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Show LOVE LETTERS OF ARTHUR BROWN. The attempt of the lawyers, retained for the defense, de-fense, of Mrs. Anna M. Bradley, the alleged slayer of Arthur Brown, to create a public sentiment on behalf of their client by publishing the love letters of the unhappy man to his concubine, is an intimation inti-mation to his friends that the prosecution will mercilessly mer-cilessly lay the axe to the trunk of the tree of the dead man's reputation. Giving to the public these most confidential letters, weeks in advance of the trial of Mrs. Bradley for murder, is an adroit move to enlist the sympathy of the people in favor of the imprisoned woman and a covert hint that the attack on the murdered man's character will be directed di-rected with precision and a tierce determination to prove him an unpitying scoundrel. Sophar the Naamathite, said to Job thousands of years ago, "The bones of the sinful man shall be filled with the vices of his youth and they shall sleep with him in the dust." Mrs. Bradley's counsel answers, "Xot so, we will judge him according to his way and will lay open his secret sins; our eyes will not spare him, neither will they show mercy; his sins will be for an execration and a wonder, and for a curse and for a reproach." And from the grave of the dead man tonight there comes to us a voice full of pathos and shame, "Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you who were my friends." How supremely su-premely sad and melancholy is the history of these two -wretched souls. Arthur Brown, a man of education, edu-cation, endowed with more ability than is the heritage heri-tage of the average man, a conspicuous figure in his profession that held out to him the hope of high reward and honorable distinction, murdered by the hand of the woman he made his paramour. That such a man by "ruffian lust should be contaminate;" that for the indulgence of an animal passion and the gratification of sensual love he should wreck his career and should go down to his unhonored grave, perishing by the hand of God and consumed by the spirit of his wrath is pitiful in the extreme. Between lust and murder there is a mysterious affinity that no metaphysical inquiry has yet satisfactorily sat-isfactorily explained. "Murder," exclaims Escanes in Shakespeare's Pericles, "is as near to lust as flame to smoke." The habitually immoral man or woman has, by excess and repeated contempt for the J law of God, destroyed the refined sensibilities inherited in-herited or acquired in childhood. Faith in life beyond be-yond the grave, in justice, chastity and the judgment judg-ment to come, is as dead as in the Roman Felix who would not hear St. Paul when he spoke of the hereafter. here-after. In the habitual libertine, the spiritual and moral integrities of his human personality are controlled con-trolled and dominated by a perverted mentality and by animal passions which, fed by indulgence and pampered by concession, expand into a tyranny fierce' and dangerous to the man himself and to his fellow man. Conscience which, in the beginning, was the whisper of God to the soul, abandons the lustful man and in time he becomes a moral derelict dere-lict and a moral "tramp." In the soul of such a man there is no place for pure love, in the soil of ' such a soul there grows only the noxious weeds of impure desires on which the body feeds. The Greeks of Homer's time understood this when they created the Minotaur, a foul and lustful monster, that fed on virgin's flesh. It is pitiful, beyond the power of expression, to reflect that the very thoughts of the dead man when alive his protestations of burning burn-ing love, his broken promises, his violated pledges, his ardent terms of endearment, his passionate plcadings.-and even "the unlawful issue that their loves hath made between them" should live to blast his memory. Whatever of good the unhappy man did in his time, what redeeming attributes were his when in the flesh, the public which read these let- ten will probably never know, so true is it that "the evil which men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones." The Whites, the Browns, the Thaws, what a triad of failures, of moral wrecks and social castaways. |
