The Story of the Outlaw, Emerson Hough [ereader that reads to you txt] 📗

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!