It would be stupid to allege that the reason men killed was because they had been stepped on or had been deprived of a glass of beer.  The cause lies deeper than that.  It rests in the willingness or desire of the murderer to kill at all.  Among barbaric or savage peoples this is natural; but among civilized nations it is hardly to be anticipated.  If the negro who shoots his fellow because he believes himself to have been cheated out of ten cents were really civilized, he would either not have the impulse to kill or, having the impulse to kill, would have sufficient power of self-control to refrain from doing so.  This power of self-control may be natural or acquired, and it may or may not be possessed by the man who feels a desire to commit a homicide.  The fact to be observed—­the interesting and, broadly speaking, the astonishing fact—­is that among a people like ourselves anybody should have a desire to kill.  It is even more astonishing than that the impulse should be yielded to so often if it comes.

This, then, is the real reason why men kill—­because it is inherent in their state of mind, it is part of their mental and physical make-up—­they are ready to kill, they want to kill, they are the kind of men who do kill.  This is the result of their heredity, environment, educational and religious training, or the absence of it.  How many readers of this paper have ever experienced an actual desire to kill another human being?  Probably not one hundredth of one per cent.  They belong to the class of people who either never have such an impulse, or at any rate have been taught to keep such impulses under control.  Hence it is futile to try to explain that some men kill for a trifling sum of money, some because they feel insulted, others because of political or labor disputes, or because they do not like their food.  Any one of these may be the match that sets off the gunpowder, but the real cause of the killing is the fact that the gunpowder is there, lying around loose, and ready to be touched off.  What engenders this gunpowder state of mind would make a valuable sociological study, but it may well be that a seemingly inconsequential fact may so embitter a boy or man toward life or the human race in general that in time he “sees red” and goes through the world looking for trouble.  Any cause that makes for crime and depravity makes for murder as well.  The little boy who is driven out of the tenement onto the street, and in turn off the street by a policeman, until, finding no wholesome place to play, he joins a “gang” and begins an incipient career of crime, may end in the “death house.”

The table on the opposite page gives the figures collected by the ‘Chicago Tribune’ for the years from 1881 to 1910.

In view of the foregoing it may seem paradoxical for the writer to state that he questions the alleged unusual tendency to commit murder on the part of citizens of the United States.  Yet of one fact he is absolutely convinced—­namely, that homicide has substantially decreased in the last fifteen years.  Even according to the figures collected by the ‘Chicago Tribune’, there were but 8,975 homicides in 1910 as compared with 10,500 in 1895, and 10,652 in 1896.  Meantime the population of our country has been leaping onward.