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POPULAR SCIENCE MOST ELY 



these extra ten due to suicide or to 

 Caucasian markmanship ? 



Very serious, too. is the mistake of 

 studying arrests for homicide, without 

 taking into account the relative effici- 

 ency of the local authorities. Mr. 

 (Shipley's failure to realize this is , 

 shown, not only by his indiscriminate 

 grouping of cities in all parts of the 

 country, but specifically by his- dis- 

 cussion of homicide in Colorado. He 

 compares the small number of arrests 

 for this offense in Denver with the 

 large number of murders in the state, 

 properly enough emphasizing the law- \ 

 less condition of the mining-camps; but j 

 he fails to ask how many Denver mur- j 

 derers elude a comparatively small 

 police force, and escape into the wild- 

 erness on the many railroads radiating ' 

 from the city. The question of relative j 

 police efficiency might have been stud- I 

 ied from his Table I., giving the num- , 

 .ber of arrests for homicide in various 

 cities. The population of Xew York 

 can not be much worse than that of 

 neighboring cities, with their factories, 

 docks and tramp-infested freight-yards. 

 Yet New York reports 13.23 homicide 

 arrests per 100,000, against 9.16 in 

 Newark and only 4.51 in 'anarchist' 

 Paterson, Jersey City and Hoboken 

 also reporting low figures. 



Again, the attitude of the community 

 ought to be considered, if arrests for 

 homicide are made the criterion for 

 this form of crime. Is it conceivable 

 that the word ' lynching ' should be 

 absent from an inquiry into American 

 murders? Not once does Mr. Shipley 

 allude to the hundreds, nay thousands, 

 who have participated in the lynching 

 of negroes, of horse-thieves and ' rust- 

 lers '; were the members of these mobs 

 enumerated, or even the crimes counted 

 singly, how would our statistics look? 

 Let us now examine his study of the 

 relation of the immigrant to homicide. 

 First comes a diagram, Fig. 1, ' show- 

 ing changing character of immigra- 

 tion into the United States ' by 

 three curves, showing the percentage 



of each year's total immigration, de- 

 rived from northwestern Europe, south- 

 eastern Europe and ' all others.' Be- 

 low is a homicide curve, which is 

 strikingly parallel to the southeastern 

 Europe curve. But had these curves 

 been drawn to represent the actual 

 i) umbers of each group of nationalities, 

 instead of their percentage out of a 

 variable whole, the parallelism would 

 have vanished. Furthermore, the 

 southeastern curve represents natives 

 of Italy, Russia, Poland and Austro- 

 Hungary, whereof the Italians form 

 about one third. Another table, 

 Fig. 3, gives the ratio of murderers 

 among 1,000,000 Italians as 50.2; 

 hut that of the Poles and Magyars 

 is shown at very much less than the 

 French, and the large masses of Rus- 

 sian arid Galician Jews are bunched 

 with unclassified nationalities in a 

 group rated at a trifle over 1 per 100.- 

 000. The peoples representing two 

 thirds of that incriminating curve ac- 

 tually produced less than the average 

 number of murderers. Bearing in 

 mind that the criminal tendency of an 

 immigrant could not exhaust itself in 

 the first year after his arrival, it is 

 evident that the homicide curve, if 

 strongly influenced by the immigration 

 of the last fifteen years, the period in 

 which the Russian and Italian immi- 

 gration has outnumbered the Germanic, 

 ought to have run steeply upward, in 

 a hyperboloid form, instead of remain- 

 ing almost horizontal, and showing less 

 of an upward tendency than during the 

 preceding decade. 



Further to incriminate the Italians, 

 Fig. 5 arranges the states and terri- 

 tories in the order of homicidal sta- 

 tistics, and gives a graphic representa- 

 tion of the number of natives of north- 

 ern Europe, as contrasted with a com- 

 bined group of Italians, Mexicans and 

 Chinese, living in each; the south- 

 western and Rocky Mountain states 

 show the greatest mortality by vio- 

 lence, and by combining these three, 

 otherwise unrelated, nationalities, their 



