The administration of criminal law by the United States Courts deals chiefly with the trial of persons accused of murder on the high seas, counterfeiting, forgery, smuggling or postal frauds, defaulting bank officials and, very lately, corporation managers charged with favoritism in freight rates, or with the maintenance of monopolies affecting interstate commerce. Throughout the length and breadth of the land it is prompt, thoroughly dignified, vigorous and fair; indeed, its excellence, as a whole, suffers little if at all by comparison with the best English standards, which have been perfected only by centuries of experience in the highly concentrated population of a small Island. But turning to the individual States, all comparisons must depend upon locality. New York, the landing place, that threshold of real America, with a predominating foreign population; the western frontiers of civilization, and the South, with its peculiar racial conditions, suffer by comparison with British standards far more than would one of the orderly communities composing the greater part of the Republic. Recent mal-administration of criminal law in New York constitutes a subject of national mortification, but the existence of this sensitiveness is the best of reasons for believing that time will bring an improvement. Unfortunately for the good name of the country, foreigners do not comprehend, and can hardly be made to appreciate, that the instances of private assassination in that city followed by trials, which, whether owing to a vicious system of practice or to judicial incompetency, excite the indignation and ridicule of the world, are not typical of America but are expressions of purely local and probably temporary conditions. Foreign critics should be told that New York is not America, as many of them assume, and that temporary and local lapses do not prove a low standard. They may also be reminded, as showing that human justice is fallible, that even in London if a man walks into an Oxford Street department store, lies in wait for the proprietor against whom he has a grievance and blows out his brains, although he will be convicted in a trial occupying but three hours, yet the Home Secretary may intervene and prevent his hanging, upon a petition signed by tens of thousands of sentimentalists moved by the rather illogical fact that his wife contemplates an addition to a thus celebrated family.