Will Condemn Their Littleness

WILL CONDEMN THEIR LITTLENESS.

Gen. Miles has been something of thorn in the flesh of his superiors during his occupancy of the position of commander of the army of the United States. He has probably not been without faulting these matters, nor have his official superiors. The position he has been in has been one that has tried to distraction some of the best military men who have ever occupied it. Even Gen. Wm. T. Sherman could don't stand the flunkeyism of his intolerable environment. The hied of himself off to St. Louis to get rid of his intolerable surroundings. The fact is the place is one without power and has been used to humiliate great military men and place them in subordination to their military inferiors. Gen. Miles has been humiliated to such a degree that a man of his fighting qualities could not brook the treatment. Under his environment this veteran fighter became garrulous, and possibly insubordinate.

But that now when the time has arrived for him to retire under the age limit, it is surprising that he should be retired without one word of commendation for his long and really brilliant fighting record. this fact reflects no honor upon Secretary Root or the president himself. It shows these men too acrimonious to be fair, too narrow to be generous. If the only man concerned in all this was the man Corbin, little would be thought of this shabbiness, but the country had the right to expect less littleness from the president and his secretary of war. It is entirely safe to say that the country at large is ashamed of their littleness in this connection. From Gen. Miles' entrance into the army until he became its lieutenant general, at least, he served the country nobly and well, and for these services broader men than Root and Roosevelt would have found some word of commendation, no matter what their relations with him may have been during the period of his residence in Washington.

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The basis on which Gov. Bliss intimates that he may pardon or parole Frank C. Andrews appears to ignore entirely the interest of the public in the matter. If he paroles or pardons him, he says, it will be because those who lost their money in the bank failure sign a petition for his release. But has society no interest in the case? Were the depositors in the bank the only people wronged by Frank C. Andrews' Napoleonic financial operations? How about his open and shameless violation of all law relative to safeguarding banking business? Besides, the view the governor seems to take of this matter would seem to make the pardon or parole of any criminal dependent upon the number of signatures the friends of the convict can secure to a petition for his release. This view would make the time of the incarceration of a convict depend upon the friends he has outside rather than upon the crime committed. In fact, if fully carried out, it would make imprisonment for crime a practical impossibility when the criminal has powerful friends outside. It would practically reduce the punishment that could be inflicted upon a man with  powerful connections and money to some kind of pecuniary settlement. This view of punishment for crime ignores society's interest in the punishment of criminals.