The Carson Daily Appeal

RUMORED KILLING OF JAMES FISK BY JOHN MORRISSEY.

The New York Tribune of Jan. 26th thus refers to and comments upon a late rumor:

On Saturday afternoon there ran through the town a wild rumor of a fresh atrocity, a rumor coming no one knew whence, but established in the mouths of a thousand self-constituted witnesses. It declared that James Fisk, stock gambler, had been shot in the street by John Morrissey, ex-prize fighter, proprietor of faro banks, and member of Congress. It declared furthermore, that Fisk had cheated Morrissey out of large sums of money in the late gold excitement, that Morrissey had threatened to punish him publicly unless he made restitution, and that the killing was as deliberate as the threat of public chastisement had been.

Two hours later the whole story proved a canard, hatched, probably, by some unscrupulous reporter.

But the tale has a moral. Commonly a murderer so shocks the moral sense of the community by the cowardice and the malignity of his act that public sentiment is disposed to defend, if not to vindicate, the victim so brutally deprived of the opportunity of self-defense. Yet when this report was at its strongest the business world received it with a mild acquiescence in the fitness of the agent to his horrible work, if not with positive and expressed satisfaction. Nobody seemed horror-stricken, nobody cried out for retaliation in blood. No doubt this apathy or carelessness was due in part to the convocation of horrors which has of late sickened, disgusted, or appalled the community, one woe treading upon another's heels so fast they followed.

But an explanation beyond this lies in the feeling of the public that James Fisk is a man whose hand is against every man's; in the feeling of the public that a man who made sport of common honesty, of truth, of decency, in his own life and in his dealings with men, living really an outlaw, in some sort sanctified the claims of society upon him in dying the death of an outlaw. It is a test of the hollowness of the 'Success' which his man had achieved that nobody cared for him living, and nobody mourned him dead. It is a most startling commentary on the recklessness of public sentiment and the mockery of justice which pervade the times that his own world was neither shocked nor surprised.