The New England Weekly Review

Trial for Rape at Salem.

The Boston papers contain a full account of the trial of Moses Goodhue, of Gloucester, Mass., for the crime of committing a rape upon the person of his own daughter, a girl of seventeen years of age. The particulars of the testimony, produced on trial, are too disgusting and horrible to spread before the public, and only exhibit the depths of degradation into which human nature may be plunged. The fact of carnal knowledge, at seven different periods, were fully sworn to by the daughter, but the fact of her not having made sufficient forcible physical resistance on the occasion of the first attempt upon her virtue, which, according to her testimony was witnessed by her own mother, who was subdued into silence, was not sufficiently proved to the Jury to cause them to convict the criminal father of rape.—They, however, found him guilty of incest, and he was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in the Penitentiary, the full extent of the law.

What a revolting case of human depravity! Who can believe that the annals of history in this enlightened age could possibly be blackened by a record of such a horrible, such a disgusting crime, and that too, occurring in a part of our country where education and intelligence are so universally diffused, and religious principles so widely inculcated!