Desperadoes of the Cities--_Great Cities Now the Most Dangerous
Places_--_City Bad Men's Contempt for Womanhood_--_Nine Thousand Murders
a Year, and Not Two Hundred Punished_--_The Reasonableness of Lynch
Law_.
It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great
wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most
largely concerned with the latter in our studies of desperadoes and in
our search for examples of disregard of the law. We have found a
turbulence, a self-insistence, a vigor and self-reliance in the American
character which at times has led on to lawlessness on our Western
frontier.
Conditions have changed. We still revel in Wild West literature, but
there is little of the wild left in the West of to-day, little of the
old lawlessness. The most lawless time of America is to-day, but the
most lawless parts of America are the most highly civilized parts. The
most dangerous section of America is not the West, but the East.
The worst men are no longer those of the mountains or the plains, but of
the great cities. The most absolute lawlessness exists under the shadow
of the tallest temples of the law, and in the penetralia of that society
which vaunts itself as the supreme civilization of the world. We have
had no purpose in these pages to praise any sort of crime or to glorify
any manner of bad deeds; but if we were forced to make choice among
criminals, then by all means that choice should be, must be, not the
brutal murderer of the cities, but the desperado of the old West. The
one is an assassin, the other was a warrior; the one is a dastard, the
other was something of a man.
A lawlessness which arises to magnitude is not called lawlessness; and
killing more than murder is called war. The great industrial centers
show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than
the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records
of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest
wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened
desperado of the West to blush for shame.
One distinguished feature of city badness is the great number of crimes
against women, ranging from robbery to murder. Now, the desperado, the
bandit, the robber of the wildest West never made war on any woman,
rarely ever robbed a woman, even when women mingled with the victims of
a "stand and deliver" general robbery of a stage or train. The man who
would kill a woman in the West could never meet his fellow in fair fight
again. The rope was ready for him, and that right quickly.
But how is it in the great cities, under the shadow of the law? Forget
the crimes of industrialism, the sweat-shops and factories, which
undermine the last hope of a nation--the constitution of its women--and
take the open and admitted crimes. One city will suffice for this, and
that may be the city of Chicago.
In Chicago, in the past twenty-four years, very nearly two thousand
murders have been committed; and of these, two hundred remain mysteries
to-day, their perpetrators having gone free and undetected. In the past
year, seventeen women have been murdered in Chicago, some under
circumstances too horrible to mention. In a list of fifty murders by
unknown parties during the last few years, the whole gamut of dastardly
crime has been run. The slaughter list is appalling. The story of this
killing of women is so repellant that one turns to the bloodiest deeds
of Western personal combats with a feeling of relief; and as one does so
one adds, "Here at least were men."
The story of Chicago is little worse, according to her population, than
that of New York, of Boston, of any large city. Foot up the total of the
thousands of murders committed every year in America. Then, if you wish
to become a criminal statistician, compare that record with those of
England, France or Germany. We kill ten persons to England's one; and we
kill them in the cities.
In the cities it is unlawful to wear arms, and to protect one's self
against armed attack is therefore impossible. In the cities we have
policemen. Against real fighting men, the average policeman would be
helpless. Yet, such as he is, he must be the sole fence against the
bloody-minded who do not scruple at robbery and murder. In the labor
riots, the streets of a city are avenues of anarchy, and none of our
weak-souled officials, held in the cursed thrall of politics, seems
able to prevent it. A dozen town marshals of the old stripe would
restore peace and fill a graveyard in one day of any strike; and their
peace would be permanent. A real town marshal at the head of a city
police force, with real fighting men under him, could restore peace and
fill a graveyard in one month in any city; and that peace would be
permanent. If we wished the law, we could have it.
The history of the bloodiest lawlessness of the American past shows
continual repetitions. First, liberty is construed to mean license, and
license unrebuked leads on to insolence. Still left unrebuked, license
organizes against the law, taking the form of gangs, factions, bandit
clans. Then in time the spirit of law arises, and not the law, but the
offended individuals wronged by too much license, take the matter into
their own hands, not waiting for the courts, but executing a swifter
justice. It is the terror of lynch law which has, in countless
instances, been the foundation of the later courts, with their slow
moving and absurdly inefficient methods. In time the inefficiency of the
courts once more begets impatience and contempt. The people again rebel
at the fact that their government gives them no government, that their
courts give them no justice, that their peace officers give them no
protection. Then they take matters into their hands once more, and show
both courts and criminals that the people still are strong and terrible.
The deprecation of lynch law, and the whining cry that the law should be
supported, that the courts should pass on the punishment, is in the
first place the plea of the weak, and in the second place, the plea of
the ignorant. He has not read the history of this country, and has never
understood the American character who says lynch law is wrong. It has
been the salvation of America a thousand times. It may perhaps again be
her salvation.
In one way or another the American people will assert the old vigilante
principle that a man's life, given him by God, and a man's property,
earned by his own labor, are things he is entitled to defend or have
defended. He never wholly delegates this right to any government. He may
rescind his qualified delegation when he finds his chosen servants
unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great
and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable.
An unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast
off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American
Revolution earth's greatest example of lynch law!
[Illustration: "AFTERWARD"
Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
buried here]
Conclusions parallel to these are expressed by no less a citizen than
Andrew D. White, long United States Minister to Germany, who, in the
course of an address at a prominent university of America, in the year
1906, made the following bold remarks:
"There is a well-defined criminal class in all of our cities; a class of
men who make crime a profession. Deaths by violence are increasing
rapidly. Our record is now larger than any other country of the world.
The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number
punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or
ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in
favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, that 'there are communities in which
lynch law is better than any other.'
"The pendulum has swung from extreme severity in the last century to
extreme laxity in this century. There has sprung up a certain
sentimental sympathy. In the word of a distinguished jurist, 'the
taking of life for the highest crime after due process of law is the
only taking of life which the American people condemn.'
"In the next year 9,000 people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day
I tell you that 9,000 are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the
criminal heart, and with no regard for home and families; and two-thirds
will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes called mercy.
"I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for those who will
be murdered; for their families and for their children. This sham
humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now is for righteousness.
The past generation has abolished human slavery. It is for the present
to deal with the problems of the future, and among them this problem of
crime."
Against doctrine of this sort none will protest but the politicians in
power, under whose lax administration of a great trust there has arisen
one of the saddest spectacles of human history, the decay of the great
American principles of liberty and fair play. The criminals of our city
are bold, because they, if not ourselves, know of this decay. They, if
not ourselves, know the weakness of that political system to which we
have, in carelessness equaling that of the California miners of old--a
carelessness based upon a madness of money equal to or surpassing that
of the gold stampedes--delegated our sacred personal rights to live
freely, to own property, and to protect each for himself his home.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough