terrent features, as well as punitive functions. One is as essential to the well-being of society as the other, and any measure which does not exert a restraining influence upon the vicious classes is of doubtful value" (pp. 229-235).
The propositions here made are simply too utterly puerile as to be worthy of sober consideration at my hands. They are simply senseless and idiotic, and to carry them out would be in the highest degree impossible. When a man talks about "exterminating by law the lawless white element in the South," he may just as well propose to submit the entire United States to a legal drag-net, and, having taken all the criminal and law-breaking class at one haul, they could by the courts be summarily executed right there. The hanging of all the real leaders of a mob that took part in a lynching anywhere would no more deter others from doing the same thing under similar conditions, than the execution of all the murderers we have executed in this country within the last two centuries, and they run up far into the hundreds, will prevent in the slightest degree the crime of murder among us. It is the most unmitigated nonsense to suggest the extermination of an element in society. As silly as this proposition is, however, it is not a circumstance in comparison with the absurdity of the suggestion to emasculate the negro (or any one else) as a preventive of rape, or assaults upon white women. To be sure, if emasculation is thoroughly and properly done, it renders the man completely sterile, but, on the other hand, it by no means always renders him impotent. The vulgar and lay belief is that it does, while in reality it does not. I have known several cases in
