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.