LETTER FROM BELGIUM
Is the quillotine a danger to the police?
(From our private correspondent)
BRUSSELS, 31 May

When Doctor Guillotin aroused the admiration of his contemporaries by his brilliant invention, the good bourgeois saw their goods and their persons forever protected against the attempts of criminals only with such a dramatic staging and such a rapid and radical result could not fail to impress.

Sentimental, sensitive women found there an answer to their humanitarian desires. Politicians thought that they could now get rid of their adversaries by sparing them the humiliation of a hanging or the honor of a sword. Finally, popular justice that wants the guilty to be punished and that the punishment be exemplary could only admit to being satisfied. But no one thought of the dangers run by those who had to find the assassins and bring them to the scaffold.

But these, police officers, security inspectors are often victims of the fear that the guillotine arouses. At least that's what an agent of the Belgian judicial police told me who praised the security of his job.

- Security ? I replied in disbelief, thinking of the many inspectors who, in France, get beaten up by those they pursue,

— Yes, we rarely bail,

"And to what do you attribute this immunity?"

"The fact that in Belgium, although the death penalty is sometimes imposed, it is never applied. Admittedly, our service is copied from that of the General Security, but fortunately for us there is this difference which comes, it is true, from the customs of the country and not from the organization of the police. When we catch a criminal, he, knowing that all is not lost, does not resort to desperate means.

And, finishing his sentence, the Belgian smiled with an air that meant: "See, I'm very quiet. »

The argument seems worthy of examination, we leave it to the sagacity of our readers. — Y. DUSER.