ssary from the standpoint of good citizenship
than the ability to steel one's heart in this matter of granting
pardons. The pressure is always greatest in two classes of cases: first,
that where capital punishment is inflicted; second, that where the
man is prominent socially and in the business world, and where in
consequence his crime is apt to have been one concerned in some way with
finance.

As regards capital cases, the trouble is that emotional men and women
always see only the individual whose fate is up at the moment, and
neither his victim nor the many millions of unknown individuals who
would in the long run be harmed by what they ask. Moreover, almost any
criminal, however brutal, has usually some person, often a person whom
he has greatly wronged, who will plead for him. If the mother is alive
she will always come, and she cannot help feeling that the case in which
she is so concerned is peculiar, that in this case a pardon should be
granted. It was really heartrending to have to see the kinsfolk and
friends of murderers who were condemned to death, and among the very
rare occasions when anything governmental or official caused me to lose
sleep were the times when I had to listen to some poor mother making a
plea for a criminal so wicked, so utterly brutal and depraved, that it
would have been a crime on my part to remit his punishment.

On the other hand, there were certain crimes where requests for leniency
merely made me angry. Such crimes were, for instance, rape, or the
circulation of indecent literature, or anything connected with what
would now be called the "white slave" traffic, or wife murder, or gross
cruelty to women and children, or seduction and abandonment, or the
action of some man in getting a girl whom he had seduced to commit
abortion. I am speaking in each instance of cases that actually came
before me, either while I was Governor or while I was President. In an
astonishing number of these cases men of high standing signed petitions
or wrote letters asking me to show leniency to the criminal. In two or
three of the cases--one where some young roughs had committed rape on a
helpless immigrant girl, and another in which a physician of wealth
and high standing had seduced a girl and then induced her to commit
abortion--I rather lost my temper, and wrote to the individuals who had
asked for the pardon, saying that I extremely regretted that it was
not in my power to increase the sentence. I