THE DEVIL'S COUNTRY.
NOT very many days ago we read of a lynching at Houston, Mississippi, which the Times correspondent described as "the most spectacular lynching that the State has ever seen." The negro, who was supposed to have killed a white woman, was drenched with oil before the faggots were lighted. It is said that the shops were closed, which means, we suppose, that there was a sort of public holiday. The correspondent says that the negro was shot before he actually died from burning. But on the previous day another negro had been lynched for the same offence, "on the false evidence of two coloured men," and we gather that he did not enjoy the advantage of being shot. In order apparently to compound for the lynching of the innocent man and make everything square and decent, the citizens of Houston, when we last heard of them, were searching for the false informers in order to lynch them too. All this may have been more spectacular than usual. We were not there to judge, and do not know. We dare say that in some way or other it was a bit out of the ordinary, and that it was therefore justly picked out as one of those cases which are worth while drawing attention to in Europe, while the vast majority of lynchings are not. At all events, it is a mere matter of degree. The whole story sounds extremely familiar, and we mentally add it to a long list of kindred affairs in which it seems hardly worth while to distinguish the details. It may be no more useful to protest against lynchings on this occasion than on any other. But, on the other hand, it can hardly be less useful. As lynchings are always going on, one occasion is as good or bad as another. Frankly, then, we are quite sick of reading of such disgusting brutalities in a civilized land. Paralysis seems to fall upon the authorities, and they act as though some inevitable law of Nature were functioning and nothing could be done to prevent it. But why can nothing be done? We venture to say that the excuses for inaction are all pure nonsense. A town which has disgraced itself as Houston has done should surely be made to feel its disgrace.
These seem harsh and unfriendly words; but sometimes it is the part of a friend to say what seems an unfriendly thing— to use the most uncompromising language at his command. A mere friend has no "right" to do so; he has no legal sanction to act upon, no business bond, none of the advisory authority vested in kinship. Yet a friend would not take the trouble to remonstrate with someone, and certainly would not court the odium of doing it, if he were not really a friend. That we are friends of the United States we need hardly tell our readers. Perhaps some of them think that we often exaggerate the virtues of Americans. In many ways we regard America as the most wonderful nation in the world, with its amazing power of absorption, its invulnerable vitality, its enterprise, its inventiveness, its hospitality, its imagination, its power of gathering together apparently unwieldy and conflicting motives, and its qualities of simplicity (under- lying the showiness that we hear too much of) which are derived direct from the puritanism of the early immigrants. We know further that in what we say about lynching we have the hearty agreement of every decent American. Every man worthy of the name of American loathes and deplores with all his heart the saturnalia of brutality known as lynchings. Some are determined to do what they can to put an end to these things, but others less boldly tell themselves that what has been must be.. But we assert again that such things need not be. The United States is a highly civilized country. The remote parts of Russia do not know by comparison what civilization is; yet though " rough justice," as it is miscalled, is carried on there, the Russian peasants would stand absolutely aghast at the things which happen in some American towns that are equipped with electric trams and electric light, and dignified buildings symbolical of the progress of government and the arts. The Russians of the steppes do not burn fellow- creatures at the stake in broad daylight, or with news- paper reporters looking on, ready, when the fun is finished, to hurry off with the reek of burning human flesh and fat still in their nostrils, to wire the details to their offices. No excuse for lynchings remains in America. We know very well the usual extennations. There is the law's delay, and meanwhile a white community, hedged around by a majority of negroes, and protecting itself largely by prestige, must prove quickly and decisively that it is not to be trifled with. Offences against the superior race must bring retribu- tion terrible in its swiftness. Old proofs of the beneficence of lynch law are quoted. It is said that as the settlements spread from the east towards the west the rough frontier life beyond the Allegheny mountains would have been quite uncontrollable by means of the unsuitable laws of the east. Rough justice reduced California to order, and by holding human life cheap in one sense protected it in a much larger sense. It may be so, but the fact is that to-day not a shadow of excuse remains on such grounds as these for allowing the continuance of what Englishmen in their own unsettled days used to call gibbet-law. It is not even as though lynching were a remnant of savagery which would spend its illogical force with this generation or the next. It still flourishes as though it might exist for ever, and it has spread within the last few years into some of the most respectable and soundly established States in the Union. It is no longer an affair of the black belt. It is absurd to defend lynching by saying that it is brought in, as it were, in aid of the law, and is itself a kind of superior unwritten law. It cannot exist side by side with a deliber- ately adopted code without bringing the whole of the latter into jeopardy. We do not write as sentimentalists. If it be said that the law is inadequate to deal with the black peril, by all means let the law be made more severe. If it be said that the jury system does not work, then let there be another system. All the excuses for lynch law are only arguments for a reform of the law. Everything that is done by a self-respecting community to protect itself must be done within the four corners of the law. Those who go outside the law in a professed attempt to reach justice by a short cut are the worst enemies of the law. If it is necessary to strike terror into the hearts of negroes, let it be done scrupulously by means of the law.
Meanwhile if we had in our keeping the honour of the United States and respect for its law as it exists, we would not hesitate to punish those who disgrace themselves as the people of Houston have done. We dislike on principle general penalties which fall on the innocent and guilty alike, but there may have to be exceptions. We would—if necessary suspending the Constitution—proclaim a district in which a lynching had taken place as demonstrably unfit for popular government. The district should for a term of, say, twenty- one years be administered by Federal Commissioners and the inhabitants be deprived of the franchise, Federal, State, and local. In Great Britain a whole constituency may be disfranchised merely for electoral corruption. We confess that we lose patience when we are told that some such punishment as ie possible in Great Britain for a com- paratively small offence is impossible in the United States for the most hideous, brutal, and unjust of crimes. A prolonged dictatorship in a disgraced district would do infinitely less harm to every man, woman, and child than the continuance unchecked of the ghastly system of racial autos-da-fe which has not even the negative merit of being inspired by a sincere, if appallingly warped, religions motive. Americans speak of a part of their country as " God's country." In a general way they have very good reason, but they forget a side of their national life which makes it more appropriate to speak of other parts of the United States as the Devil's country. Burning men at the stake is a piece of orgiastic wickedness for which every American citizen must bear a portion of the responsibility, unless ho is making a serious effort to put lynching down. We hold up our hands over witch-burning, but that crime was as nothing compared to negro-burning. The witches perished by laws duly passed and administered, however stupid. The wretched negro, often the victim of a blunder, perishes at the hands of that vilest of things human —a brutalized mob.
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