of the
police, "mysteries revived," and even editorials on capital punishment.

A letter of protest brought in due course, but much more slowly, one
hundred and seven clippings, which yielded the following reasons why
men killed: There were four suicides, three lynchings, one infanticide,
three murders while resisting arrest, three criminals killed while
resisting arrest, two men killed in riots, eight murders in the
course of committing burglaries and robberies, seven persons killed in
vendettas, three grace murders, and twenty-four killed in quarrels over
petty causes; there were twelve murders from jealousy, followed in
four instances by suicide on the part of the murderer; six killings
justifiable on the "higher law" theory only, but involving great
provocation, and thirty deliberate slaughters. The last clipping
recounted how an irate husband pounded a "masher" so hard that he died.
Leaving out the suicides and those killed while resisting arrest, there
remain one hundred persons murdered, not only by persons insane or
wild from the effects of liquor, but by robbers and burglars, brutes,
bullies, and thugs, husbands, wives, and lovers, and by a vast number of
people who not only destroyed their enemies in the fury of anger, but in
many instances openly went out gunning for them, lay in wait for them in
the dark, or hacked off their heads with hatchets while they slept.

It is, indeed, a sanguinary record, from which little consolation is to
be derived, and the only comfort is the probability that the accounts
of the first one hundred murders anywhere in Europe would undoubtedly be
just as blood-curdling. I had simply asked the clipping bureau to
send me one hundred horrors and I had got them. They did not indicate
anything at all so far as the ratio of homicide to population was
concerned or as to the bloodthirstiness of Americans in general. They
merely showed what despicable things murders were.

As to the reasons for the killings, they were as diverse as those
which Mr. Nott had prosecuted, save that there were more of an ultra
blood-thirsty character, due probably to the fact that the young lady
who did the clipping wanted (after one rebuff) to make sure that I was
satisfied with the goods she sent me. And this suggests a reason for
the large percentage of cold-blooded killings prosecuted by my
friend--namely, that Mr. Nott being the most astute prosecutor
available, the district attorney, whenever the latter