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ITEARST’K SUNDAY AMERICAN, ATLANTA, HA., SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 1013. 3 A HARRY THAW AND SOME OF THOSE O LL 3 AND AGAINST 1 HIM ir 4 ' i i m MRS. MARY COPLEY THAW. WILLIAM TRAVERS JEROME. HARRY K. THAW. MRS. EVELYN NESBIT THAW. DELPHIN M. DELMAS. ’ f ‘He’s as Good as on His Way to Mat teawan,’ Declares Nemesis of Mil lionaire Fugitive, Who Is Fighting to Stay in Canadian Jail. Thaw Life Drama Bares Every Human Passion •{•••{• ^••4* 4 , *4* 4**4* 4**4* 4**4* 4**4* Nation's Interest in His Case Is Unflagging The People Hail Thaw as Public Benefactor, Says Dorothy Dix “Popular sympathy has always been with Thaw, even in New York, and it is interesting to note that, in his present at tempt to escape from Matteawan, practically everyone that discusses it expresses the hope that he will' succeed in his ef forts to get free. “For underneath it all is the feeling that Thaw committed a crime that needed to be committed; that he rid the world of a man who was a monster of vice and an influence of evil; whose power was beyond computing, and who preyed on de fenseless young girls. This man’s social and professional posi tion, and the wealth of the men who were his associates, put him almost beyond the reach of the law. “Probably only such a bullet as Thaw’s could have stopped his iniquitous career, and for that reason the man in the streets and the woman in the home have never udge Thaw harshly and have always felt that he was unduly punished. Which isn’t law, nor logic, but is very human.” -DOROTHY DIX. SHERBROOKE, QUEBEC, Aug. 30. Harry K. Thaw, for the first time since he crossed the border into Can ada, lost a skirmish to-day in the battle which must result either in his release or his deportation. Attorneys representing: the Cana dian Government strained every point possible in the endeavor to put Thaw Into the hands of the immigration au thorities for deportation to-night. They did not succeed in this, bat they did succeed in strategy whi~n caught the defense unprepared, when Constable Boudereau, of Quebec, was given a writ of habeas corpus, re turnable Tuesday. The constable is in the position of demanding the liberty of the man he arrested a r . Canadian soil. Lawyer Takes Special Train. C. D. White and H. B. Frazer, Thaw's barristers here, regard the sit uation as so menacing that they tele graphed J. N. Greensfield, an asso ciate in the case, to come at once from Montreal. He hired a special train and set out with the avowed in tention of breaking all speed records for the 100 miles to Sherbrooke. Jerome was jubilant. “Harry is just as good as cn the way to Matteawan now,” h? said. The fight opened to-day when Tnaw did not appear in court in answer to a writ of habeas corpu3 returnab.e at 10 o’clock this morning. As the upshot of the ^arlv argu ments came the Bou iereau wrH— habeas corpus writ No. 3—in rhe case. Repulsed at first by its own attack, the State of New York was com pelled to wait for the famous prisoner to make some move which will permit them to take counter ac tion and again place him in Mattea wan Asylum, from which he so dra matically escaped more than a week ago. Thaw occupies just as paradoxical a position. In his fight to become a free man he Is fighting every move to get him out of Jail. Here Is the situation. The State of New York preferred criminal charges of conspiracy against Thaw. On this charge he was arrested soon after he bad crossed the New Hampshire State line into Canada. His attorneys first sought hi? re- leaw from prison on a writ of habeas corpus. The date for arguing the ap plication for the writ was 9et. Thaw Called an Undesirable. In the meantime representatives of the State of New York sought Thaw's deportation into New York by the immigration authorities. These au thorities held that Thaw is an un desirable citizen and should be de ported. This ruling meant that if Thaw were to win his fight for freedom on the habeas corpus writ he would lose his fight for freedom by being deport ed into the United States and imme diately rearrested. Obviously, Thaw’s only hope for freedom was to stay in jail. His attorneys immediately made application for withdrawal of the ap plication for the writ of habeas cor pus. The State of New York imme diately straggled to have the original application granted and Thaw made free. State Loses First Tilt. In the first legal skirmish before Judge Globensky. before whom the writ was pending, was won by Thaw on all three points at issue. These were: 1. New York State was denied the right to be a party tc the proceedings in court. 2. Counsel for the State failed in their efforts to have Thaw arraigned before a magistrate, and the commit ment on which he was held quashed, which would have released him to the immigration authorities. 3. The court granted the plea of Thaw’s counsel for a discontinuance of the writ of habeas corpus, which might have brought about his release. This remedied the stragetic blunder that his counsel had made in making | the original application for writ of j habeas corpus. * But Thaw’s principal victory was in his realization that Canadian pub lic sentiment is with him and he i? assured of a fair trial and probable acquittal if the charges of conspiracy are ever brought to trial. If he is ac quitted on that charge, it is held by his counsel that his legal status in Canada will be fixed and he can not be deported as an undesirable. Prisoner Given Ovation. As soon as the crowd that packed the courtroom saw that the court had ruled in favor of Stanford Whites slayer there was a tremendous dem onstration in his favor. He was cheered all the way back to the jail and was made to realize that if he gets a jury trial in Canada chances of his success are exceedingly bright William Travers Jerome, his old prosecutor, who is repre. c *»nting New York State as special counsel, has now gone to Quebec, where he will make every effort to have the magis trate who committed Thaw, Alexis Dupuis, of Coaticook. quash the com mitment. If he succeeds in this Thaw will b*» in jail with no charge against him and, of course, will have to be re leased . From Mansion to Lone ly Farmhouse, Every Development Is Watched With Breath less Interest. By DOROTHY DIX. No other murder case in the whole history of the world has been so much written about, so much read about, so much discussed as the Thaw case. If all that has been printed about it were spread out upon the earth, it would blanket the United States from Canada to the Gulf, and from the At lantic to the Pacific Ocean. And every printed word of it all has been eagerly devoured, not only by people to whom their dally news- paper sensation is as necessary as pepper and salt In their food, but by quiet, conservative folk who as a rule religiously skip all accounts of mur ders and scandals in their papers and confine their attention to the tariff and the editorials. But there was something in the Thaw case that took hold of the pop ular imagination and stirred the dull est fancy so that the remotest ham lets and the loneliest farmhouses were just as much interested in it as was Broadway. Every move in it was fol lowed with the breathless interest with which an audience watches a grip ping melodrama, and, no matter what the real merits of the case are, or what the law, it is idle to deny that popular sympathy went with Thaw. Thaw Appears as a Hero. In New York w r e were close to the magnitude of the crime, and we knew a few things about Harry Thaw that did not seem to make him just the ideal avenger of youth and innocence. Also there were circumstances con nected with Evelyn’s past history that dimmed her halo as a victim of man’s depravity, but away from New York these slight blurs on the picture were not perceived. Harry Thaw was the noble hero who rescued the persecuted heroine land slew' the despoiler of virtue, and most people hoped that the law' would deal leniently with him. He killed to avenge the woman he loved—his wife —and that theory of justifiable homi cide still goes in the South and West As a matter of fact, popular sym pathy has always been with Thaw, even in New % York, and it is interest ing to note that, in his present at tempt to escape from Matteaw’an, practically everyone that discusses it expresses the hope that he will suc ceed in his efforts to get free. General Interest Not Abated. For underneath it all is the feeling that Thaw committed a crime that needed to be committed, that he rid the world of a man who was a mon ster of vice and an Influence for evil whose power was beyond computing, and who had preyed on defenseless young girls. This man’s social and professional position and the wealth of the men who were his associates put him almost beyond the reach of the law. Probably only such a bullet as Thaw’s could have stopped his iniqui tous career, and for that reason the man in the street and the woman in the home have never judged Thaw hardly, and have always felt that he was unduly punished—which isn’t law nor logic, but is very human. Nor has the general interest in the Thaw case abated, although it is now seven years and more since Thaw shot Stanford White dead in Madison Square Garden. Thousands go night ly to see Evelyn Nesbit do a foolish little dance on a roof garden simply because she was the heroine of that scandal, and millions of readers are watching Thaw’s attempt to escape from Matteawan with an interest they are not bestowing upon what Huerta is doing in Mexico, or (’(ingress is doing to them in Washington. Drama Held Every Passion. This undying interest in the Thaw case is easily explained in many ways. For one thing, it was a groat human drama that swept every chord of emotion. It had in it love, and jealousy, and bitter hate and re venge, every passion that sways the heart. Moreover, it went back to the very foundation stone of romance, and told the tale, in real life, that has been the basic idea of every novel from Pamela down to William Dean Howells. Its heroine was the poor, pretty country girl who comes to the gre<t city to seek her fortune, and whose beauty is her undoing. She meets with the rich villain, who substitutes silks and satins for her homespun, who plays his knowledge of the world against her unsophistication, and so beguiles her into the primrose path. Then comes the rich young prince, who falls In love with her, who mag nanimously marries her in spite r f her past, and who takes her by the hand and leads her to his splendid home and his white-haired old moth er, w'ho, after having at first fran tically opposed the marriage, finally consents, and bestows upon them her blessing. Romance in Real Life. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t sat up nights to follow some novel with exactly that plot. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t shed tears over such a play on the stag'\ a^d hissed the vil lain, and applauded the noble hero, and felt that when the hero shot down the dark-browed villain he was doing a praiseworthy act for which he de served a Carnegie medal. And here was the story in reality. Here was the romance In actual life Here was the play being played out by the living people, not the mum mers on a stage. No wonder that the Thaw case interested the general pub lic! Another reason was because of the importance of the people concerned in it. In one of the charming come dies that Sol Smith Russell used to play there was a scene In which he, starving himself, told stories to make two hungry little children forget their misery. “What shall I tell you about?” he asked. “Tell us about rich people,” replied the poverty-stricken little creat ires Tale Had Good Background. So say we all. We like to hear of the doings of the rich and great, and we like to read of millionaires’ af fairs just as we prefer to peruse nov els in which the characters are dukes and duchesses rather than scrubwom en and longshoremen. The Thaws’ millions gave a sort of aureate backg>'ouqd to the story. Be sides which, they were personally in teresting. There was his old mother, white-haired, haughty, her oroud head bowed to meet th.s agonizing experi ence—the greatest that any mother can possibly suffer—that of seeing her idolized son, his hands red with L'ood, standing in the shadow of the elec tric chair, fightino f, his life. There were his sisters, Mrs. Car negie, married to a nephew of Andrew Carnegie, and so adding other mil lions and other prestige to the Thaw millions and prestige. There was the Countess of Yarmouth, another sister, the shadow of her mad marriage to a discredited and fortune-hunting Eng lish peer already darkening about her. There were brothers who came and went during the trial, and always Roger O’Mara, grim mouthed, silent as the Sphinx, forever hovering in the shadow of the Thaw family. The Three Vital Figures. About all there were the three vital figures in the case. First the ghost of Stanford White, all the more interesting because it was so intangible 4t left a million things to the imagination—an evil ghost that might have come from the pit itself, so black and sinister were the things attributed to it. FYom the shadows from which it was evoked came also lurid pictures of unmentionable orgies taking place amid scenes of indescribable beauty and splendor. They were scenes such as filled the pages of Ouida, and that ravish the fancy. Then there was Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, marvelously beautiful, with her story of injured innocence to make the very angels weep—a story that gained credence from her wist ful little child’s face. Never was there a more lovely heroine, never a sadder tale or one that went straight- er to the heart of every honest man and woman. That such experiences should befall one so young and ten der drew tears from every eye— tears that had to be wiped away sur reptitiously, so that we wouldn’t miss a single word of her revelations. Escapades Startle the Nation. And there was Harry Thaw him self, a perfect type of the gilded youth, who make history up and down the tenderloin. The country al ready rang with a thousand stories. some true, some false, of his es capades—of his givieg $50,000 beauty dinners to the demi-mondaines of Eu rope, of his shooting up cafes just for fun, of his hard-headed old father having made a frantic effort to save him by cutting down his al lowance, and of his fond mother hav ing circumvented the plan by supply ing him with money from her own deep purse. Other features of interest v ere the lawyers, Dan O’Reilly, fresh from the l’atterson case; Clifford Hartridge, Gleason, Delmas. brought from the Pacific Coast because of his golden tongue and posing about in Napoleon ic attitudes; Martin Eittleton, alert, the iron hand in the silken glove, the only man who has ever been able to control Thaw at all. Question of Sanity Absorbing. And last, but not least, one of the reasons for the undying interest in the Thaw case is the still unsolved query whether he is san e or insane. It is like the conundrum of the lady or the tiger, and each person has a perfectly good opinion on It which he can substantiate with perfectly good arguments. Half a dozen alienists, eminent and respected in their professions, most of them the authors of books on mental diseases, many of them in charge of institutions for the insane, swear that Thaw is a dangerous lu natic. An equal number of other alienists, also authors of books on mental diseases and in charge of other insane asylums, swear that he is perfectly sane. When doctors dis agree what is the layman to do but argue about It? And so, for a hundred and one reasons, the interest in the Thaw case goes on and will continue to go on for Heaven knows how long. It is the great continued story of real life in which our interest never flags, for none of us knows what is coming next, nor what the real end will be. NOW IS THE TIME TO RE DECORATE YOUR HOME This work can be intrusted to FEIDDELL BROS.’ interior decorating department and you will find the transformation of your home exactly as you would have it. FRIDDELL BROS, is universally asknowledged to b< the best equipped institution in the entire South in the field of interior decoration. You are cordially invited to visit our establishment to see the newest and most approved offerings in wall-cover ings (especially our exclusive Aeroehrome wall decora tions). Our line is complete in every respect. Nothing is lacking to give you the service that is consistent with the up-to-dateness of this firm. Our interior decorators are artists and are at your service to consult with you and to submit you sketches and suggestions upon your request. Our prices will stand the most critical comparison. 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