I mentioned that in my first night at Shyenne, I calculated on the effect two recent lynch-law executions would have in keeping things quiet for a season. About that time I heard of five other executions of the same kind in that neighbourhood. There are people who denounce this method of maintaining order, but they do so without understanding the circumstances. At all events, a man has been known to exclaim loudly against it in New England, and before he had been in the West a month, to join a vigilance committee. The fact is that the ordinary method of administering law is quite impracticable in a place where you can get no policemen, no constables, no lawyers, no juries, no jails, no judges; and where, if it were possible to get the apparatus of justice, it would be next to impossible to work it. Some one or other would be bribed, or some flaw would be established in the evidence, and there would be time and opportunity enough, in one way or another, for the escape of the prisoner. Instead of this, here is a system which has no officers or jails, which costs nothing, and is very terrifying to evildoers by the rapidity and certainty with which it acts, and the mystery with which it is involved. It would be a very unnecessary and evil system in a settled community, but where none of the ordinary appliances of law are possible, and where at the same time all the scum of the great world behind is concentrated, it is a necessity, and a highly beneficial one. It does really what Napoleon III. claims to have done for France: it saves society, which without it would cease to exist, for it would be overwhelmed by these reckless and desperate characters. Everyone in America knows how completely in California it got rid of all the disorderly and dangerous elements which were collected there in such force, that it would have been quite hopeless to have attempted to deal with them in any other way. Just so, again, it was at Denver, a town on this side the mountains, of eight thousand inhabitants, now as orderly and well-disposed as any other eight thousand persons anywhere to be found. Four or five years ago Denver was what Shyenne is now. But lynch law has purified it, and in a way in which ordinary law has never purified any community in the world. All the rogues and violent fellows have been hanged, and all the suspected have been made to clear out. There are now no other such eight thousand souls in any part of the Old States. A man who knows both would rather leave his baggage out all night in the street at Denver than in any city of New England. This is the state into which a community has been brought when lynch law hands it over to ordinary law.