THE FATAL FRUITS OF LYNCHING.
By Editor
LYNCHING is something which grows by what it feeds upon. At first, as punishment for a crime for which the penalty provided by law is confessedly inadequate, it gained a certain sympathy for its essential justice, however much it was disapproved for the illegality of its methods. But no wrong walks the earth alone. Lynching, as a remedy for a legal wrong, cultivated a spirit of disregard of law, which has burst the bonds which confined it to a correction of the inadequacy or ineffectiveness of the law. The lynching spirit could not be gorged with the meager supply of victims from one small class of criminals. It swiftly spread its bloody, greedy hands to gather food for its insatiate maw from negro criminals of all shades of guilt, and in its latest and most revolting outbreak at St. Charles, Ark., at least six out of the thirteen negroes killed were not even charged with any crime, but were called out and shot merely as "a warning to others." The spread of this malignant moral disease has already included white men as well as negroes within its fatal toils, and has given plain tokens of its existence, dormant or active, in every section of the country. But, repulsing and shocking as it is in its open outbreaks, its tortures of its victims, its burnings at the stake, its unprovoked slaughter of innocent men, the worst effect of the lynching spirit, which has spread its miasma over the land, is beyond question in the subtle growth among the people of all classes of a readiness to resort to acts of violence on very slight provocation. How common this murderous spirit has become is too little realized. Human life has cheapened perceptibly, but so hidden has been the decline, in the moral sense, of the value of this precious thing that it has not made the impression it ought to make. We shudder at the killing of thirteen negroes in one small town in Arkansas, but are not shocked at fifteen murders in New England in the month of March. We praise the vigorous action of Governors Montague, of Virginia, and Vardaman, of Mississippi, and Durban, of Indiana, in promptly calling out the military forces to prevent lynching, but what is needed is a general public sentiment, so strong, so vigorous, so outspoken against all acts of violence of every sort as to give warning that all illegal resort to force will be promptly and severely punished.—The Watchman. And yet it is a fact that punishment for crime does not have the deterrent influence upon the criminally inclined that it is expected to have. Men commit the gravest crimes almost under the shadow of the penitentiary. Men who have seen a man burned or hanged or shot to death for that terrible crime against womanhood have gone from the awful scene, and committed the same offense. Our prisons are filling up with persons who have seen their fellows punished for the same crimes that sent them there. The great army of men wearing prison stripes is not doing so through ignorance of the fact that punishment follows crime. They are wearing the stripes in spite of their knowledge of that fact. The moral fiber of the world is weakening, and with that weakening is coming a strange indifference to the consequences of crime. It is one of the sure indications that the culmination of earth's career is drawing nigh.