of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism.”  In December, 1893, Walter H. Page, writing in the Forum of lynching under the title, “The Last Hold of the Southern Bully,” said that “the great danger is not in the first violation of law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race problem will lose the true perspective of civilization”; and L.E.  Bleckley, Chief Justice of Georgia, spoke in similar vein.  On the whole, however, the country, while occasionally indignant at some atrocity, had quite decided not to touch the Negro question for a while; and when in the spring of 1892 some representative Negroes protested without avail to President Harrison against the work of mobs, the Review of Reviews but voiced the drift of current opinion when it said:  “As for the colored men themselves, their wisest course would be to cultivate the best possible relations with the most upright and intelligent of their white neighbors, and for some time to come to forget all about politics and to strive mightily for industrial and educational progress."[1]

[Footnote 1:  June, 1892, p. 526.]

It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled in the whole of American history.  The Negro was already down; he was now to be trampled upon.  When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters.  In Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to the Southwestern Christian Advocate that he had lost a membership of a hundred souls, the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten days.

In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged to a lamp-post.  On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they passed.  Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the sport became furious and two men were fatally shot.  About the same time, and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree.  In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro who had outraged a farmer’s wife was captured and burned alive, the injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire.  Just a few days later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro was killed.  Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes who were thought to have been leaders in the killing,