PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ON LYNCHING.
DRESIDENT ROOSEVELT has another terrible 1 problem before him. There can be no doubt that the practice of " lynching," that is, of trying and executing grave offenders through " Courts " improvised by those living near the locale of the offence without the inter- vention of any responsible Magistrates, has greatly in- creased in certain States of the Union since the emancipation of the negro. It was not that he became worse, for no such phenomenon followed emancipa- tion in the West Indies, but that the class which is likely to commit murder or rape was suddenly released from supervision. Prior to that ' great Revolution the powerful, ill-conditioned, perhaps half-savage, negro who was occasionally found among the toilers, and who would be a terror in any community, was compelled to labour all day, was strictly watched as a dangerous character by the overseers of the plantation, and knew that any violent crime would at once bring down on him the semi- military organisation of the neighbouring planters, who alone carried arms, and who kept up an informal but highly effective supervision of the whole black population. Emancipation released such negroes without placing them under that strict police, at once organised and armed, which the British rulers of mixed populations have even in India recognised as indispensable to order. The black rough became a free rough, who in particular districts often endangered, and still more often frightened, the white woman, who is compelled by the conditions of her life to traverse unfrequented roads, belts of forest, and tracts where she can have no immediate protection from her friends. The American of the States affected grew half mad with terror for his womankind, and with insulted colour pride, both aggravated by his knowledge that the laws were insufficient and inefficiently administered. Rape had not been made a capital offence, as it ought under the condi- tions to have been, corroborative evidence was hard to find, juries were not entirely reliable, and a custom which we do not pretend to understand makes all serious criminal procedure in America intolerably slow. A secret resolve spread through the States with a mixed population that a negro accused by a white woman should be arrested at once, tried by an improvised jury of the neighbours, and if found guilty executed on the spot, frequently, indeed we fear usually, by the horrible means to which President Roosevelt refers. We need not say that with such a jury suspicion and rumour, especially in the case of bad characters, sometimes took the place of solid evidence. So long as lynching was confined to the single offence opinion was not deeply stirred, even among the negroes ; but, as always happens, the practice spread far beyond that limit. If an improvised jury had rights in one case, why not in another? Lynching was swifter, cheaper, and, above all, more certain than any legal trial ; race feeling was deeply stirred; and gradually,in any case of serious accusa- tion against a negro, his white neighbours took the law into their own hands. Of all the crimes so punished, says the President in his letter to the Governor of Indiana, only One-fourth were allegations of rape. The negroes, finding their security gone, began to resist, resistance was always treated as a crime justifying lynching, and in a few months the practice spread till in places it threatened to supersede the law, and the State Executives felt it necessary to pro- tect the law officers by military force, even at a considerable sacrifice of white life. Several of the State Governors have done their duty unflinchingly; but they have not always the support of opinion, the tendency to anarchy spreads rapidly among mixed populations, and so serious did the social danger become that the central Government itself began to dread a servile war; and President Roosevelt has appealed in a powerful proclamation—for that is what his letter is—to the whole community to restore the weakened authority of law, and to revindicate the first principles of American liberty. His appeal is eloquent and almost pas- sionate in its earnestness ; but it is not certain that it will be effectual.
It will, of course, invigorate every law-abiding American, and the law-abiding Americans, if the Union be considered as a whole, form an immense majority ; but the restora- tion of legal order is impeded by the old question of State Rights. The early Federalists, hampered as they were By Colonial history and the slavery difficulty, did not venture, as the German and Canadian Federalists did, to propose a uniform Criminal Law, and each State now regards its right of " the high and the low justice," as it used to be described in Europe, as among the most sacred of its prerogatives. They will not surrender it ; and the President's letter is, therefore, only a piece of advice, or counsel of perfection, which will be in a way respected, but in practice laid aside. Each State will do as it pleases ; and in some lynching is approved, while in many there is a strong objection to an efficient police, and in a few a feeling—a relic of the slave period—that the power of acting without the intervention of the law, or even in defiance of the law, is absolutely necessary in order to keep the ultimate power in white hands. There will • be the greatest difficulty in inducing some States to alter their laws, and still more in persuading them that a police paid and controlled as regularly as an army, though not under such severe laws, is indispensable to the full enjoyment of orderly freedom. There is a perverse idea in parts both of the West and South that a, really efficient police which will enforce the law without respect of persons involves a sort of tyranny, and the people prefer to rely on the system of coercing criminals through the Sheriff and the posse comitatv,s, which we only abandoned in rural districts some fifty years ago. Yet without such an organisation changes in the law will not help them much, more especially against those partial and local risings through which lynch law wherever it hardens into a system is carried out. The " neighbours " who have elected the improvised jury are bound to defend their accomplices whenever they are called upon to answer for their acts. Besides, the ancient system, if useful for the punishment of crime, provides no watchers for its prevention. The Americans will do well to remember that if the Executive is frequently resisted, the alternative to a police when a district is out of hand is the use of military force, and that the habitual use of military force may very soon develop into the " tyranny " against which, as the inevitable con- sequence of anarchy, their able President has so seriously warned them.
Europe will watch with deep interest the result of the President's appeal, for in Europe there is still an idea that Republican institutions are not favourable to the maintenance of strict order, and many will believe that in condemning lynch law President Roosevelt has injured his own chances of re-election. We do not think that at all. Whatever the defects of the French Republic, want of obedience to the law is not one of them. In America the guilty districts, being protected by the State Rights theory, may for a time remain guilty ; but it will be with a new sense of shame, and a general, though, it may be, secret, approval of the President's action akin to the almost universal feeling of drunkards that drunkenness ought to be repressed. Democracy likes to be led, even if the leading takes it on a path which it is unwilling to follow ; and there is a rule which legislators would do well to study more closely :—You can put down almost any abuse if it is opposed to the instinctive conscience of mankind. Execution without trial and fair opportunity of self-defence strikes even the executioners as having in it " something " at least " of the nature of sin "; and President Roosevelt in his courageous appeal to that feeling will have the support of almost every voter in America. Even the man who has fired the torch will feel that Mr. Roosevelt is right when he says :—" Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must for ever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man."
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