Let us quote a recent example of this fearful blood lust:—
Jackson, Ky., Aug. 29, 1916.
“Don’t you want to see a nigger die,” witnesses report were the introductory remarks offered by Breck Little, who Sunday shot and killed Henry Crawford, colored, 17 years old, on Old Buck Creek in Breathitt County. The shots were fired from a barn door which Crawford was passing while going up the road, and the victim fell dead in the road.
This illustrates the lust for blood. “Don’t you want to see a man killed?” If you do, say so and you may be accommodated.
We have pointed out heretofore in a former history that there is much similarity between the old Scottish feuds and those of Kentucky; that the clan spirit is yet alive; that Kentucky feuds are nothing more nor less than transplanted Scottish feuds. This view has been adopted by other writers and sociologists as furnishing the solution of the riddle: What is the cause of these feuds?
But can such incidents as the one cited above be attributed to the clannishness of the people. No. Such individual acts of savage ferocity can have but one source—an inborn, natal craving for blood. This and this alone can furnish us any sort of explanation why men slay without provocation or purpose.
Bad Tom Smith, of Perry County feud fame, slew to satisfy this craving for blood. According to his own admission, it had made itself felt when he was a mere youth. He was a degenerate pure and simple. His last murder, that of Dr. Rader, was committed without any motive whatever. “I just raised up and killed him while he was asleep!” That was the only statement he would ever make concerning that bloody deed.
Environment has, of course, much to do with it. Yet if we look about us, we find that counties in the very midst of feud-ridden sections have remained free of the murder craze.
Many years ago Breathitt, along with practically all the other mountain counties of the State, decided to abolish the saloon. Local option has been in force there now for years. It was hoped that the elimination of the legalized liquor traffic would eradicate crime, or, at least, enormously diminish it. Prohibition is supposed to exist in Jackson and the county at large. It will not do to say that notwithstanding the local option law is in operation, liquor is still at the root of the evil. We must presume that the prohibition of the sale of liquor is enforced. To presume otherwise would be to acknowledge the inefficacy of prohibition laws. Doubtless the local option law is enforced in Breathitt as much so as anywhere else where similar laws prevail, or, better said, the laws in this respect are enforced as far as is possible with interstate shipment of whiskey into local option territory remaining unobstructed.
The “liquor argument” is no solution of the sociological question in hand. During all those years that prohibition has existed in Breathitt, ostensibly so, at least, without apparent diminution of crime, without any receding of the murder wave, other counties, neighbors to it, we might say, have rejected local option laws, and permitted saloons without any apparent increase in the crime rate.
Reverting again to the spirit of the Scottish Highlander as responsible in part for the murder lust: Nearly all of southeastern Kentucky is peopled by the same stock. Jackson and Laurel counties have never been contaminated with the feuds which have raged on their very borders. Jackson County in all its history has not seen as many murders committed as have stained the soil of Breathitt in less than one year. Jackson County has never had a feud; its chief lawlessness has been the promiscuous sale of whiskey, illicitly, of course.