THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



VOL. XIII. 



CHICAGO, AUGUST, 1899. 



NO. 11. 



THE PROGRESS OF WESTERN SMERICH 



The 

 Curtain 



Falls. 



The curtain dropped on the 

 It^st act of the Luetgart 

 tragedy, when the dying body 

 of Luetgart was found in his prison cell. 

 In recent years there has been no case in 

 court which attracted the interest that 

 the trial of Luetgart did. The evidence 

 of the crime although circumstantial was 

 yet so conclusive as to leave little doubt 

 in the minds of most people of Luetgart's 

 guilt. Yet the jury hesitated: the faint 

 doubt of his wife's death, the bare pos- 

 sibility of her reappearance some day 

 caused them to fix the penalty at life 

 imprisonment instead of death. The 

 whole grewsome story of the fiendish 

 murder and the careful attempts made to 

 conceal the same to the final unraveling 

 from minute evidence of the crime, sounds 

 more like a fanciful tale from the pen of a 

 novelist than the record of an actual 

 occurrence in a practical, unromantic city 

 like Chicago, with s.uch a prosiac per- 

 sonage as the sausage maker in the role 

 of heavy villian. With Luetgart's death 

 the tragedy is at an end. and while most 

 people are convinced of his guilt, to some 

 there will ever remain a doubt. Among 

 the many peculiar things one might say 

 coincidences in this case, is that in so 

 short a time, little more than a year, two 

 of the most prominent figures in the case, 

 Luetgart, and inspector Schack. have 

 died: two, the women most interested. 

 ha\e married, and. lastly, auother case so 

 similar in every detail, ha- been tried. 



The Becker case is almost parallel with 

 the Luetgart: the men looked alike, 

 followed the same business, and disposed 

 o f their wives in equally revolting ways, 



while in both instances there was the 

 usual "woman at the bottom of it.'' Had 

 Luetgart's sentence been that of death, it 

 is possible Becker would have hesitated, 

 to comit his awful crime, but the sentence 

 of life imprisonment by most people was 

 interpreted to mean a few years in prison, 

 a pardon, and a lucrative opening in the 

 saloon "business or as a dime museum 

 'freak." with the woman for whom the 

 crime was committed as his companion. 



B- cker, however, has been sentenced to 

 death. Perhaps tie greatest of all 

 mysteries in the Luetgart case is the fact 

 that three women should have cared for 

 such a brute. 



With all our boasted civil- 

 In the 

 Land of ization there is yet room for 



the Free. great improvement. A record 

 of seventy seven cases of lynching from 

 January 1, 1899, to the present time, in 

 the United States bears out the above 

 statement. Of these seventy-five have 

 occurred in the southern states. Georgia 

 having contributed twenty-two nearly 

 one-third. Out of the seventy-seven 

 victims to mob violence sixty were 

 negroes aud some of them were tortured 

 in a manner almost inci-edible in a civil- 

 ized community. Not satisfied with 

 cruelly torturing and then killing the 

 victims, the mob even went so far as to 

 take away portions of flesh as suvenirs of 

 the ghastly affair. For such fiendishness 

 there can be no excuse. Of the twenty- 

 two men who were lynched in Georgia, 

 all but one were colored and in three 

 instances the alleged crimes for which 

 they suffered were resisting arrest, race 

 prejudice; using violent language, most of 



