“I now pass over an intervening period and come to the circumstances of one of my most interesting and stirring experiences.  It was about this time that some misbegotten mechanician invented the automatic magazine pistol, and thereby rendered possible a new and execrable type of criminal.  It was not long before the appropriate criminal arrived.  The scene of the first appearance was the suburb of Tottenham, where two Russian Poles attempted, and failed in, an idiotic street robbery.  The attempt was made in broad daylight in the open street, and the two wretches, having failed, ran away, shooting at every human being they met.  In the end they were both killed—­one by his own hand—­but not until they had murdered a gallant constable and a poor little child and injured in all, twenty-two persons.

“I read the newspaper account with deep interest and the conviction that this was only a beginning.  Those two frenzied degenerates belonged to a common enough type; the type of the Slav criminal who has not sense enough to take precautions nor courage enough to abide the fortune of war.  The automatic pistol, I felt sure, would bring him into view; and I was not mistaken.

“One night, returning from a tour of inspection, I met a small excited crowd accompanying a procession of three police ambulances.  I joined the throng and presently turned into a small blind thoroughfare in which had gathered a small and nervous-looking crowd and a few flurried policemen.  Several of the windows were shattered and on the ground were three prostrate figures.  One was dead, the others were badly wounded, and all three were members of the police force.

“I watched the ambulances depart with their melancholy burdens and then turned for information to a bystander.  He had not much to give, but the substance of his account—­confirmed later by the newspapers—­was this:  The police had located a gang of suspected burglars and three officers had come to the house to make arrests.  They had knocked at the door, which, after some delay, was opened.  Some person within had immediately shot one of the officers dead and the entire gang of four or five had rushed out, fired point blank at the other two officers, and then raced up the street shooting right and left like madmen.  Several people had been wounded and, grievous to relate, the whole gang of miscreants had made their escape into the surrounding slums.

“I was profoundly interested and even excited for several reasons.  In the first place, here at last was the real Lombroso criminal, the sub-human mattoid, devoid of intelligence, devoid of the faintest glimmering of moral sense, fit for nothing but the lethal chamber; compared with whom the British ‘habitual’ was a civilized gentleman.  Without a specimen or two of this type, my collection was incomplete.  Then there was the evident applicability of my methods to this class of offender; methods of quiet extermination without fuss, public disorder or risk to the precious