The significant features of this analysis are that about seventy-five per cent of the killings were due to quarrels over small sums or other matters, drink and women; over fifty per cent to drink and petty quarrels; and about thirty per cent to quarrels simply.  The trifling character of the causes of the quarrels themselves is shown by the fact that in three of these particular cases, tried in a single week, the total amount involved in the disputes was only eighty-five cents.  That is about twenty-eight and one-half cents a life.  Many a murder in a barroom grows out of an argument over whether a glass of beer has, or has not, been paid for, or whose turn it is to treat; and more than one man has been killed in New York City because he was too clumsy to avoid stepping on somebody’s feet or bumping into another man on the sidewalk.

The writer sincerely regrets that his own lack of initiative prevented his keeping a diary during his seven years’s service as a prosecutor.  It is now impossible for him to refresh his memory as to the causes of all the various homicides which he prosecuted, but where he can do so the evidence points to a conclusion similar to that deduced from Mr. Nott’s record.  The proximate causes were trifling—­the underlying cause was the lack of civilization of the defendant—­his brutality and absence of self-control.

With a view to ascertaining conditions in general throughout the United States, I asked a clipping agency to send me the first one hundred notices of actual homicides which should come under its scissors.  The immediate result of this experiment was that I received forty-five notices supposedly relating to murders and homicides, which on closer examination proved to be anything but what I wanted for the purpose in view.  With only one or two exceptions they related not to deaths from violence reported as having occurred on any particular day, but to notices of convictions, acquittals, indictments, pleas of guilty and not guilty, rewards offered, sentences, executions, “suspicions” of the police, “mysteries revived,” and even editorials on capital punishment.

A letter of protest brought in due course, but much more slowly, one hundred and seven clippings, which yielded the following reasons why men killed:  There were four suicides, three lynchings, one infanticide, three murders while resisting arrest, three criminals killed while resisting arrest, two men killed in riots, eight murders in the course of committing burglaries and robberies, seven persons killed in vendettas, three grace murders, and twenty-four killed in quarrels over petty causes; there were twelve murders from jealousy, followed in four instances by suicide on the part of the murderer; six killings justifiable on the “higher law” theory only, but involving great provocation, and thirty deliberate slaughters.  The last clipping recounted how an irate husband pounded a “masher” so hard that he died.  Leaving out the suicides and those killed while resisting