Book Description

Excerpt from The Standard-Bearers: True Stories of Heroes of Law and Order In the foreword of an earlier book, Justice to All, I have told the story of the dastardly murder and heroic death of Samuel Howell, carpenter, ambushed by robbers on a lonely country road in the State of New York. In the book itself I have tried to tell the story, equally heroic, of the Pennsylvania State Police. The slaying of that fine young American laboring man, too true of heart to buy his life with his honor, unmasked once more an old and shameful fact - that the Empire State connived at such tragedies - accepted them without feeling, without action, and without remark. The trade of robber and murderer, so long as exercised upon the poor, was practically a snug and safe employment in rural New York. The rich, like lords of feudal castles, lived in their big houses surrounded by their own garrisons of servants and guards. But those of less estate, the farmers, the laborers, the women and girl-children in small isolated homes, or traversing lonely roads as perforce they must, - in a word, all the scattered population of the countryside, - were stolidly ignored by the one power morally responsible for their safety and their peace. The very government that enacted the laws treated its own enactments as "scraps of paper." The criminal world, in consequence, remained at perfect liberty to do the same. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.