thinly settled country communities.  No man can leave his family at night without the dread that some roving Negro ruffian is watching and waiting for this opportunity.  The swift punishment which invariably follows these horrible crimes doubtless acts as a deterring effect upon the Negroes in that immediate neighborhood for a short time.  But the lesson is not widely learned nor long remembered.  Then such crimes, equally atrocious, have happened in quick succession, one in Tennessee, one in Arkansas, and one in Alabama.  The facts of the crime appear to appeal more to the Negro’s lustful imagination than the facts of the punishment do to his fears.  He sets aside all fear of death in any form when opportunity is found for the gratification of his bestial desires.

There is small reason to hope for any change for the better.  The commission of this crime grows more frequent every year.  The generation of Negroes which have grown up since the war have lost in large measure the traditional and wholesome awe of the white race which kept the Negroes in subjection, even when their masters were in the army, and their families left unprotected except by the slaves themselves.  There is no longer a restraint upon the brute passion of the Negro.

What is to be done?  The crime of rape is always horrible, but the Southern man there is nothing which so fills the soul with horror, loathing and fury as the outraging of a white woman by a Negro.  It is the race question in the ugliest, vilest, most dangerous aspect.  The Negro as a political factor can be controlled.  But neither laws nor lynchings can subdue his lusts.  Sooner or later it will force a crisis.  We do not know in what form it will come.

In its issue of June 4, the Memphis Evening Scimitar gives the following excuse for lynch law: 

Aside from the violation of white women by Negroes, which is the outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct, the chief cause of trouble between the races in the South is the Negro’s lack of manners.  In the state of slavery he learned politeness from association with white people, who took pains to teach him.  Since the emancipation came and the tie of mutual interest and regard between master and servant was broken, the Negro has drifted away into a state which is neither freedom nor bondage.  Lacking the proper inspiration of the one and the restraining force of the other he has taken up the idea that boorish insolence is independence, and the exercise of a decent degree of breeding toward white people is identical with servile submission.  In consequence of the prevalence of this notion there are many Negroes who use every opportunity to make themselves offensive, particularly when they think it can be done with impunity.

We have had too many instances right here in Memphis to doubt this, and our experience is not exceptional. The white people won’t stand