Education And The Mob Spirit

The fundamental remedy, both for the mobs, on the one hand, and for the offenses which provoke the mobs, on the other, is to be found in a better and more thorough education. The negro offenders upon whom the violence of mobs is visited, come, as a rule from the most ignorant and degraded class. It is not true, as is often asserted, that the criminal class of negroes is largely recruited from the better-instructed half of the race. It is the ignorant class, white and black, that chiefly supplies the violent criminal element: and it is the ignorant class, white and black, that is most easily incited to mob violence. The right kind of education will train the children of the more unfortunate classes of our population, not merely in such arts as reading and writing, but also in sound ideas about work and citizenship. Fortunately, although the actual number of lynchings for some weeks past has been greater than the average, the general trend of our civilization is toward a more lawful and orderly life. Thus, the statistics of lynching for a period of twenty years show that there has been an average decline, and that last year's record was the best of all in point of the actual number of lynchings. In 1893, there were 200 reported in the United States, and in 1894 there were 190. The decline has not been regular, since 135 were reported for 1901, as against 107 in 1899; but the number for 1902 dropped to 96. The first five months of the present year promised an even more favorable record. It may still turn out that 1903 will not show more than 100 actual lynchings. But the disposition to invoke the mob spirit upon slight provocation has shown itself with usual recklessness this summer and it must be sternly suppressed. In New York, a few weeks ago, a negro criminal shot and killed the agent of an organization which had been instrumental in procuring his arrest. There might readily have been started an anti-negro race riot or a lynching movement; but the evidence in the case was clear, and the district attorney procured an almost instant indictment of the murderer. Trial and conviction followed a few days later. It is a useful thing, in cases of this kind, to show that the machinery of justice can move quickly without any sacrifice of the rights of the individual. There is no such delay in the ordinary administration of justice in any other country as in our own. This is largely the fault of a system which the lawyers as a professional guild have developed, and which the judges as members of that guild do not seem able to remedy, from the very limitations of their professional training. Among remedies to be sought must therefore be included a scientific improvement of the machinery of justice. -From "The Progress of the World," in the American Monthly Review of Reviews for August.