From “What’s Wrong with the Right People?,” which appeared in the June 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

“There’s a lot of law at the end of a rope”: such was the gospel of the San Francisco vigilantes when they set out to clean up the crime wave of 1849. But theirs was a world of oxcarts and covered wagons; ours is one of automobiles and airplanes. So most things have moved along since then, yet the passage of many years has…