LYNCH LAW AND CHRISTIANITY.
[TO THE EDITOR 01 THE "SPECTATOR."] Sra,—I have read with a great deal of interest your timely editorials touching the vital points of our civilization, and I beg to say that I am in hearty accord with them. They can- not fail to awaken thought where thought is needed. I am especially interested in what you have had to say in regard to the murder of that native African by Mr. Sam Lewis, and also concerning the horrible brutality perpetrated upon a helpless negro in a Pennsylvania town across the Atlantic. I cannot understand how such atrocities can take place among civilized people—a people making such a profession of Christianity as they do—without calling forth universal denunciation of such barbarities. To profess Christianity and then uphold—to say nothing of permitting and abetting—such terrible deeds is simply mockery. I am from the States, and I am ashamed to say that the lynching of negroes is not regarded there as important enough to raise a great hue and cry about it. The public reads it in the morning papers as simply "news," and in large measure there is not even public comment in certain sections of the country.
What is needed everywhere is an awakened conscience. Men must be made to feel that all men are human beings, made to believe in the brotherhood of man, and made to learn to wait for the stern arm of the law to deal with criminal offenders. There is no shadow of a possibility of civiliza- tion being helped on by such acts of violence. We should be long past the days of such " wild justice "—such revengeful acts—but it does seem as though with all our boasted civiliza- tion we are really going back to savagery, and that no nation to-day can afford. The pity is that such a state of affairs finds sympathizers, the revengeful, the prejudiced, the unthinking—a mob that would wipe the negro from the face of the earth. It is neither Christian nor intelligent, neither wise nor safe, to continue such a course of action, to boast of it, or praise the spirit that led to it.—I am, Sir, &c., As AMERICAN.
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