MURDERS AND HOMICIDES..

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 96, 25 April 1907, Page 7

MURDERS AND HOMICIDES..

In a public address delivered in Chicago- on November 16th last Judge Kavahagh stated that 45:000 nrurdeis had been cooiniittcd in tlie United States during the last five years. Similar statistics were given on June 26th, 1905, by a much more prominent man, Mr Taft, Secretary of War, and previously a United States circuit Judge. Mr Taft, addressing the Yale Law School on " The Administration of Criminal Law," said that since 1885 there had been in that country 131,951 murders and homicides, and only 2286 executions. The number of murders tad increased from 1808 in ISB6 to 8482 in 1904, but the increase in executions during that period was only from 108 to 116. The real meaning of such figures is best conveyed by such a startling comparison as that quoted by Bishop Greer at the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of New York in 1905. It had been stated, he said, that while the number of British soldiers who were killed or died of disease in the Boer was 22,000, the number of homicides in the United States during the same period was upwards of 31,000. A detailed comparison was made by Judge W. H. Thomas, of Alabama, in a paper read at the St. Louis Exposition Law Congress in 1904. He shov/ed that the homicides annually for every million of the population were as follows : —German Empire 4.85, England and Wales 10.15, France 14.22, Belgium 16, United States 129.5.