Human beings generally run true to form. Newspaper writers are saying that the matter of pardons and the innumerable pleas for executive interference are telling upon Governor Morrison. It is what was to have been expected.
When called to the Governor’s chair, most men have only a theoretical and very long range knowledge of the inexplicable thing which we call crime, and less of that mysterious creature which we call man. Our governors, like most other citizens, have a hazy idea that the conviction of a man of a serious crime ipso facto puts that creature out of the realm of humanity and sets him aside as something altogether different from the rest of us, a mere thing, to be moved about and handled and thought of as an inanimate object. A law has been violated. A man has been charged with the offense. The court has said that he is guilty. Why take more heed of the matter? Is not all this fuss about criminals mere sentiment, quite sufficient for a few emotional outbursts and the tears of a few women and children, but nothing to move a stern man highly sensitive to his responsibility as the chief executive charged with the duty of law enforcement? Governor Morrison seemed to be possessed of more of this attitude than the average governor, possibly because his predecessor was noted for his softness of heart which many blood and thunder citizens considered simpering weakness.
But alas, Mr. Morrison, to his credit be it said, is going the way of other governors. He has become disillusioned. He is finding that this thing of life and death, even though behind it is the decree of a court, is so weighty a matter that no hand can long hold it in its hollow without trembling. It is no longer the cut and dried formality which it has been before. It becomes a warm and human thing, no longer a lifeless theory, a cold problem in mathematics. It is human flesh and blood and heart and soul; human weakness and ignorance; human passion and regret—everything human—all the weaknesses and the passions and the illusions and sorrows that are common to mankind.
A Brutus at first, stern and devoted to a theoretical idea of justice, our Governor becomes sooner or later the weak Brutus who can no longer forget his love and humanity and think of the formula of the law. He strives, he halts, between he two phases of the matter, his old stern and ignorant idea of the position and his new and warm revelation of the weakness and passions of men; and he is torn and harassed beyond measure. He becomes more or less shell shocked in striving between the two, because he has not yet reached that full measure of revelation where he can see the whole thing as merely a hideous tragedy of the weakness of men. Tragedy in the culprit because he has either done a vile thing or been wrongfully accused of it, and tragedy in the impersonal and cold blooded thing which we call the State in that it thinks that it is getting somewhere in the elevation of all men by casting some out and to death.
The public is no less befuddled than the executive. Crime is to us a horrible thing which we hate. Not being able to deal with an intangible thing we at once begin to hate the man who has committed the crime or has been charged with its commission. But we hate him at a distance. We are not brought face to face with him as an erring human being begging for mercy and a new trial as the Governor is. Therefore, most of us go on regarding the Governor who is affected by his position as a sentimentalist.
Editorial from the Monroe Journal, page 4, May 4, 1923; Founded in 1894 by the present owners, G.M. Beasley and R.F. Beasley
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