JUSTICE A LA MODE

The recent exposures concerning the alleged questionable proceedings of the Department of Justice are sufficiently grave to demand the immediate attention of every exponent of civil liberty. The Sacco-Vanzetti case, the fall of the Italian, Salsedo, from the fourteenth story of the offices of the Department, the extended list of its illegal practices compiled by such lawyers as Zachariah Chafee, Felix Frankfurter, and Dean Pound of the Law School, cannot fail to arouse the suspicion that "where there is smoke there is fire". Specifically, the Department is charged with wanton destruction of property; arrest without warrant; illegal imprisonment without trial; cruelty, torture, and "third-degree" methods--all employed against aliens and persons of foreign birth who are not cognizant of their rights under the American law. In particular, as regards the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the Department stands accused of gaining a conviction by means of secret evidence, of prejudice of the witnesses who were to identify the criminals, by placing the defendants on view before trial, and of many other gross irregularities.

If even a small fraction of these abuses have actually been committed by the guardians of the Law, there can be no denial that justice, here in the United States, is far from being all that it should. The wide gap between the Government and the ordinary life of the people, which has long worried our political philosophers, has resulted in a system that is bureaucratic to what now appears may be a dangerous degree. Our boasted "government of laws" is in danger of becoming a "government of men", where personal conviction is allowed to replace well-tested principles on the ground of expediency. Yet he who twists Justice to gain ends which he personally believes to be for the best interests of the community, is at best but short-sighted: Justice is the highest form of expediency which Man, through centuries of trial and error, has been able to develop.

It is just this perversion of the fundamental and long-tested maxims of human progress with which our Department of Justice is accused. An almost fanatical desire to rid the country of alien "reds" may have led to that misuse of the courts for which it is now blamed. But such practices, if proven to exist, should not be allowed to continue. Faulty administration of the law can never be anything but a stumbling-block to advancement: the attitude of mind which brings it about is unworthy of the twentieth century; above all, the indifference of the public, which allows such a condition of affairs to go uninvestigated, is growing to be a characteristic national fault. Let us not forget that the burden of seeing that full justice, neither more or less, is done even to the most abandoned of alien "reds" rests on the conscience of every citizen of this Republic.