“Think of it! More than one thousand human lives forfeited to Judge Lynch form the South’s record for the past ten years. What a horrible record! It seems almost incredible that such lawlessness can exist in communities supposed to be civilized. Would to God it were but an evil dream and that I could to-day assure the world that this terrible condition is but the unfounded imagining of a nightmared mind.
“Lynching is a peculiarly revolting form of murder, and to tolerate it is to pave the way for anarchy and barbarism. It cannot be truthfully denied that one of the most potent factors militating against the progress of this country is this frequent resort to illegal execution, and before we can realize the full benefits of your natural inheritance, your laws—our laws—must be impartially enforced, property must be protected, and life sacredly guarded by rigid legal enforcement, backed by an elevated public conception of duty.
“It is no greater crime for one man to seize a brother man and take his life than it is for a lawless multitude to do the same act. The first, if there be any difference, is less criminal than the latter for it, at least often has the merit of individual courage and the plea for revenge on the ground of personal injury. But when a man is deprived of his liberty by incarceration in the jail and thus shorn of his power of self protection, it is the acme of dishonor and cowardice to wrest him from the grasp of the law and deprive him of his life upon evidence that possibly might not convict him before a jury.
“I do not wish to be understood as saying that brave and good men do not sometimes, under strong excitement, participate in this outrage against human rights and organized society, for it is a fact that such rebellions are not infrequently led by the most prominent citizens, and, from this very fact, it is the more to be deplored.
“My friends, have you never thought to what this practice may lead? Has the frequency of mob violence no alarming indications for you? Directed, as it more often is, against our negro population, instead of making better citizens of the depraved and deterring them from crime, it has a tendency to cultivate a race prejudice and stir up the worst of human passions. It is inculcating a disregard of law because it ignores that greatest principle of freedom—that every man is to be considered innocent until proven to be guilty by competent testimony.
“Judge Lynch is the enemy of law and strikes at the very foundation of order and civil government. His rule is causing large classes to feel that the law of the land affords them no protection. The courts furnish an adequate remedy for every wrong. One legal death on the scaffold has a more salutary effect than a score of mob executions. The former teaches a proper dread of offended law, leaves no unhealing wounds in the hearts of the living, stirs up no revengeful impulses, creates no feuds and causes no retaliatory murders. What a field of home mission stretches before us! We owe it to the South to remove this blot on our good name. Let us hasten the day when Judge Lynch shall be spoken of with a shudder, as a hideous memory.
“This pitiful people, our former slaves, if instructed by intelligent ministers and teachers, might be delivered from the cramped mind, freed from the brutalized spirit which causes these crimes among us. They are naturally a religious people and this principle, which seems to be strong within them, under the guidance of an earnest enlightened ministry, might prove to be the key to the race problem find open up a social and political reformation, unequalled in modern times.
“Already the negro race is doing much for its own advancement and good. To-day there are thirty-five thousand negro teachers in the elementary schools of the South. Six hundred ministers of the gospel have been educated in their own theological halls. They own and edit more than two hundred newspapers. They have equipped and maintain more than three hundred lawyers and four hundred doctors and have accumulated property which is estimated at more than two hundred and fifty millions. I note this fact with pleasure. It makes them better citizens by holding a stake in their community. Let us show our appreciation of what they have already done by helping them to do more.”
CHAPTER VII.
The strange faces, the new scene, the suddenness of the call had shaken Elliott’s self-possession, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he finished his speech.