ins, 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