THE CAW CAW SWAMP
"If you knew what it was to live under the constant fear of these terrible atrocities; to be a poor farmer, we will say, like one of the men you met, and to come home with your ax over your shoulder and find your cabin the scene of a ghastly and revolting tragedy …!" He looked expectantly at the naturalist.
"I can understand the blood rage of the father and husband," replied Leyden quietly. "I was simply questioning the remedy, the, to me, mistaken casuistry which makes it appear such."
"Why mistaken? Can you suggest a better? Anything possible—effective, yet humane?"
"Possibly not; that is scarcely the question, which is whether the present course is a remedy at all. Do you know that, from my knowledge of the fanciful, morbid, perverse elements of the negroid mentality, I firmly believe that each spectacular lynching of a negro for a crime of this sort is the direct cause of others of similar character. There is no human brain upon which suggestion acts so strongly, so imperatively, as upon his."
"But where does the suggestion come in when a negro is lynched—burned, we will say, for some atrocity?"
"In the most powerful way; by exciting his sense of the morbid, the horrible. For instance, a negro commits an atrocity; he is hounded, caught, carried by a howling mob to some dreary spot and there tortured, finally killed, annihilated, remnants of his carcass being carried off by ghouls worse than the madman, because they are not themselves mad. Other negroes are naturally terrified; they hear the thing related, discuss it with quickened breath and rolling eyes. Upon one
269
