CAMOUFLAGE

The current, New Republic invests Boston with a purpose, namely, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. It attributes this purpose to what it, editorially, takes to be the real Boston, an "ethnic minority" conscious that the prisoners are communists and foreigners. It contrasts this state of things with the political temper of Chicago where it finds, an agglomerate ethnic majority, conscious that another and more aristocratic portion of the city is Anglo-Saxon and descend from grandparents native born, has just elected as mayor, one who jollied and humored them.

The specifications, with regard to both Chicago and Boston situations are far from proved by assertion. And it is, moreover, under this sort of treatment that the Sacco-Vanzetti case is becoming obscured while winning notoriety. The case has already established public relations with the defects of the Massachusetts judicial system, the standard of integrity maintained in the district attorney's office, theories of evidence, and labor agitation. It remained for the New Republic to allege that there is also a racial question at stake.

Of course it is not to be expected that such a public show as the Sacco-Vanzetti, case very obviously has become, will pass from the boards without first being thoroughly drained of all apparent significance. Indeed, it is not altogether an unhappy outlook to suppose that lawyers and politicians will take the affair some-what to heart and that, consequently, some slight attempt will be made to mend both the ways of court procedure and political preferment. Doubtless, too, it will occur to some analyst that the case of Judge Thayer, laboring for years under the siress of one single controversy, and likewise the case of Madeiros, seeking to make a confession which would baffle the lawyers, are good prey for psychological discussion.

But it is hardly necessary to argue that journalistic elaborations and literary interpretations, not to mention political theorizing, are all, just now, a bit beside the point. The case, itself, is a single instance containing within its own history all the elements necessary to its reasonable settlement. The defendants are two individuals without,-- as far as judicial process is concerned,-- the attributes of race and social position. The mechanisms of the judicial system are side-issues, too, and the Governor, in whose hands the matter now is, will do well to ignore them for the present. He needs but look to the original evidence, measure, if he can, the almost overwhelming doubt that meets the eye as to the actual guilt of the men. Sacco and Vanzetti, and act accordingly.