THE USE OF THE REVOLVER IN A 1W - F1RICA.
ACURIOUS account of the readiness to take human life upon any, and indeed upon no pretext, which prevails in Kentucky, has lately been published by an American news agency. Blood-feuds kept up between certain families from generation to generation, and a general contempt for the law and its officers, are well known to be characteristic of many parts of the State ; but it appears that in one section social anarchy has become the normal condition. Within the last five years, two hundred murders have been committed in this region, and yet not a single arrest has taken place. Two years ago the Court-House was purposely burnt, and since then no attempt has been made to rebuild it, nor, until a fortnight ago, to hold a Court. On the Saturday before last, however, a Circuit Judge, guarded by several companies of Militia, arrived in the county town, not inappropriately named "Hazard," and bravely held his Court in a large tent which had been specially erected for the purpose. The proceedings that followed are thus described :—" A large crowd collected, and several hundred outlaws came in from the mountains and lounged about in the outskirts of the town. With great difficulty the Judge induced sixteen citizens to act as a grand jury. In his charge be said that the county was seventy years old, and while only 'one man had been con- victed of murder and sentenced to a short term in the Peni- tentiary, it was on record that over five hundred murders had been committed. He said : I have missed several terms because I was satisfied that a court could not be held. My life has been threatened, and I have had every reason to expect assassination ; but I have determined to do my duty.' The jury consented to indict several persons for horse-stealing, but frankly admitted that they were afraid to indict a number of the outlaws charged with murder." This last item of news is exceedingly characteristic. Horse-stealing is looked upon as a real crime, and the whole community is therefore in. favour of its punishment. The taking of human life is qUite another matter, and public opinion will not sanction any stringent measures of repression in the case of murder. , Though this attitude towards murder is seldom so pro- nounced as in Perry County, Kentucky, it prevails in effect throughout a large portion of the Wild West, in Texas, and also very largely in the Southern States. In these regions, it is generally admitted that there are certain circumstances which justify, nay, require a man to shoot at sight. Just as most Englishmen hold that there are acts and expressions that can only be answered by a blow, so the men of some of the Western and Southern States consider that it is both right and necessary to put a bullet into the body of a person who has become offensive beyond a certain degree of endurance. In the communities where these notions obtain, it is thought a highly commendable thing to be quick to take offence, and to punish the object of your anger with instant death. Codes of honour as pedantic as they are false spring up like mushrooms, in such soils, and very soon certain words and acts become recognised as equivalent to a challenge to a struggle for life. Among the more rowdy section of the cowboys,, for instance, one or two words have been selected, out of a very copious vocabulary of abuse, as sign-posts of dishonour. They are by no means specially disgusting or insulting, but the moment a cowboy of spirit hears one of them addressed to himself, he has no choice, according to his notions of honour and dignity, but to draw his revolver and " go for " the man who used the opprobrious epithet. The question : How did this condition of lawlessness grow up in Western and Southern America, and why is it that so little regard is felt there for human life P—is one well worth the asking. The answer usually given is to the effect that this lawlessness is due solely to the unsettled condition of the country, and to the wild, rough life which must necessarily be led upon the frontiers of civilisation. A little reflection, however, will show this explanation to be altogether inadequate. Exactly the same half-established communities exist in Canada, only just across the border, and also in Australia ; and yet there is no sort of tendency in either country to revert to a condition of virtual anarchy. No one in Vancouver's Island, or Alberta, in New South Wales or Victoria, thinks it necessary to go always armed, or to revenge the chance word of a fool or a drunkard by a revolver-shot. Everywhere, in fact, but in America, the English race shows respect for human life, even though society may be knit by very slender ties, and a settled and regular government is unattainable. Surely, then, it must be wrong to attribute this particular form of lawlessness to the lack of an efficiently organised society. Besides, shooting at sight is very nearly as frequent, and meets with not less great, if not greater, popular sympathy, in some of the long-settled Southern States than in the Wild West. It was in a Southern State that occurred one of the worst of recent cases. A certain doctor had been et- posed and frustrated by a newspaper editor in his attempts to ruin a girl employed in the journalist's family as a governess. The doctor resented this interference, went to the news- paper office, and shot the editor dead in the most cowardly and brutal manner possible. Yet a jury of his countrymen —we believe without leaving the box—found the murderer " Not guilty," and the crowd gave him an ovation. The editor had no doubt spoken his mind pretty freely before the shot was fired, and had used language unpleasant for a high-spirited man to hear in silence. According to Southern opinion, therefore, the killing was perfectly natural, and if not actually justifiable, at any rate excusable. Yet another recent instance shows even more clearly that it is not the unsettled state of the country that stimulates the use of the revolver. A society of doctors met the other day in a town in the South, and listened to a paper on the cure of disease of the kidneys, read by one of their body. At the end, a vehement discussion was raised by a medical man who objected to the treatment pro- posed. After the meeting had been adjourned, the reader of the paper was met on the steps of the hall where the discussion had taken place by the objector, who reasserted his arguments till the difference was ended by one of the disputants shooting the other dead. Another story of the same kind, which
has, we believe, been mentioned already in these columns, though unlike the two last in that it cannot be regarded as certainly true, may be recalled here. Even if not well authenticated, the fact that it is told as having actually occurred throws light upon the tone adopted by society in the South in regard to outrages with the revolver. In a hospital in the capital of a Southern State, a very unusual and interesting case of aneurism of the heart was being watched by the medical staff. A practitioner in the town, unconnected with the hospital, heard of this case, and resolved to secure for himself, if possible, the honour of making a cure. Accordingly, he obtained access to the ward, and persuaded the patient, much to the disgust of the staff, to leave the hospital. An ambulance litter was in readiness, and the sick man was thereupon placed upon it and brought down into the portico. When, however, the hospital doctors saw their favourite patient being actually carried off the premises by a medical marauder, their feelings became too much for them, and they one and all drew their revolvers and opened fire on the thief. He replied, and for a time a fierce battle raged over the prostrate body of "the aneurism." It would have been a fitting piece of irony if the patient had settled the question who was to cure him, by dying of fright or of a bullet- wound. As it was, we believe, he did not succumb to this portion of his treatment, but was at last borne off in triumph by the doctor of his choice.
These and a hundred other stories of a similar kind, when taken with the absence of shooting at sight in Canada and Australia, establish the fact that the " unsettled state of the country" explanation will not account for the problem we are discussing. We take it that the true explanation is something very different, and we believe it to be this. To the existence of slavery in the past is due the criminal recklessness displayed in the South and West in regard to the taking of human life. Slavery, as it always must, demoralised the social life of the Southern States. The masters knew that their property in a slave rested ultimately on their right to take the slave's life. Legal quibbling might deny them this in theory; but since they had the power to work a slave to death, or to give him insufficient food, it obviously existed in reality. Practically, there was nothing to prevent a master striking down his slave in a fit of anger, and this he knew and cherished as the sign of his power and of his dignity. But the Negro is too much like the European to make it possible to maintain any distinction between killing the one and the other. Hyde, let loose on the blacks, remained ready and eager to vent his rage upon the whites. The swaggering plantation bully, ever ready with his revolver, became the ideal of the South, and hence arose the notion that the taking of human life in hot blood was a venial offence. To get into such • a rage or to be so grossly insulted that it becomes necessary to shoot at sight, is felt to be the sort of accident that may happen to any gentleman of spirit ; and therefore no jury, even if it considers in cold blood that a particular occasion was inadequate, will care to interfere. But, it may be said, though this accounts for the use of the revolver in the South, it leaves the Western habit without explanation. The difficulty, however, is only apparent. The social habits of the West are those of the South, and were directly imported thence. The West, it may be remem- bered, was largely colonised by persons pressed up the Mississippi Valley from the South, and these earliest settlers gave the tone to the community. If a few hundred desperadoes get the " first cry " in a settlement, it is wonderful how soon the social ideal levels down to their standard. Texas, too, was always Southern in feeling, and Texas greatly influenced the West in early days. The influx of settlers from the East, and from Europe will, however, soon do away with this tradition of Southern influence, and the North and Central Western States will ultimately assimilate their manners to those of the rest of the English race. People in Connecticut or Maine no more think of shooting at sight than they do in Warwickshire or Devon; and a similar regard to the sanctity of human life is destined to grow up in the Western States. What will happen in the South it is difficult to say. A certain change for the better is sure to come in time ; but we fear that the presence of an inferior race will for many years keep the old bad habits alive. Slavery is a disease which is certain to leave its traces on the body politic.
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