and sustained by public opinion, have actually deprived every adult male
American of the right to live. If the death of any man is desired by any
woman for any reason he is without protection. She has only to kill him
and say that he wronged or insulted her. Certain almost incredible recent
instances prove that no woman is too base for immunity, no crime against
life sufficiently rich in all the elements of depravity to compel a
conviction of the assassin, or, if she is convicted and sentenced, her
punishment by the public executioner."

In this interesting fragment, quoted by Bogul in his "History of an
Extinct Civilization," we learn something of the shame and peril of
American citizenship under institutions which, not having run their
foreordained course to the unhappy end, were still in some degree
supportable. What these institutions became afterward is a familiar story.
It is true that the law of trial by jury was repealed. It had broken down,
but not until it had sapped the whole nation's respect for all law, for
all forms of authority, for order and private virtues. The people whose
rude forefathers in another land it had served roughly to protect against
their tyrants, it had lamentably failed to protect against themselves, and
when in madness they swept it away, it was not as one renouncing an error,
but as one impatient of the truth which the error is still believed to
contain. They flung it away, not as an ineffectual restraint, but as a
restraint; not because it was no longer an instrument of justice for the
determination of truth, but because they feared that it might again become
such. In brief, trial by jury was abolished only when it had provoked
anarchy.

Before turning to another phase of this ancient civilization I cannot
forbear to relate, after the learned and ingenious Gunkux, the only known
instance of a public irony expressing itself in the sculptor's noble art.