The natural corollary of lynching is civil war, and they
have got something very like one in North Carolina. A man named Calvin Snipes, in Bakersville, suspected a neighbour named Osborne of betraying his possession of an illicit still, and accordingly murdered him. He was arrested, and the neighbours, thinking ho had exceeded hie privileges as a citizen, resolved to do a murder on their own account by hanging him untried. The Sheriff objected; and a number of respectable men armed themselves to support the consti- tuted authority. Tho majority, however, persisted, surrounded the jail, and after a fierce fight, in which twenty of the assailants were killed and fifty wounded, the Sheriff was murdered with twelve of his assistants, and Snipes dragged out. The mob forced him to a forest half a mile off, shooting bullets into him at intervals, and then hanged the dead body on a tree. The Sheriff's friends will, it is said, avenge his death, and twenty-five further murders are reported, so that it is possible the Governor may call out the State militia. The extraordinary thing in a State so long civilised as North Carolina, is that there appears to be no organised body of armed men upon whom the Sheriff could rely for assistance, and no means of arresting the lynchers except by using soldiers in uniform. The diffi- culty of organising an. efficient police is said to be mainly financial; but we suspect that if opinion were clearly in their favour, the means to pay them would soon be forthcoming. The assumption always made by Englishmen that all man- kind, except savages, are in favour of law and order, is un- true,—or, rather, is based upon the fallacy that there are no savages in trousers who speak English. There are hundreds of thousands.
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