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Petersburg in 1890 he said: "There is a sense in which nothing that lives is incapable of betterment, and so strictly speaking there are no incorrigible criminals.
Until the best men of Chicago would get together, form a vigilance committee, shoot some of the criminals, hang others, drive the rest out; and Chicago would get back to law and order, with courts of justice and a regular police body, composed of men trained, employed and paid to use force in resisting evil.
This astonishing heresy was not of indigenous growth: its seeds were imported from Europe by the emigration or banishment thence of criminals congenitally incapable of understanding and valuing the blessings of monarchical institutions, and whose method of protest was murder.
It must have been that; and how much I meant, and how much I did not mean, God alone knows! "What a sympathy I have always had for criminals! I have always wanted, or, anyhow, one side of me has always wanted, to do right, and the other side has always done wrong. I have sympathised with the just, but I have always felt that I'd like to help the criminal to escape his punishment.
The Count of Armagnac, his chancellor, and several bishops and officers of state were the principal victims; but no one, man or woman, was spared. State prisoners, criminals, and debtors, even women great with child, perished in this indiscriminate slaughter. Almost the whole of Normandy was by this time in possession of the English; but Rouen, the capital of the duchy, still held out.
"Well, good-night everybody, and, Mrs Clay, don't forget to apply for your right in time, or you won't be able to vote," she said in parting. "No fear," responded grandma. "I've not been counted among mad people an' criminals, an' done out of me simple rights till this time of life without appreciatin' 'em w'en I've got 'em at last."
But a still greater blow to the privileges of the clergy was struck by the Parliament under the influence of Cromwell, who had elevated it in order to give legality to the despotic measures of the Crown; and in this way a law was passed that no one under the rank of a sub-deacon, if convicted of felony, should be allowed to plead his "benefit of clergy," but should be punished like ordinary criminals, thus re-establishing the constitutions of Clarendon in the time of Becket.
Though they should put him on his trial for forgery, what of that? He had heard of trials in which the accused criminals had been heroes to the multitude while their cases were in progress, who had been fêted from the beginning to the end though no one had doubted their guilt, and who had come out unscathed at the last. What evidence had they against him?
They treated the offenders as the most atrocious of criminals, and thus, though by a very indirect and circuitous method, led the way to the total dispersion of those clouds, which hung, with most uneasy operation, on the human understanding.
Michael did not know why his eye had been attracted to the item nor why he had read the article through to the finish. It was not the kind of thing he cared to read; yet of late all crime and criminals had held a sort of sorrowful fascination for him. "It is what I might have done if I had stayed in the alley," he would say to himself when he heard of some terrible crime that had been committed.
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