My motives for having kept silent would be open to the worst interpretation, and I should be everywhere denounced as an enemy of society whose criminal vanity had made him think himself capable of coping single-handed with the greatest artist in crime of the century, and whose yet more criminal greed and anxiety to secure the entire reward for himself had led him to withhold from the proper authorities information by means of which the capture of the arch-murderer might have been effected and the last dreadful outrage prevented. Knowing, as I did, how uncontrollable was the feeling of the populace in regard to the outrage, I could not disguise from myself that a man who made such a confession as I had to make, would--should he be recognised in the streets--run a very good chance of being mobbed, if not lynched. An infuriated mob is not given to make nice distinctions, and so long as it has a scapegoat on which to wreak vengeance it does not wait to inquire too particularly into the question of the scapegoat’s innocence or guilt. Let the object of its wrath be not forthcoming, and let some evil or foolish person raise the cry that this or that luckless passer-by is the offender’s relative or friend, or even that he has been seen coming from the offender’s house, or is of the same nationality, and in nine cases out of ten the mob will “go” for the luckless wight _en masse_. I have made a study of that wild beast which we call “a mob”--the one wild beast which civilisation has given us in exchange for the many she has driven away--and knowing something of the creature and its habits, I must confess that I would rather fall into the jaws of the wild beast of the jungle, than into the clutches of the wilder beast of the city and the slum. One day--one not very distant day--that wild beast will turn and rend its keepers, and when once the thing has tasted human blood it will not be beaten back into its lair with its thirst for blood unglutted. To be mobbed or lynched in a noble cause and in support of a great principle is not without its compensations, but there is no glory in being subjected to physical violence and personal insult as a scoundrel and a knave. Worse, however, than the possibility of being mobbed was the certainty of being held up in many quarters as an object for public odium and private scorn, and the more I thought about it the less inclined did I feel to face the consequences of confessing the part which I had played in the recent tragedy. It was upon my own responsibility, I argued, that I had entered upon the enterprise, and so long as I kept within the law it was to myself only that I was responsible for the way in which that enterprise was carried on. That I had failed meant nothing more than that what had happened to those whose business and whose duty it was to have succeeded, had happened also to me; and, after all, I left things no worse than they were when I took the matter up.