" Permit me to thank you, as an American citizen,
for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in ref- erence to lynching. " Mob violence is simply one form of anarchy, and anarchy is now, as it always has been, the hand- maiden and forerunner of tyranny. " All thoughtful men must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and es- pecially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the vic- tims — on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime, but on the color of the criminal. Criminal Forfeits Sympathy " In a certain proportion of these cases the man lynched has been guilty of a crime horrible beyond description, a crime so horrible that as far as he him- self is concerned, he has forfeited the right to an}^ kind of sympathy whatsoever. " The feeling of all good citizens that such a hideous crime shall not be hideously punished by mob vio- lence is due not in the least to S3^mpathy for the crim- inal, but to a very lively sense of the train of dreadful consequences which follow the course taken by the mob in exacting inhuman vengeance for an inhuman wrong. " In such cases, moreover, it is well to remember that the criminal not merely sins against humanity in inexpiable and unpardonable fashion, but sins par- ticularly against his own race, and does them a wrong far greater than any white man can possibly do them. Therefore, in such cases the colored people through- out the land should in every possible way show their belief that they, more than all others in the commun- ity, are horrified at the commission of such a crime, and are peculiarly concerned in taking every possible measure to prevent its recurrence and to bring the criminal to immediate justice. The slightest lack of
