A singular phenomenon of the time was the immunity of criminal women.
Among the Americans woman held a place unique in the history of nations.
If not actually worshiped as a deity, as some historians, among them the
great Sagab-Joffoy, have affirmed, she was at least regarded with feelings
of veneration which the modern mind has a difficulty in comprehending.
Some degree of compassion for her mental inferiority, some degree of
forbearance toward her infirmities of temper, some degree of immunity for
the offenses which these peculiarities entail--these are common to all
peoples above the grade of barbarians. In ancient America these chivalrous
sentiments found open and lawful expression only in relieving woman of the
burden of participation in political and military service; the laws gave
her no express exemption from responsibility for crime. When she murdered,
she was arrested; when arrested, brought to trial--though the origin and
meaning of those observances are not now known. Gunkux, whose researches
into the jurisprudence of antiquity enable him to speak with commanding
authority of many things, gives us here nothing better than the conjecture
that the trial of women for murder, in the nineteenth century and a part
of the twentieth, was the survival of an earlier custom of actually
convicting and punishing them, but it seems extremely improbable that a
people that once put its female assassins to death would ever have
relinquished the obvious advantages of the practice while retaining with
purposeless tenacity some of its costly preliminary forms. Whatever may
have been the reason, the custom was observed with all the gravity of a
serious intention. Gunkux professes knowledge of one or two instances (he
does not name his authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and
sentence, and adds that the mischievous sentimentalists who had always
lent themselves to the solemn jest by protestations of great
_vraisemblance_ against "the judicial killing of women," became really
alarmed and filled the land with their lamentations. Among the phenomena