THE LAW GETS ITS MAN

It is late Sunday evening; an automobile containing a man and his wife with their small child beside them is driving leisurely home from a Sunday holiday. Two men with sawed off shot guns step from the bushes and order the vehicle to halt. Thoughts of highway robberies, his family, a hundred dollars in his pocket, who knows what flash through the mind of the man at the wheel. Confused he hesitates before applying the breaks. Two shotguns blaze out, twenty-six slugs strike the side of the car, and the driver crumples over into his wife's lap, dead. Such is the story carried in the Monday morning papers of another mistake made by prohibition agents.

A similar murder took place but a short while past near Niagara Falls and struck horror in the breasts of everyone sensitive enough to experience the shock of useless death. The circumstances of the present outrage are such as to awaken even more intense sympathy. The facts that the victim was accompanied by his family, was a full fifteen miles from the border, and possessed not a trace of alcohol in the car, all combine to awaken popular recognition of an affair, the barest facts of which are hideous.

It seems impossible that such cold blooded practices may be allowed for long in any civilised society, but the growing indifference to the rights of individuals at present noticeable in this country appears to admit of anything. The vigor with which the present offenders in the name of law and order are prosecuted may serve as an index to the extent that a respect for an order that is higher than law still remains in the United States.