this has taken place at precisely that time when weapons of the most deadly nature have been invented and made at a price permitting all to own them and many to become extremely skilled with them. The temptation and the means of murder have gone hand in hand. And in time the people, not the organized law courts, have applied the remedy when the time has come for it. To-day the Indian Nations are no more than a name. Civilization has taken them over. Statehood has followed territorial organization. Presently rich farms will make a continuous sea of grain across what was once a flood of crime, and the wheat will grow yellow, and the cotton white, where so long the grass was red.
Chapter XXII
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.