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Show BLACKMAILING REPUTATION. REPUTA-TION. A popular reaction almost, invariably goes to the extreme from which it ro-coils. ro-coils. The recent exposures of I ho attempts at-tempts to blackmail the reverend Dr. Carter, of New York, by an adventuress adven-turess who demanded money frSin him upon pain of publishing to the world that he had had illicit intercourse with her and was the lather of her murdered mur-dered embryo tic offspring, and of the masculine scoundrel vlio tried to levy blackmail upon Sir Travis Twis.s by threatening to declare his wife 'unchaste before marriage, have made the public so skeptical of, and indignant against, this particular phase of crime, that there is danger of its ruuuiug Lo the opposite extreme and annulling scoundrels scoun-drels ofthejiL-t penally ol' their crimes, under the plea that they are unfortunate unfortu-nate innocents who are about to become be-come the prey of unscrupulous male and female blackmailers. We have no doubt but that lh Carter was innocent inno-cent of the charges preferred against him, but it is bad policy to make his case a precedent in presumption of the .innocence of all men similarly accused. In fact, divines ought to be, and if they conduct themselves nrudently will be, not only not guilty of such erimcs, but will not be suspected o( them, hi view of this new-fledged in-dignaiiun in-dignaiiun against blackmailers of female fe-male and clerical virtue, all the libertines liber-tines in the land will take fre.-di courage cour-age to indulge their licentious propensities, propen-sities, confident of avoiding the penal-tics penal-tics of detection and exposure, by asserting assert-ing that they are the chaste victims ol attempts to extort from them hush money. mo-ney. The tendency now, is to license guilt of this character by force of the example of a wrongful prosecution of a lew exceptional cases. Id these as in all other cases, opinion should be based upon evidence and not upon precedent or example. |
