Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1893 — BRIGANDS AND HIGHWAYMEN. [ARTICLE]

BRIGANDS AND HIGHWAYMEN.

Better Police Protection in Rural Districts Needed. Most Americans cherish the singular superstition that brigandage and highway robbery are only possible in depraved backward countries like Spain, Sicily or Greece, and that an English-speaking country with courts and the common law must necessarily be free from these pests. This is nonsense. Brigands, footpads and highwaymen will spring up in any land where an efficient police is absent. They swarmed over England a century and a half ago, they were frequent in France a little earlier, and they were to be found over most of Europe in the last century. They are certain to appear, in this country and become a wide-spread pest unless there is a radical change in the American habit of keeping the people’s peace. At present, it is left to keep itself. Great tracts of this country are left without any protection to travel, ex. cept the sheriff and the constable. City people have very little idea of the insecurity which exists in many American rural districts. There are many counties in New York State, and some doubtless in this State, where it would not be considered prudent for an unattended woman to walk in broad day along a lonely country road. The farms on which farmers are in constant fear of tramps can be numbered by the thousand. While abroad, even in countries like Spain and Italy, the rural districts are given the benefit of a police patrol paid for by taxes or by the wealth and trade of the cities, here our thinly settled farming neighborhoods are left to protect themselves as best they can. The wonder is, not that a train is now and then' held up, but that this does not happen a great deal oftener. Depend upon It, these modern highway robberies in the shape of train robberies will go on increasing untH our States establish a permanent rural police—Philadelphia Press.