Yearly Record of Crime, Etc
Yearly Record of Crime, etc.—The Chicago Tribune, which makes a specialty of gathering such statistics, reports in murders for the year 1901, 7,852 deaths. It does not believe that it has them all. In these are not included the wholesale murders involving whole communities. These are called lynchings. Yet every man who took part in them sympathetically is a murderer. Responsibility of moral acts can not be divided among a crowd. In 1900 the murders reported amounted to 8,275. The same year the lynchings numbered 115; but in 1901 they reached a total of 135, 121 occurring in the South, 14 in the North. Seven of these are set down as suspected criminals only, and one was a case of mistaken identity. Suicides also increased. In 1900 the number was 6,755; in 1901, they were 7,245. It is a bloody, ghastly, grewsome, cruel record.