Untitled article by Editor

Untitled article

Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 8, 1894

THE Christian Advocate and the Examiner, two religious weeklies of this city are before us, both bearing date of February 1. The Advocate complains that lynchings are becoming common in the North; and the Examiner finds fault because the governor of Florida did not override the order of the courts of that State and prevent the recent prize fight. We have nothing but detestation for prize fights. They are disgraceful and degrading; but is their influence as pernicious and as far-reaching as would be the example of a governor himself overriding the law and usurping powers not given him by the laws which he is sworn to uphold and to administer? Certainly not; and yet the Examiner says of such cases:—

What a State needs is a governor of the Andrew Jackson type who is capable of making and enforcing his own laws for about fifteen minutes. If Governor Mitchell had had the nerve to send his militia to the spot, arrest the fighters in the act and land them in jail, it would go hard with the State of Florida if its lawyers could not afterwards find law enough to justify his action.

No State needs anything of the kind. Prize fights are evil, and it is anything but creditable to our civilization that public exhibitions of that kind are possible; but better a thousand acts of brutality than one of usurpation. Cannot the religious press see that in advocating usurpation by the State it is inciting mob violence by the people? If executive officers may make law in emergencies, what wonder if the people do the same thing when by some startling crime their feelings are outraged.