highwaymen, vandals, sharpers, and others. The enforcement of
these laws is left largely in the hands of local community
officers. Cities have police departments, with large numbers of
patrolmen and detectives whose business it is not only to arrest
violators of the law after the violation has taken place, but also
by their vigilance to prevent the violation from occurring.

RURAL POLICE PROTECTION

The state laws against the violation of property rights apply to
rural communities as well as to cities, and rural communities have
officers for their enforcement--the constable in townships, the
sheriff and his deputies in counties. Where the population is
small and widely scattered, as in a rural township or county,
about all the officers can do is to arrest law violators after the
commission of the unlawful act, if they can be found. The officers
are too few to watch isolated and remote property, and in case of
serious disturbance, such as a riot, they are too few to handle
the situation effectively. Rural communities and many small
industrial or mining communities do not always have the protection
they need against lawlessness. In such cases the tendency is
sometimes for the people to "take the law in their own hands." In
times of labor trouble mining companies and other industrial
corporations have sometimes organized their own police. Such
practice is dangerous, for the enforcement of law should be in the
hands of the state, and not in the hands of an interested party.
In early days on the frontier, in mining and lumber camps,
"vigilance committees" were common; and even now, in various
localities, we hear too frequently of "lynching parties," which
are as lawless as the original offenders against the law, and tend