surpassed by the pirates of the West Indies or
the savages of the wilderness. For on a summer day
on a little farm, in Pennsylvania, he had murdered the
whole Brown family, except the husband who was at
the time away from hore. George, aged 16, and
David, aged 10, he had choked to death in the woods.
Jacob of 14 years he had shot in the back; little Bliza-
beth, the only daughter, he had strangled, and then
the mother’s throat he had cut while she lay in bed
and the eldest son John he had shot. The case finds
no parallel in our criminal records, The pirates of
the West Indies have long ago disappeared from the
high seas, and the savages of the wilderness are no
more. Only in the reports of the Bryce Commission on
the Belgian invasion and in the report of the French
government on the German atrocities in northern
France, can one read of more awful crimes in scores
of hamlets and country-sides in these devastated
lands by a people who claim to be civilized and ‘‘cul-
tured.’’

How many of our best citizens are every year pay-
ing tribute to adventurers like W. J. Cook (p. 624)
and Mrs. Hirsch (p. 655) it would be difficult to say.
The innocent victim, in nine cases out of ten, submits
to blackmail rather than endure the publicity of the
yellow press and the condition of mind of the ordinary
American juror who will take any woman’s word as
against a man’s. And our state legislatures who seem

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