murder are convicted than of men charged with the same
offence. To read the newspapers one would suppose that the
mere fact that the defendant was a female instantly paralyzed
the minds of the jury and reduced them to a state of
imbecility. The inevitable result of this must be to
encourage lawlessness among the lower orders of women and to
lead them to look upon arrest as a mere formality without
ultimate significance. The writer recalls trying for murder a
negress who had shot her lover not long after the discharge of
a notorious female defendant in a recent spectacular trial in
New York. When asked why she had killed him she replied:

"Oh, Nan Patterson did it and got off."

This is not offered as a reflection upon the failure of the
jury to reach a verdict in the Patterson case, but as an
illuminating illustration of the concrete and immediate effect
of all actual or supposed failures of justice.

A belief that the course of criminal justice is slow and
uncertain, that the chances are all in favor of the
defendant, and that he has but to resort to technicalities
to secure not only indefinite delay but generally ultimate
freedom, breeds an indifference amounting almost to arrogance
among law-breakers, powerful and otherwise, and a painful yet
hopeless conviction among honest men that nothing can prevent
the wicked from flourishing. Honesty seems no longer even a
good policy, and the young business man resorts to sharp
practices to get ahead of his unscrupulous competitor. In
some localities the uncertainty and delay attendant upon the