LYNCHING OF NEGROES

 There has been a remarkable increase both in the number and in the savage cruelty of the lynchings reported of late from the United States. The details of some of these unauthorised executions are hideous in the extreme, and it is obvious that the most violent passions must have been aroused before respectable women would so far forget, not merely their sex, but even the primordial instincts of humanity, as to set fire to a wretched negro soaked in kerosene, and calmly watch his death struggles and listen unmoved to his agonised cries. Yet such an occurrence has not been infrequent of late in the Black Belt of the Southern States, where the negro race predominates. In addition, however, to the swift self constituted justice meted out to negroes, there has been a still more anti-social display in such cases as the lynching of the eleven Italians at New Orleans. It must be remembered that there are two entirely distinct causes for the appearance of Judge Lynch in America. One is the corruption which unfortunately pervades the elective judiciary system and the consequent distrust that every citizen feels lest crime will not be punished whenever the offender has political influence or money wherewith to bribe judges and juries. No doubt this is a serious charge to make, but it is fully borne out by such phenomena as the lynchings at New Orleans and Cincinnati. In the latter instance a murder had been committed for the sake of robbery. Again and again the prisoner had confessed his guilt, but through the adroitness of his lawyer and the alleged corruption of the jury, he was only convicted of man slaughter. So great was the impossibility of obtaining a sentence of death in Cincinnati that murder was an every day offence, and at the time the mob took the law into their own hands there were no less than twenty-three persons convicted of murder or awaiting trial on a capital offence in the gaol of that city. The riot which then broke out, and during which many lives were lost and much property destroyed, was a natural revolt against the absolute failure of the law. A similar sentiment instigated the lynchings at New Orleans, where a mob led by citizens of good standing broke into the prison and killed eleven Italians who were confined there, several of whom had just been acquitted of the murder of the Chief of Police. Here again the incentive to the ferocious conduct of the mob was the belief that the jury had acquitted the prisoners either through fear of the Mafia, an Italian organisation, or on account of bribes given by its agents. In these and similar cases of the mob becoming judge and executioner the cause was evidently the distrust of the courts as impartial and fearless tribunals.
Lynchings of this kind are altogether different from those in which negroes are killed and tortured for crimes against the chastity of white women and children. "Revenge," says Lord Bacon, "is a kind of wild justice, which the  more man's nature runs to, the more the law ought to weed it out. The most tolerable sort of revenge in for those wrongs " which there is no law to remedy ; but then let a man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish, else a man's enemy is still beforehand, and  it is two to one." Judged by this criterion there is no excuse for the lynching of negroes in the South. No one will for a moment deny that a white jury would give a negro guilty of an offence against a white woman the very shortest of short shrifts. The law is there, and the machinery to carry it out, but revenge, that wild justice, takes entire possession of the friends and relatives of the victim, and law is too feeble to weed it out. Quite recently Mr. Frederick Douglas has taken up the cudgels for his colored brethren in an American magazine. Douglas is a picturesque figure in the history of the United States. His mother was a slave and his father a white man, and as long ago as 1838 he escaped from slavery and took refuge in New York. In conjunction with the authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the other New England abolitionists, he played a prominent part in the anti-slavery movement, and after emancipation held several Federal offices. He was, however, removed from office by President Cleveland, whose vaunted ideas on civil service reform were not sufficiently far advanced to stomach a "nigger" in a political office that a Tammany " heeler" wanted. Mr. Douglas contends that the indignation which leads to lynching does not lie so much in the revolting nature of the offence as in the fact that it is perpetrated by a negro on a white woman. For two hundred years, he says, white men have committed this same offence against black women in the South, and the fact has excited but little attention even at the North, except among the abolitionists. From which he concludes that the horror now felt is not on account of the crime itself, but because of the color of the participants. This argument does not hold water for an instant with anyone cognisant of the negro's code of morals. Chastity among the colored race is by no means esteemed as it is among white people, and the violations to which Mr. Douglas alludes were merely the assertion of ownership of slaves, the woman being a willing party. To compare them with the brutal outrages upon white women and children in the South at the present time is simply absurd, and Mr. Douglas's conclusion, that the jealousy of the white man at the progress of the negro is the real cause of the great increase in lynching, is not borne out by an iota of evidence in cases where the lynching takes place on account of an outrage upon a white woman. No doubt negroes have been lynched because they undertook certain work which the white man considered should belong exclusively to him, as was the case at Memphis; but these cases are extremely rare, and have nothing to do with the lynchings for sexual crimes. Another point upon which Mr. Douglas fails to make out a case is that because the crime is a new one for the negro, it is therefore unlikely to be as frequent as is generally stated. He points out that during the Civil War, white women and children were left in the guardianship of negroes, and that there is not an instance of the trust thus reposed in them being abused. This is very true, but what does it prove? Does it not show that as long as the negro was, not to say under the domination of the white man, but in constant contact with him, there was a civilising influence at work, and the negro was taught and obliged to control those fierce sexual instincts which, now that this good influence and restraint have been removed, are given full scope? This view of the matter is supported by the utter failure of the danger of detection, and of an awful fate in case of detection, to exert any deterrent effect upon his criminal impulse. For instance, a short time ago a negro was lynched in a small village in Virginia for an assault upon a white woman, and under circumstances calculated to strike terror into every would be ravisher ; yet a short time, after a similar crime was committed in the same village by another negro. Again, in the large cities of the South, where the negro is brought into contact with whites, the instinct for committing this particular crime has not developed. Under the influence of the white race he is advancing in education and the ability to acquire property, but in the country districts, where large masses of negroes are segregated and removed from this influence, his atavistic tendencies seem to return, and among them the gratification of his sexual desires, undeterred even by the awful fate which he must know probably awaits him.
At all events, both whites and blacks are unanimous that crimes against the persons of white women have enormously increased in number. We have seen the reasons alleged by Mr. Douglas, a position which is also taken up by the negro newspapers. The Montgomery Herald, a journal written by colored men, says "Every day or so  we read of the lynching of some negro for entrapping some white woman. Why is it that white women attract negro men more than in former days ? There  was a time when such a thing was  unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect the growing appreciation of the white Juliet for  the colored Romeo as he becomes more  and more intelligent and refined. If  something is not done to break up  these lynchings, it will be so  after a while, they will lynch every  colored man that looks at a white woman  with a twinkle in his eye." From which we may gather that the colored pressman is not a close student of Shakspeare, or he would have quoted the leading case of Desdemona, not of Juliet, who was never suspected of any partiality for a dusky lover. Now everything goes to show that there is not a scintilla of foundation for the cynical hypothesis of the Herald, and that it is principally where the negro has retrograded in refinement and intelligence by being thrown out of touch with the white race that these crimes have increased. The evidence supplied by Hayti, the Black Republic, is exceedingly strong. In that island, after 90 years of negro government, there is not the slightest sign of improvement either in intelligence or morals— indeed, quite the opposite is known to be the case. Especially is this obvious in the relations of the sexes, for in Hayti 70 per cent. of the births are illegitimate, and a Haytian changes his wife, in the rare instances when he has one, as readily as an Australian would change his baker or milkman. We have similar proof of the retrogression of the negro when left alone in the failure of the Free State of Liberia. The evidence that the negro has become more brutal since emancipation in the South is equally convincing. "If," said a Southern planter, " the option were offered me of taking my  wife and family into one of the black  country districts of the South or into a jungle full of wild beasts, and if I were obliged to leave them without proper  protection, I would unhesitatingly choose  the jungle." Yet before emancipation these men used to leave their families in the guardianship of negroes without fear of evil results.
Enough has been said to make it clear that there are two entirely separate problems in regard to lynching awaiting solution in the United States. The one arising from the general belief in the corruptions of judges and juries can at any time be solved by the people freeing themselves from the domination of the political "bosses" and filling elective positions with honest men. The other, unfortunately, admits of no such easy solution, and presents one of the gravest difficulties ever encountered by a free country. We know that the negro, unlike the Australian aboriginal, will not die out in the presence of whisky and the white man ; on the contrary, in spite of the great infantile mortality among the blacks, the colored race is increasing with startling rapidity in America. Nor is there the remotest chance of the two races amalgamating. The contempt of the white man for the negro is greater than ever, and absolutely precludes such a consummation. Schemes for the wholesale deportation of the negro to Africa or elsewhere have been abandoned as utterly impossible, and it looks as if the white race will have to stew in the gravy which slavery concocted. The danger of allowing an alien and inferior race to gain a foothold in a country has been awfully exemplified ; and the whole world, and more especially Australia, have an object lesson before them of something that should be carefully avoided. Another lesson is that mankind is full of atavistic tendencies, and just as ancestral sexual unrestraint recaptures the negro, so the wild anti-social instincts of the primitive white man reassert themselves, and are shown in the lynching of his captives.

Age (Melbourne, Vic.  1893,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article193440973