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Show H EIGHT THOUSAND ARE H MURDERED. H Looking back, Commerce and FJ- H nance, a marked copy of which has H been received by the Standard, notes H ' that S000 murders are committed each H year in the United States, according I to a study of the criminal reports of thirty American cities, made by F. L. H Hoffman. H These cities have a population of Hi 17,416,640. The highest murder rate M for any year was that of 1913, when j B, 8.7 persons were killed for every 100,- Hj 000 persons in the country. In the B1 decade from 1905 to 1914 inclusive H the average was 8.1 per year In the Hj ten years before that the rate was H 5, and in the first decade of the period H it was 4.S. Memphis tops the list in H percentage of murders. In 1914 that H city averaged 72.2 persons slain- for H, every 100,000 in the city. Charleston B 4is second with 33.3. Southern cities H have worse records than northern. H After Charleston comes Savannah, H then Atlanta. New Orleans, Nashville, H Louisville, St. I.,ouis, San Francisco, M Cincinnati, Seattle, Spokane and H' Washington. Manhattan and the H Bronx together stand sixteenth. Their M rate is 6.1, or less than the average. ' Chicago's average for 10 years is 9.3. m j Slightly over 60 per cent of the mur- H j ders were committed with firearms, H and a little more than 15 per cent H with knives or other sharp instru- M ments. AH other styles of murder are H J grouped H Nowhere in the world is murder so H i prevalent as in the United States. m Mr Hoffman says there is one H j southern city, in which many murders Hi' occur, where a white man never was I" hanged. The carrying of firearms may account ac-count for a large percentage of klll-m klll-m v ings, as compared with foreign coun- H tries, but a very big factor is the dis- H regard for constituted authority j found in many parts of the United H States. |