Queer Mail for Police

Many Hints as to Torture for Leon Czolgosz.
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CAGE HIM WITH RAJAH
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OTHER WRITERS PRESCRIBED TICKLING AND ACID
TREATMENT—TIPS FROM THE SLEUTHS.

     Gen. Bull gets a bunch of queer mail nowadays. It is full of Czolgosz. Almost every letter relates to Czolgosz, what should be done with him, how he should be treated, how he should be persuaded to confess the tale of conspiracy, how he should be put to death. The superintendent reads all the letters and files them away, a few in a pigeonhole, the rest in the wastebasket.
     Hundreds of people want a photograph of Czolgosz to see if they know him or can identify others as anarchists by having seen them with him. These requests are denied except in the instances of police and detective bureaus, where the photograph is wanted for the rogues’ gallery. All the police departments of big European cities desire photographs.
     One letter suggests that the police should take Czolgosz in his bare feet and strap him to a big plank or board, face downward. Then two men, each with a feather, should begin to tickle the soles of his feet and should continue until Czolgosz confessed. The writer of the letter spoke as one having authority and experience and said that no criminal, however stoic and silent, could resist this treatment and rather than undergo its awful tickling tortures would cry for mercy, and confess to the truth, lest it caught in a lie he would be tickled again.
     Another writer, a banker from a neighboring State, tells Gen. Bull to take Czolgosz in the dead of night to Bostock’s on the Midway and there place him in the cage with Rajah, the man-eating tiger. The banker is willing to pay all the expense of this matter and also to assume liability for any damage done to Rajah.
     A physician or an expert chemist, evidently, was the author of a long letter containing a list of “delicious tortures” for Czolgosz. According to the writer the old bludgeon ways of torturing a man were merciful and benign compared with the ways now available through the recent strides of science. He tells of injections, of drugs inserted under the finger nails, of acids to sprinkle on the body and eat to the bone, to awful concoctions of agony and frightful convulsions. Above all he would have the prisoner conscious through all the anguish, and, to this end, the formula of torture includes restoratives and stimulants.
     Some writers think of poisoned food, others of cold, dripping water on a given spot. One believes in locking a dead man in the cell with the prisoner. Several suggest starving him to death.
     Old back-country sleuths give the benefit of their sage advice and tell how simply it all can be done, in tracing Czolgosz’s actions and in involving Goldman. Gen. Bull reads most of them. Also he throws most of them away.