VOL. 36

IT

T WILL help the reader to appreciate the pertinency and pressing importance of these questions and to answer them aright, if we recall briefly some more or less familiar history; not so familiar, however, but that it needs to be rehearsed, until the American people awake from the easy-going, complacent indifference, with which they have so long been accustomed to treat this evil.

During the last twenty years, according to well-authenticated statistics, there have been over three thousand lynchings, very many of them accompanied with barbarities and atrocities which almost beggar description and hardly find a parallel in the world to-day and have seldom been matched or surpassed in the world's history. Our country stands to-day almost solitary and alone among the nations in these most horrible and revolting infamies of mob violence. Were it not for the stern, unimpeachable facts, it would be thought incredible—indeed, scarcely conceivable that such things could occur, or that they would be permitted to occur, in this professedly civilized, law-governed and Christian land.

The average for the last twenty years (1885-1904) has been one hundred and forty-two; the average for the first ten

years (1885-1894) was one hundred and seventy, and for the second ten (18951904) one hundred and twenty-four; for the first five years (1895-1899) of this second period one hundred and forty, and for the last five (1900-1904) one hundred and seven.

The number has varied greatly from year to year, now rising to a very high figure and then slowly receding for several years to a much lower point, suddenly to mount up again. Thus in 1885 the number was one hundred and eightyfour, diminishing to one hundred and twenty-two in 1887, rising again to one hundred and seventy-six in 1889. Then it fell off to one hundred and twentyseven in 1890, but in 1892 reached two hundred and thirty-five, the highest figure for any year. Again the wave gradually receded until the year 1896, when the number was one hundred and thirty-one. The next year it rose again to one hundred and sixty-six. In 1899 it dropped to one hundred and seven, but in 1901 advanced to one hundred and thirty-five. For the years 1902-1904 the number remained at about one hundred. In 1905 it fell to sixty-six, all, except one, negroes, several of whom were burned at the stake; and all but five lynchings occurred in

nine states, where the negro population is largest.

In the opinion of men whose long and intimate acquaintance with the conditions prevailing in the South qualifies them to judge, the statistics thus briefly summarized do not tell the whole truth. Every year there are very many lynchings, in out-of-the-way places especially, that escape the notice of news-gatherers and of which no hint reaches the outside world.

A review of the long catalogue reveals certain most significant facts. At first lynching as a rule was reserved as the penalty almost exclusively for one crime, which appealed for special vengeance, because of its deep-dyed villainy. In comparatively few instances was it resorted to as a punishment for other offences. Very soon, however, other forms of criminality came to be included, until in more recent years the mob has ceased to discriminate, and the list of crimes for which lynching has been administered now comprises also murder, attempted murder or threats to kill, burglary and thieving, insults to whites, arson, and other minor offences, and the general depravity or obnoxious character of the victim when there is only a suspicion of crime. Of late about fourfifths of lynchings have been for crimes other than criminal assault, which had hitherto been the ostensible justification of lynch-law.

Besides this growing tendency to add to the number of crimes which fall under the ban of lynch-law, there has also been a steady and decided increase in the ferocity and savagery of its execution, until already, it would seem, the climax of inhumanity has been reached. Years ago the mob contented itself with hanging or shooting the victim to death. But for some years past this mode of procedure has become altogether too tame and commonplace, and the mob has practiced the most fiendish cruelties, burning its victims at the stake, piling up faggots about them and pouring on

oil, stoning them to death, sometimes mutilating and hacking their bodies, and even carrying away the charred remains as souvenirs of these orgies of brutality.

In order to give authority and impressiveness to the doings of the mob, it has often been said that "it was composed of the best citizens of the community." This is undoubtedly a too sweeping statement and not to be accepted literally. But while it may be true that the "best citizens" do not actually adjust the noose, or fire the shot, or apply the torch, yet by excusing and condoning, by acquiescing in and countenancing, or even defending the action of the mob, by doing nothing to bring the guilty parties to the bar of justice or sometimes even shielding them from arrest or refusing to convict them when placed upon trial, the great majority of the best citizens, so-called, have practically made themselves accessories after the fact and morally at least participes criminis.

In not a few instances, no doubt many more than are known, the mob in its reckless fury has wreaked its vengeance upons persons altogether innocent of the offences charged. Indeed the guilt or innocence of the victim is widely regarded as a matter of comparatively little moment. The head of a prominent educational institution represented a not uncommon sentiment, when, as is credibly reported, he said to the young men under his charge: "The only way to get along with niggers is to hang a few once in a while, and if the man hung is not the man who deserved it, in that case you are not likely to be far wrong, and the moral effect is the same."

The customary verdict of coroners' juries is to the effect that "the deceased came to his death at the hands of persons unknown." And grand juries either refuse to indict those accused of mob violence or recommend their discharge, even when in one case a member of the mob had confessed his own share in the affair and had implicated others.

In some instances, even after the ac

cused has been promptly tried and convicted by a court of justice and sentenced to be hanged, the mob has not permitted the law to take its course, but wresting the prisoner from his legal guardians, has punished him according to its own diabolical will.

As a rule, with some most honorable exceptions, the constituted authorities, both state and local, whose highest office is to defend law and justice, have been shamefully delinquent in their duty. Sometimes so feeble is their resistance that they seem to be in collusion with the mob. And after the lynching has been consummated, seldom is any serious, determined effort made to bring the participants to the bar of justice, even when the leaders of the mob are well known. A search of court-records will reveal scarcely any instances in which a lyncher has been brought to trial, convicted and punished as he deserved, not more than a beggarly twenty-five or thirty out of the tens of thousands concerned in these outrages. Public opinion in the communities involved is almost invariably on the side of the mob, or is so weak and cowardly as to reduce legal procedure to a farce and make it practically impossible to secure conviction.

In July, 1904, at Eutawsville, S. C., a negro, charged with cursing a farmer, was arrested, tried and convicted, and fined by the village magistrate. At night a party of men-savage beasts, rather took him from the jail, chained him to a huge iron grating, and rowing out into the middle of a neighboring river, pushed the grating and their prisoner overboard. His body was found a few days later with seventeen stab-wounds in it, the eyes gouged out, the scalp torn off, and the fingers severed. In the following December, through the energetic and persistent efforts of the governor of the State, aided by skilled detectives, a number of arrests were made, two of them village officials, for participation in the crime. One of them turned state's evidence and implicated the others in the affair, giving

a graphic account of how the victim met his death. Hundreds of farmers of the neighborhood, we are told, swore that they would not permit the accused to be found guilty or punished, and the man who confessed was threatened with death. Of course, when the case was brought to trial in May, 1905, almost a year after the commission of the crime, it was a foregone conclusion that the accused would be acquitted.

Months have elapsed since the wholesale lynching of eight persons in July, 1905, at Watkinsville, Ga., one of the most infamous outrages in the whole history of lynch law. But no one concerned in this affair has been punished or even arrested. The prisoners were murdered, regardless of the offences charged and in defiance of the sacred and most elementary right of American citizenship, the right to a fair trial, to determine the guilt of the accused.

Public indifference on the subject of lynching is almost universal the country over. The average American citizen, as he partakes of his morning roll and coffee and reads in his daily newspaper the sickening account of the latest lynching tragedy, is moved for the time being with a thrill of horror. He lays his paper aside, goes to his daily work, becomes absorbed in the business of money-making, and that is the end of it. The incident is closed. It is only a few days' sensation and soon forgotten. It is none of his affair, he thinks, and he is satisfied to leave it to those who are immediately concerned, forgetting that not merely the community and state where the affair occurs, but our entire nation, is deeply disgraced and dishonored in the estimation of the civilized world; that the finger of reproach, even of scorn, is pointed at us, of contempt for a people whose institutions and government are apparently impotent to put an end to such devilish scenes, or at all events make no determined effort to prevent them or to punish those concerned in them. The callousness of the American people in the pres

ence of this evil is amazing. The fate of the victim himself may excite no special interest or sympathy; and many perhaps may feel that no punishment is too severe for the chief crime. But have we no regard for our reputation as a civilized and Christian people, no solicitude for the brutalizing influence of these scenes, not only upon those who take part in and witness them, but also upon the very race to which the victims for the most part belong and upon those in all parts of our country who are disposed to set law and order at defiance? All experience proves that such unusual and unlawful punishments have no virtue as a preventive of crime. Itself the height of lawlessness, anarchy and crime, lynching breeds these very conditions and aggravates the very trouble it was intended to correct. The lynching spirit is an infectious as well as a contagious disease. "Lynch him! Lynch him!" has come to be the common cry of the mob, wherever in the land it rears its portentous head. Even a gang of boys, catching the lynching spirit from the newspaper accounts of these affairs, has been known to perform a mock lynching as a sort of grim amusement, with what would probably have been a fatal result to a colored boy, had it not been for the timely arrival of the police. A mob of lynchers is seldom content with the death of the immediate victim. Other crimes of personal violence upon negroes who have violated no law, very often follow in the wake of a lynching. They are beaten, shot at and driven from their homes; their houses are burned to the ground and their property destroyed, in order to intimidate and terrorize the entire neighborhood.

Security for the whites as well as for the blacks depends upon the orderly enforcement of law and the equal protection of all under the law. They who take the sword of lynch-law may themselves at last perish by the same sword. Every close observer of the drift of public feeling has noticed a growing intensity of race

prejudice and hatred, to which nothing ministers so effectually as the practice of lynching and its attendant cruelties. Hatred by one race begets hatred in the other. Unless the causes are removed, the breach will become wider and wider, and mutual animosity more and more pronounced, with results which it requires prophetic vision to foresee.

The situation, thus briefly sketched in its most salient features, should compel the attention of the American people to the question at the head of this article: Shall lynching be suppressed? And no excuses, palliating circumstances, or pleas in extenuation should be permitted to divert attention from the simple, plain, elementary issue involved in this question.

The truth is the American people have never given an affirmative answer to this question. They have never made up their minds that lynching shall be suppressed. Let us squarely face the facts as they are. Communities and states where lynchings have occurred or where local conditions make them possible have never determined to take every precaution and use every available means, even the most radical and drastic if necessary, to prevent them at all hazards; or if in spite of this they do occur, to employ all the resources at their command to ferret out the perpetrators and bring them to adequate punishment, no matter what their social standing may be. There have been now and then spasmodic efforts in these directions, but generally it has been only a spasm, and often only half-hearted at best, to preserve appearances, but with no real, inflexible purpose to accomplish anything.

And our national government which represents America before the worldwhat has it ever done to meet this insistent problem and show that it, too, is determined to suppress lynching? While under the peculiar conditions which prevail in the South it has been the misfortune of that section that a large majority of lynchings occur there, they also occur in the North and West. They are not

an affair of only one section of our common country. Only five States have had a clean record. No matter where they happen, the whole nation-North, South, East and West-the entire people have a common concern about them and a common responsibility which cannot be shaken off or be put aside. If they have not been suppressed, the nation as a whole must bear its full share of the disgrace and opprobrium, because it has never applied the power and resources of national authority to the problem.

It is one of the constitutional duties of the President of the United States to communicale with the Congress from time to time by message "information on the state of the Union and to recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." The prevalence of lynchings, with all their tragic incidents, is certainly a sufficiently important and menacing fact in "the state of the Union" to deserve urgent attention in a Presidential message. We could well afford to dispense with some of the long-drawn-out disquisitions on comparatively unimportant matters, that a little space at least might be devoted to this subject, that the President might arouse the national conscience, make practical recommendations to Congress and call upon that body to take such decisive action as would enable the Executive to use all the available resources of national authority for the suppression of lynching.

As a matter of fact no reference, we believe, of any practical importance has ever been made to the subject by any of our Presidents in their annual or special messages; and while several bills have been introduced, Congress has never taken any action, and the matter has seldom even been mentioned on the floor of either House. Aliens, as in the case of the Italians at New Orleans a few years ago, have on a number of occasions been the victims of mob violence. But no law has yet been passed authorizing United States officials to deal directly

with such cases; and our government has been left under the mortifying necessity of representing to foreign powers that it can do nothing of its own motion to bring the offenders to justice and can legally provide no money indemnity, such indemnity being given only as a matter of grace on our part, not as legally due.

Both the Executive and Legislative Departments and the American people have all these years practically ignored the whole subject, as if it were altogether outside of their province. Political platforms and candidates have taken as much pains to steer clear of this question as a battleship does to avoid a torpedo or a floating mine. Even the party of emancipation, while it talks and resolves about reducing the Congressional representation of certain States, in which it is alleged that the negroes have been disfranchised, utters as a party no word of condemnation for lynching and its horrors, no demand for its suppression, even if Federal power be required for this purpose.

Practically the American people and governments, local, state and national, have been cowards in the presence of this evil.

The first thing, then, to be done is to educate and organize public opinion by bringing the subject definitely and forcibly before the people of local communities and states and of the country at large, that they may be influenced to determine that this lynching madness shall be suppressed and to sustain the authorities in using the measures necessary to this end.

Perhaps no agency can do so much in this direction as the newspaper and periodical press. We believe that for the most part they can be depended upon to do their full share in awakening and shaping the opinion and will of the masses. Already many of them, even in sections most given to mob violence, have been most outspoken in its condemnation.

The political conventions of all parties