THE MURDER OF W. C. RASOR

The beating to death of William C. Rasor, retired business man, capitist, in his home in the village of Cross Hill, Laurens country, is set down to robbery, or possibly to a robbery, or possibly to a robber who also harbored a grudge, and that may be correct explanation of the immediate, the direct motive, of the crime, but the cause was larger.

That cause is that you South Carolinians permit the practice of murder and assasination in your state.

You allow YOUR laws to be flouted, and the man with murder in his heart expects that the shrewd tactics of a lawyer coupled with the dilatoriness of your statutes and their long drawn out interpretation by your judges, will, if he kill a man, save his life. At worst he looks forward to a prison sentence in all probability to be commuted by the governor.

More than that, YOUR juries, of whom YOU ARE, give the unending exhibition of needing appeals to sympathy and passion. If you try a man for killing another in a controversy, YOU, you South Carolinians, are as likely to try the merits of the quarrel as the case for murder – to acquit the killer because the slain man was a mere insulter with words.

Hence, all men disposed to take life have before them the spectacle that for every twenty or forty human lives taken by murder, scarcely one life of a murderer is exacted in return by the law and by the juries that find the facts.

Therefore, in Elloree, in Blaney, in Blackstock, Walterboro, Pomaria, Chapin, Harleyville, Lamar, Cowpens, Simpsonville, Yemassee, Allendale, Santue, Blenheim, Elliott, Monetta, Switzer, Cowards, Alcolu, Edmonds, Sliver Street, Coronaca, Aynor, Langley, Clover, in one hundred quiet villages like Cross Hill, the leading citizen like William C. Rasor is sixty times as likely to be beaten to death in his home as he would be if he lived in a Canadian, an English, a Scottish, and Australian villege.

Yes, sixty times.

So it is in your larger communities, even your cities. What care you of life? Where is one of them that cannot be wrought to insensate passion, often about trifles, so that men by scores go about armed to the teeth?

What care you, YOU SOUTH CAROLINIANS, about life?

How much “honor” was ever saved by laying a human creature dead in the dust over a wretched quarrel, over hard words?

HOw much usefulness in after life is left to the slayer?

Why waste discussion? Let us dismiss the irrelevant, the insignificant. No man’s life, good man, bad man, beggar man, thief, bootlegger or police officer, is in less than sixty times the danger that it would be in a civilized state that quickly, surely, punshies murderers, brave, gallant, “honorable” murderers as well as lowly and ignorant robbers and assassins, with death.

Let the notion once get abroad in South Carolina that a man slayer will surely die, by verdict of a jury, by sentence of the judge unmolested by a governor inflated with a sense of power that belongs not to him – and men like W. C. Rasor, in the old and quiet village of Cross Hill, may sleep in their beds in security.

But, YOU CAROLINIANS, are you not more concerned about the funerals of slain men than about the punishment of the killers?

In South Carolina that murderer is humble and friendless indeed whose defense, from the moment of arrest to the exhaustion of the last resource, a petition for pardon, does not draw forth ten times the energy, the money, the lawyer-power, that is expended in effort to punish him. – Charleston News and Courier.