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