024 Page – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

Here is the translated text as follows:

PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN

To be sublimely ignorant of what the great dramatist has written about the comparative value of one's purse and good name is to treat a blackmailer as a person to be dealt with most tenderly—witness the mild sentences given to Cook and Mrs. Hirsch. Our national legislature has made it even easier for this class of blackmailers by enacting a law, which, as construed by our highest Court, allows a notorious prostitute who induces a boy of 17 to pay her fare on a steamboat, railroad, or streetcar to pose in the courts as a victim of white slavery. If the youth refuses to accede to her demands, she can have him sent to the penitentiary for a longer term than the average sentence given to a burglar, a footpad, or an assassin.

The six Spanish pirates who were hanged in the city of Boston (Pedro Gibert and others, p. 699) had stopped an American merchant vessel on the high seas and appropriated all the specie they found there. However, the merchantman returned safely to its home port, and no man, woman, or child lost their life. What a trifling offense this was compared to the crimes of German pirates who, in the past four years, have sent hundreds of peaceful vessels to the bottom of the sea and murdered thousands of innocent sailors, passengers, women, and children. Tried for their lives under admiralty law, Gibert and his associates had no defense. When, after the war, the German pirates are tried by the rules of international law, what defense will they be able to set up? International law is simply the unwritten and written law of the nations. It is the sum of those usages which civilized people have decided to be binding on them in their intercourse with one another, and it has its rules for times of war as well as for times of peace, just as the common law in England and America does.