Sierra County Advocate

THE BRUTALITY OF SCIENCE
Albuquerque Times.

Among the disgusting particulars of the carving up of Carlyle Harris' body that newspaper correspondents have fairly reveled in is this ghoulish statement: "Harris' skull, which had been sawed off by Drs. Sheehan and Pyne, was used to dip the fluid from the thorax to a pail on the floor." Either correspondents should be rigidly excluded from such barbaric exhibitions, or doctors should be compelled, by the law, to be humanely decent. No matter what the young man's crimes may have been, there was no demand from science that his charred body should be hacked and gauged and disfigured to be sent back to his poor mother. That mother who proudly said to him while her heart was breaking, "I thanked God I was Carlyle Harris' mother and I could say what few mothers can say, that in his twenty-three years of life he had not given me one unkind word or ever disobeyed an expressed command. We agreed that God's word must be best." It was the refinement of cruelty to send back her boy to her with the mark of the surgeon's knife upon him. Bad he may have been, but 1760 volts atoned for all the wrongs he had ever done, and to his mother he was still a sinless, loving, dutiful child. When justice was appeased, science might have withheld her soulless hand and sent him back to the brave, proud heart that never doubted him, with his boyish beauty undefiled.