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Show THE TRAGEDY AT ST. ELIZABETH'S. The Denver Republican, commenting on the horrible tragedy in Denver, writes: . Unspeakably shocking to a community comes a crime like that committed within St. Elizabeth's sacred precincts. It was. so inexcusable, so wholly without provocation, that the mind is . staggered. One asks, how could it be; why should it? What j has society done, or failed in doing that there should be within it one holding so little regard for, the sacredness of life that he could strike down ministering priest against whom he had no personal per-sonal feeling. In whatever form it comes, assassination convicts con-victs the human race of its kinship with the brute creation, proves civilization only a little removed from savagery. Committed in a cause which in the code of man demands retaliation, it may sometimes some-times be glossed with that charity which surrender to the baser passions called into play, but Guaran-accra Guaran-accra Guinseppe, so far as knowledge of his motive mo-tive goes, killed for no other reason than that to him the priesthood had become offensive and his heart was filled with murder. It is appalling to know that such a thing could happen under any circumstances; that one holding a Grudge against a class in general could find it possible to shoot down any representative of that class he chanced to encounter. Far more terrible it seems that he should have picked to mark with that unnatural hatred an unoffending priest who had come to offer him churchly consolation and give him pardon for his sins. Surely the anarchist reached the climax of his hatred of society in discharging dis-charging his murderous weapon into the heart of the good Father Leo. More despicable expression for that hatred he scarcely could have found. Against such a crime the ordinary preventive pleasures of society stand helpless. Punishment is ineffective; society cannot hate in'turn, it can only remove such a man. Man makes his laws to cover the transgressions of those like . himself , presuming presum-ing that they will be actuated by the same motives, governed by the satne passions, the same inherent human instincts, but the Anarchist who shoots down from motives that the average man cannot find within his own concept, passes all bounds and leaves man groping to understand. In some way society has failed to instil in such a member the least conception of man's duty to man and in return re-turn finds itself stunned by his act. It is a -rase in which itself is left gasping that heart plea of him whom society made a martyr because it could not .understand: "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do." So he prayed for society then, so society now must pray for its Guinseppes. Society is the sum of the average; it has no conception for the extremes, neither for the abnormally good as he was good, nor the abnormally vicious", as are those who kill because their hearts are evil. It is from some failure fail-ure of its own it must protect itself. |