The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., March 01, 1925, Page 14, Image 14

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Page Sixteen
that stranger who shared his room. Bill
protests his innocence, that he knows
nothing of the matter; that he went
into the room, went to sleep, and went
away. That during the night no un­
usual circumstance occured. As previ­
ously intimated, Bill was traveling on
private business which concerned a lady.
Therefore he refused to divulge his
name, or the matter which urged his
speed. On this point the accused stood
resolutely mute, and was staggered at
the array of circumstantial evidence
against him, to wit:
The stranger had never again been
seen since Bill entered the room. Next
morning he had disappeared. Both beds
were bloody, and the room showed signs
of a struggle; chair and table overturned,
the glass door in the bookease broken,
blood spattered all over the floor, and
the wash basin full of bloody water
where the murderer had presumably
cleansed himself. From the window-sill
a trail of blood and tracks led straight
to the beach. Between this window and
the beach were found signs of another
and more desperate struggle in the sand,
with more blood, much more. This
proved, as detectives reasoned, that B.
Grouch was bearing the body to the
shore when the stranger revived and
they fought again. There Bill finished
him off, and flung his corpse into the
sea.
In face of these damning facts they
urged Bill to confess, yet he stubbornly
insisted that all this stuff was news to
him .
For months the authorities held B.
Grouch in gaol hoping that the sea might
give up its dead and make their chain
of evidence complete. Then, without
being able to produce a dead man, they
went to trial and convicted Bill anyhow.
In the remorseless course of justice Bill
stood up for sentence.
“B. Grouch, Esq.,” asked the solemn
judge, “have you any reason to give
why you should not be hanged ? — or
words to that discouraging effect.
“Stop, Judge, stop!” a dishevelled man
shouted from the doorway, where he
fought with the bailiff to get in, “Stop,
Judge. I’m the man that he is supposed
to have killed.”
Then all the facts came out. The
stranger was afflicted with a chronic
bleeding at his nose. On that particular
morning, after his roommate was gone,
he had a violent nasal hemorrhage. He
rose and stumbled about the room, drop­
ping blood everywhere, overturning a
chair and table, and accidentally break­
ing a glass door in the bookcase. His
room being dark, the sufferer staggered
back to the wrong bed and fell across
it, dropping blood over that as well as
his own. He bathed in the basin, trying
to stop the flow. As fresh air some­
times helped him, he climbed out of the
window to take a walk. Near the beach
he was set upon by a press gang, where
in spite of manful resistance the sailors
overpowered and carried him aboard His
Majesty’s Warship Pegasus, bound for
Egypt- After an absence of months he
returned to England and read in a news-
THE UNITED AMERICAN
paper that a Mr. Grouch was being tried
for his murder; and so had hurried to
the court.
This is a famous story, often told by
criminal lawyers in their arguments
against a conviction on circumstantial
evidence. But the point that appeals to
Bill Grouch is the press gang which
abducted the young stranger, just grab­
bed up a British subject, dry so, and
carried him off to sea. A peaceable
citizen, charged with no crime, is set
upon and kidnapped. His relatives have
no tidings, and believe him to be
murdered. And his abductors are not
bandits, but a captain in the Royal Navy,
with one or more lieutenants, and a band
of trusworthy men. Such was the law
and the custom of England. When men
were needed aboard ship, and volunteers
came in slowly, the captain would send
a gang ashore, a press gang, to pick up
any able-bodied youngster that happened
to be floating around loose.
* * *
Now we come, gradually, to what we’ve
been driving at all the time, that any
American disposed to be pessimistic,
need only look about him at other lands
and former generations., The few details
given here should lead him to think of
a thousand abuses that have been cor­
rected, and oppressions of which this
particular part of the world is now so
happily free.
Our own country is not “going down.”
Even if in some particular you suspect
a tendency to back-slide, don’t make it
your business to grease the skids.
Throw sand. Grit has built these
United States, and grit, with ordinary
common sense, will keep shoving us up
hill.
No man who thinks, no man who
works, ¡no student can fail to believe
that general conditions are brigther for
us to-day than at any period of our
history. Of course we must bar certain
temporary evils and readjustments
following the late war. We must make
charitable allowance for the shell-shock
that all humanity has suffered. The
nerves of men are still on edge. Not
yet have we become normal; not yet
have passions and hatreds subsided, as
they will in time. Not yet have we
regained a placid possession of our
faculties. But when we take stock of
the year-by-year accomplishments, a
rotten branch lopped off, a seed planted,
a tree coming to maturity, then we see
most clearly that the procession of the
ages is moving forward.
After the blackness of this war, God
will again make green His world. He
who doubts that should have seen what
this writer once observed on the war-
lashed fields of Picardy. Men, soaked
and wounded and spent, like mud-
plastered demons crouched sullenly in
their trenches, or gave back inch by inch.
It was the autumn of 1917. Russia had
fallen into anarchy, and Italy reeled
dizzily from the most stunning disaster
■in military annals. Released from these
two fronts, additional men and guns
were hurled against our wavering
MARCH, 1925
western line. We feared that flesh and
blood could not withstand them.
In a torrential rain this writer sat
upon the trunk of a fallen apple tree, in
what once had been a generous orchard.
All the trees had been cut down and now
lay withered upon the ground, amidst
such wreckage and desolation as ter­
rified the soul. The song of the earth and
the air was death, death, death. It seemed
grotesquely hopeless that men Should try
to go on living. The 'horizon blazed with
fire, shells shrieked overhead — death,
death, death, the end of all things, be­
yond hope of resurrection. Then the
writer saw something of which he was
not then conscious — an apple tree,
merely a tree whose trunk had not been
quite severed from the stump. Prone
it lay amongst- the dead, yet clinging
to its vital spark, of life. Only the
slightest shred of bark remained to feed
it, but that tree blossomed, budded, and
bore its fruit. Superior to the mire,
superior to the fire, ignoring the revelry
of death, its undaunted branches held
up their load of golden apples. A
miracle! A rainbow! God’s promise
to His world that good shall never
perish, that He will replenish His earth.
And our brave upstanding American
men' and women, whom the same God
has created .in His own image, may we
not have an abiding faith in them, that
some way; somehow, they will find a
sure path to justice and to peace ?
A happening in Judge Morrow’s court:
“Have you anything to say before the
Court passes sentence upon you?”
Prisoner: “Well, all I’ve got to say
is, I hope your honor’ll consider the ex­
treme youth of my lawyer, an’ let me
off easy.”
Judah was from Seattle. — At a recent
state législative session in the state of
Washington representatives from Pierce
County in which is located the city of I
Tacoma, were assigned to a committee I
composed of a number of representatives I
from King County in which is located I
the City of Seattle. During the session I
this committee piet one evening in con-1
ference on bills in a spacious hotel room I
•in the State Capitol City of Olympia. I
On the wall of the room hung a picture I
of the twelve apostles. As the committee I
members were gathering a prominent I
Seattle man who for some time had been I
nursing anything but friendly feelings 1
for the people of Tacoma — as a result I
of the prolonged wrangle between the I
people of the two cities over the per­
manent name of a mountain peak in the I
distance from both places — commented I
dryly:' “I presume they were all from
Tacoma who 'are on that picture?” Not
all,” replied the committee chairman who I
hailed from Tacoma, “Judah was from
Seattle.”
Customer: “Your beastly hair restorer
has made my hair come out more than
ever!”
Barber: “Ah, you must have used too
much, sir! Made the hair come right
out instead of only half way.”