National Affairs: Disgrace

"The administration of the criminal law in the U. S. is a disgrace to civilization." Thus said William Howard Taft in 1905, and thus he was quoted recently in a booklet issued by the Harvard Law School. William D. Guthrie, president of the New York City Bar Association, urged that the statement be deleted at once from the Harvard booklet. He had the right to be heard, because he had already contributed 10,000 to the Harvard Law School campaign to raise $5,000,000 for legal research, in which interest the booklet was published. Said he: "The phrase has done more harm than any other single utterance during the past 30 years." Wilson S. Powell, chairman of the committee that drew up the booklet, replied that the phrase would remain, that Mr. Taft had made similar remarks in 1908, 1909, 1918 and had not contradicted the phrase in 1923 when it was quoted publicly in his presence.

Meanwhile, last week, able law, yer Henry Lewis Stimson wrote to Mr. Guthrie that he could convince him of the truth of Mr. Taft's onetime statement by a ten-minute trip through the Criminal Courts, Building in Manhattan..