The Defeat of Justice by Prof. George W. Rine

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Oct 14, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 11.

The Defeat of Justice

By Prof. George W. Rine

IN the fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth chapters of Isaiah is recorded a very instructive and remarkable line of prophecy. It is replete with striking last-day predictions, precious promises, and startling warnings. That it is primarily a latter-day prophecy is shown to be absolutely certain by what is foretold regarding the Redeemer, as recorded in verses 17 to 20 of chapter 59. In verse 20, His second coming is prophetically promised in these unmistakable words: “The Redeemer shall come to Zion [His church], and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the Lord.” In verses 17 and 18, the Redeemer is represented as putting on the “garments of vengeance” for the purpose of repaying “fury” and “recompense” to His enemies.

The Scriptures teach repeatedly that our Lord will not put on the “garments of vengeance” until He will have put off His robe of mercy, His garments of salvation. Not till the Gospel shall have completed its work of reclaiming sinners, will Christ arise to punish irreclaimable sinners. Hence this prophecy has to do essentially with conditions that obtain in the world when the coming of the Redeemer to Zion is imminent.

One of the phenomena that are strikingly prevalent in these last days is the miscarriage of justice. Verses 14 and 15 of chapter 59 read as follows: “Judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity can not enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgment [justice].”

That justice does miscarry in our day is a fact that has long been proclaimed from the housetops by orators and journalists. Every person who observes knows for himself that the foregoing prophecy is to-day notoriously fulfilled.

Delay of the Punishment.

The editor of the Pacific Unitarian wrote in the May number of that journal: “One of the most trying situations of the present time in this country is the law’s delay, and the defeat of justice through the fine-spun technicalities that are an offense to the average layman. When the punishment of the guilty rich who can command the services of shrewd and conscienceless lawyers seems practically impossible, we are drifting into a dangerous shore, and shipwreck is inevitable.”

The same writer tells his readers that common sense no longer holds sway in the interpretation and application of the law in our courts. The highest courts repeatedly acquit men of crimes that they are proved to be guilty of, simply because of some trivial defect in the pleadings. “It seems absurd,” he continues, “that a mayor who has committed crime should escape punishment because the indictment upon which he was tried did not aver that he was a mayor.”

In an article recently contributed to the London Chronicle, Mr. Sydney Brooks adduces indubitable evidence that, in America, there has come about the “complete breakdown of criminal law.” He remarks that a verdict against the prisoner at the bar is one thing: “carrying it out is quite another.” He declares that if a man who “is wealthy has friends, social influence, and the pick of the lawyers,” has committed “wilful murder, the machinery for making him or any American in his position pay the penalty of his crime simply does not exist.”

Mr. Brooks avers that any American who can afford to engage a lawyer “may commit murder with almost complete impunity. The odds are rather over seventy to one against his being executed.” He asserts that he is not speaking at random, but is really summarizing the criminal statistics of the last twenty years. “They make appalling reading,” he declares. These statistics show that in the last two decades the commission of murder has increased fivefold, but that the number of executions during the same period has remained stationary—less than 120 per annum for an average of 9,000 murders.

One of the phenomena that are strikingly justice is, as Mr. Brooks shows, the sinister influence of the press. He says: “The press is permitted to flout judicial decency and fair play, to rouse passions, confuse issues, stimulate the utmost partiality of sentiment, and create the conditions that are least favorable to the dispensation of justice, without a word either of official or popular protest.”

It is through a corrupt press, chiefly, that demagogs and the enemies of impartial justice appeal to the fears and sentimentalities of jurymen, confuse their sense of justice and honor, and often make moral cowards of them.

Partiality of the Law.

Even the Hon. William H. Taft, not long ago, alleged: “The administration of criminal law in all the states in the Union is a disgrace to our civilization.”

As a nation we have a peculiar dislike to punish severely criminals of more than ordinary social standing who have respectable friends. An illustration of this fact was given a few years ago in a notable case in New York City. The officers of a national bank had permitted their institution to be wrecked by certifying, and so guaranteeing, the checks of a firm of stock-brokers for enormous sums when the brokers had no money deposited in the bank. This was expressly forbidden, and made a criminal offense, by the national banking law. The brokers failed. The bank was compelled to close its doors in consequence. The president of the bank was indicted. A jury was impaneled to try him; he pleaded guilty. His counsel urged, as a reason for clemency, that the violation of this statute was a habit of the New York banks in the Wall Street district, and that if the ruined bank had not followed this law-breaking custom of its competitors, the stock-brokers would have withdrawn their account. The plea was successful. Imagine a common thief urging a plea for clemency based on the general business habits of his criminal brethren! Do all classes of the people any longer stand upon an equality before our courts of justice(!)?

It is admitted by all publicists that there is a class of crimes that, almost uniformly, go unpunished. These crimes, roughly speaking, are crimes of fraud, perpetrated, as a rule, upon the general public: fraud in obtaining credit by falsehood; fraud in concealing and conveying property to avoid the just demands of creditors; fraud in the substitution and adulteration of goods; fraud in bribing public officials, and corporations doing business as common carriers; fraud in the promotion, organization, and inflation of stock corporations with a view to selling worthless stocks to unsuspecting investors.

The shrewd, polished perpetrators of these multifarious frauds are rarely indicted, much less convicted and punished.

Wall Street Freebooters.

Since 1899, Wall Street brokers have sold to the gullible people of America nearly three billion dollars’ worth of absolutely worthless “industrial” stock. Yet not one of these opulent, Titanic freebooters of the stock mart has ever been whipped of Justice.

Prof. Edward A. Ross writes piquantly: “Constituted authorities are settling and crumbling; they threaten to become as obsolete for defense as have the stone walls of medieval cities. In twenty-two years we have lynched over thirty-three hundred persons as against about twenty-six hundred legally executed. . . . Like a stupid, flushed giant at bay, the public heeds the little overt offender more than the big covert offender. It resents a pin-prick more than a blow at the heart.”

Must not every candid reader admit that the latter-day prophecies cited at the beginning of this article are strikingly fulfilled in these opening years of the twentieth century? Must we not conclude that we are rapidly approaching that momentous day when He shall come who “will judge the world in RIGHTEOUSNESS”? Of Him it is written: “And His delight shall be in the fear of Jehovah; and He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither decide after the hearing of His ears; but with righteousness shall He judge the poor, and decide with EQUITY for the meek of the earth; and He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth; and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked.” Isa. 11: 3, 4, A.R.V.

Then, first of all, dear reader, let us make sure that we shall be numbered with “the meek of the earth,” to whom has been given the divine promise that they “shall inherit the earth”—that earth of which it is declared (verse 8) that it “shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.”