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Show AN UNPUNISHED CRIME. Munsey'8 Magazine for December opens with a ! powerful article on tho tialf-forgntten Slocum disaster, where-I by 1,020 lives ware lost in a burning I steamer on the lfth of June last. For I that awful sacrifice of human life, j mainly the lives ; of helpless women and little children, nobody has been punished, in person or in pure, ami, apparently nobody ever will be punished pun-ished In this : world, tays the Boston Pilot. ; - " The crime was committed in broad 1 day, on the peaceful waters of East i river. New-York,-and it was due to l criminal carelessness, which might as well have been deliberate maHce. The excursion boat steamed op its fatal voyage with a crew of untrained landsmen, lands-men, with boats, what there were of them, that could net be launched, with a fire hose which burst as soon as an attempt was made to use it. and worst of all wiih. so-called "lite-preservers'; tightly fastened by wire, which, when detached, only carried their haplfcea rwarers . to the bottom of the river! They were filled with cork dust, instead cf the solid buoyant article. Says the. writer: , . "A life-ring, whjeh should have been sufficiently buoyant to sustain a dozen people, was found by a diver at the bottom of the river, it was still grasped by four women, who had entrusted en-trusted their lives' to this treachercus sham and gone down with it as it sank. ! " 'That anchor was the finest anchor' I ever saw,' exclaimed the indignant coroner." Those treacherous "life-destroycrs,;' as a witness called them, had been examined ex-amined and passed by a government inspector. So had these others found after the wreck of the Portland steamer steam-er in Massachusetts bay a few years ago. Specimens of the latter bearing the steamer'n name on them were found afterward on the shore of Cape Ccd. They were filled with tule reeds, instead of the cork which a complaisant com-plaisant inspector., pretended to have seen in' ffiem. There is even worse criminality than that. We quote again: "As this article is. being written, the officers of the Nonpareil cork worka( Camden. N, J are being arraigned for inmerting bars of iron in the life-preservers which they manufacture. Mere than 2H0 cork blocks have been seised, every one of which contained a seven-inch seven-inch bar of cast iron. Iron is cheaper per pound than cork, and as the law roquires that evry life-preserver shall weigh six pounds, a few cents of blood- money can be -gained by -making up the weight with bara of iron. "Instead of supporting 'a dead weight of twenty-four pounds, as the law demands., de-mands., a test shows that one. of these iron life-preservers Will sustain no more than sixteen peunda -Any full-grown full-grown person who trusted to one of these death-decpys woujd sink under the waves like a. tone. Yet this ghastly ghast-ly fraud was discovered, not by a steamship inspector, but by an outside governmental department." As the writer well says, the destruction destruc-tion of 260 lives in the battleship Maine was enough to provoke a bitter and cc.9tly war: but the slaughter of over 1,000 by a less obvious "accident" is passed over And all but forgotten in half a year. I That no puniphment may ever touch any 'of the offenders ia a small thing, however, in comparison with the fact that we have no justification for believing be-lieving that a similar tragedy may not be enacted again at any time. Th-? burning of the Iroquois theatre at Chicago has not made managers more i careful, nor awakened any energy in those who are supposed to protect the public .fran such horrors?. A federal commission appointed "by President Roosevelt reported to him on Oct. 17, and he at once removed the guilty inspectors in-spectors from office; but the corporation corpora-tion which owned the steamer goes unpunished, and is even enabled to escape paying damages for the lives destroyed through it guilty greed. The federal commission inspected 268 vessels in New Yonc narour ai time and found one-third of them supplied sup-plied with defective life-preservers; one-quarter had defective hose, and more than half were without the proper prop-er quantity of hose. "Punish the gruilty. men," says the writer. "Fines are easily paid and charged to legal expenses. The only way to take the sneer from a guilty dlrector's lips, to give him a very little of the suffering that hs has caused to others, i to show him an open prison door," |