The Evansville Daily Journal

Moral of the Ward Tragedy.

This exciting tragic event which has just transpired, it is to be hoped in all its parts, seems likely to form an epoch of no inconsiderable moment in the history of social life, as well as in the annals of criminal jurisprudence.

The names of Matt. Ward, the Hardin Jury and Wm. H. G. Butler are now registered upon the public mind, and associated with considerations of the highest magnitude that can affect the sacredness of social and civil rights, or the safety of human life. We need not reiterate the melancholy facts which swell this event into the importance which necessarily attaches to it. They are all before the world, and the world blushes to give them a place in its history. The human heart quails in disgust to treasure their mournful record in its memory. Nevertheless they are henceforth to drape our historic page in mourning, and be entered upon our judicial records.

The baser passions of human nature spent their wanton wrath upon their innocent victim, and outraged humanity and its laws. Still further are humanity and its protective edicts offended and disgraced by the gratuitous judicial sanction of the highest offence known to the laws of God or man. The trial by jury, the boasted invention of human wisdom and progress, has been basely prostituted, and instead of fulfilling its high mission as the conservator of peace and the dispenser of equal justice among men, it is made the apologist and excuser of vice and crime. Our neighbors in Kentucky feel the outrage and the disgrace which it entails perhaps more keenly than the public at large.

The great mass of the people of Kentucky are justly indignant that so foul a stigma should be fastened upon their social and civil character, by a few representatives of an ephemeral, self-exalted circle, who view honest and humble worth as their legitimate prey, upon whom to satiate their thirst for blood upon the least real or imaginary provocation. Kentucky sees clearly her unfortunate position, as the late universal expressions of indignation emphatically declare.

Her citizens see and know that an atrocious murder was committed in their midst—that one of their most estimable citizens was slain, and as they believe without shadow of cause. To these facts all must assent. The murderer himself, his parents and his warmest friends all agree to the killing, which the law of the land makes murder—soul, black and unmitigated murder!! The people of Kentucky have witnessed the humiliating spectacle of their ablest, and by them most honored citizens and statesmen descend from their high places in the council of the nation, to aid with their high talents and influence to defeat the ends of justice by the subornation of witnesses, bribing of jurors, and advocating known perjury with the most solemn asseverations, to screen a murderer from the just penalty which the law inflicts. Kentuckians exclaim at the results of such corruption "There is no law in Kentucky!!".

Shame to make such admission! And a worse disgrace that the criminal code of Kentucky has ever been so badly administered! The antecedents of Kentucky criminal law are bad; and the public sentiment which tolerates their existence and permitted them to rule in the recent case is even more criminal! But in the case under consideration. the law was not in fault. The case had to be tried and adjudicated without law, else justice would have triumphed, and the guilty murderer would have been punished—a haughty "pimp" of the fishy circle though he be.

Will not the scales fall from the eyes of the honest yeomanry of Kentucky at such a spectacle as this case presents? In vain will they ever look for an occasion, when justice, truth and humanity will call louder for vindication than now. And have they no correctives to apply? We have none to suggest—except to caution such men as Prof. Butler, honest, educated and christian men though they be, to have a care how they "discharge their duty," as their existence and all the dear relations in life may depend upon it.