Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 16, 2025
The blacks and the whites in the States show their teeth and snarl, they are jist ready to fall to. The Protestants and Catholics begin to lay back their ears, and turn tail for kickin'. The Abolitionists and Planters are at it like two bulls in a pastur'. Mob-law and Lynch-law are working like yeast in a barrel, and frothing at the bung hole.
They can hardly indite a leading article, or make a stump speech, without showing their proclivities to mob-law. To be sure, if a known traitor is informally arrested, they rave about the violation of the rights of the citizen; but they think Lynch-law is good enough for "Abolitionists."
When the private man assumes to punish evil with force he sanctions lynch-law, which is a terror to the innocent as well as to the guilty. Then we have the blood-feud and the vendetta, mob-rule and anarchy. Second, the suppression of evil by force is only a temporary relief, a protection for the moment. It does not touch the root of the matter.
Why should it be wondered at? Why should the South be singled out for blame? Is it not a fact that for years in every newly settled western state lynch-law has been the unchallenged, unanimous verdict for a horse thief? And is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?
Behold the May-flower anchored at Plymouth Rock, the slave-ship in James River. Each a parent, one of the prosperous, labour-honouring, law-sustaining institutions of the North; the other the mother of slavery, idleness, lynch-law, ignorance, unpaid labour, poverty, and duelling, despotism, the ceaseless swing of the whip, and the peculiar institutions of the South.
'There was some as wanted to lynch him, and some as wanted him tried by the reg'lar judges of the Crim'nal Court. One of the best speakers said lynch-law was no law at all, and no innocent man's life was safe with it. So there was a lot of speakin', you bet. By the time it was over it was just daylight, and the majority voted as he should die at onc't.
Forgetting his situation, his comrades, the savages, forgetting everything but the fact of his having administered the last correction of Lynch-law to the object of his terror, he sprang on his feet, and roaring, "By the etarnal devil, here's Ralph Stackpole!" he took to his heels, running, in his confusion, right in the direction of the enemy, among whom he would have presently found himself, but for a shot, by which, before he had run six yards, the unfortunate youth was struck to the earth.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking