The Crime of the Century

was a conspiracy so wide in its ramifications, so cunningly contrived, so successfully executed, as to rival the diabolical plots and outgrowing tragedies that have been placed at the doors of the secret societies of France, Italy and Spain, by the historians of the Dark Ages. In the United States, as an event of national importance, the crime may be said to rank with the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield. In the case of the former, as of the latter, the perpetrator of the crime was a half crazed enthusiast, who imagined that he had a mission to perform in taking the life of the Chief Magistrate of the Republic. An effort was made, it is true, to demonstrate the fact that the assassin of Abraham Lincoln was but the tool of a band of conspirators, but, despite the fact that five of his alleged accomplices suffered an ignominious death upon the scaffold upon conviction for complicity in the appalling crime, the question as to the actual existence of a conspiracy has remained to this day a mooted