Whether the police are justified for the various uses to which they put the “third degree” in ferreting out crime, I am not in a position to state. When I asked a “cop” why they hit those fellows who passed through the “third degree,” he replied: “You know crooks are the worst kind of liars; unless the police gave them a moderate cuffing, they would tell them a fake story which it would be a waste of time to listen to.” Some men do not blame the police for a moderate use of the “third degree” in order to discover crime, but where to draw the line is a most difficult thing. Judging from Professor Munsterburg’s protest against the “third degree” in his book, “On the Witness Stand,” Germany seems to have a more diabolical thumbscrew system of the “third degree” than New York. Says the German professor: “There are no longer any thumbscrews, but the lower orders of the police have still uncounted means to make the prisoner’s life uncomfortable and perhaps intolerable, and to break down his energy. A rat put secretly into a woman’s cell may exhaust her nervous system and her inner strength till she is unable to stick to her story. The dazzling light, and the cold-water hose, and the secret blow still seem to serve, even if nine-tenths of the newspaper stories of the ‘third degree’ are exaggrated. Worst of all are the brutal shocks given with fiendish cruelty to the terrified imagination of the suspect. Decent public opinion stands firmly again such barbarism; and this opposition springs not only from sentimental horror and from aesthetic disgust; stronger, perhaps, than either of these is the instinctive conviction that the method is ineffective in bringing out the real truth. At all times innocent men have been accused by the tortured ones, crimes which were never committed have been confessed, infamous lies have been invented, to satisfy the demands of the torturers. Under pain and fear, a man may make any admission which will relieve his suffering, and, still more misleading, his mind may lose the power to discriminate between illusion and real memory.” [Illustration: Putting a Crook through the Third Degree at Police Headquarters.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXII THE CITY GANGS