“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.*”