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146 
THE CRISIS

who permit the criminal to pass from the grasp of the law to the clutches of the mob. The record of race riots and mob violence in the North in the last decade shows that neither North nor South  could point at the other the finger of scorn. Lynching is a wrong for which the whole country must bear the responsibility."

What a remarkable idea! 
The disposition of governors to exercise such power would depend very largely upon the dispositions of governors.
In many cases the governor would find an excuse for the sheriff and decline to turn him out of office. A Democratic sheriff might be, with ostentatious ado, removed from office - kicked out so to speak - by a Republican governor. A Republican sheriff might be thrown down the courthouse steps, figuratively, by a Democratic governor, but a sheriff rarely would be removed by a governor belonging to the political party of the sheriff's adherence.
Governor O'Neal may be, and doubtless he is, an executive whose moral austerity is so much greater than his party loyalty; whose virtue so overtops his political ambition that he would not hesitate to cast out any number of sheriff's guilty of allowing lynchings, but that is not true of governors speaking generally.
The Dial has a thoughtful article showing the various aspects which the lynching problem is assuming:
An instance of the impossibility of national repentance is the attitude of the American people toward the lynching of Negroes. That the country feels a certain shame is clear. The news of such outrages is now largely suppressed. Even the press foregoes the profit of playing upon its readers' appetitite for atrocities, and when the Liberator published the accounts of certain peculiarly hideous mob crimes, it was roundly denounced for lack of patriotism.
An effort to arouse the public conscience on this matter and to initiate works meet for repentance will be made by the National Conference on Lynchings to be held in New York City, May 5 and 6, "to take concerted action against, lynching and lawlessness wherever found, and to consider what measures should be adopted to abate them."
The words of the call above quoted contain an oblique reference to the fact that lynching is no longer a purely race problem - nor is it always a matter of reprobation and shame. On the contrary, as expression of patriotic sentiment it has been recognized as part of our moral life, and associated with our best efforts toward the progress of the world.
So inured has this country become to the idea of violence that we find its aid enlisted by patriotic societies, military authorities, and other sponsors in behalf of the Liberty Loan. There lies a pretty irony. The Dial continues:
The chief propagandist for the Security League still boasts of his attempt as agent provocateur before an audience in a Western university. The press has repeatedly borne witness to the crimes of violence committed by men in uniform against persons exercising the right of lawful assembly, but whereas our courts martial have been active in grinding out sentences to death and life imprisonment against men who have failed in some minor observance of military law, we have yet to hear of a case where a solider has been punished for attacking the institutions of democracy which he was drafted to defend - except the men who rioted Houston, who were black, and who were hanged. An instance of the attitude of the army toward mob law is shown by the petition of soldiers of the 27th Division to General O'Ryan threatening violence unless the entirely lawful performance of opera in German were prevented by "organized action." Apparently the threat was regarded as so natural as to attract no comment or rebuke. An organ which claims to represent the returned soldiers is Arthur Guy Empey's Treat 'Em Rough, whose eminent services are enlisted in behalf of the Victory loan. In the March issue Mr. Empey advises the men who were in the trenches when he was on the lecture platform as follows:
"The Fith Liberty Loan drive will soon be here. Make a Bolshevist or an 'I. W. W.' buy one of those bonds, and believe me, from that time on that fellow is going to support Uncle Sam, and, if necessary, fight for him. If you cannot, after very patient endeavor, sell him, then show him what it means to get good Yankee wallop in the nose."
The Brooklyn Eagle feels that lack of unanimity among Negroes seriously affects the failure to suppress lynching, surely a superficial view since no matter how much radical and conservative Negroes may differ they are all agreed in their efforts to eradicate the scourge of their race. The Eagle says:
If the Negroes stood together on the Booker T. Washington platform they would reduce such bitterness to a minimum and reduce lynching to a minimum. Unfortunately they do not.
There is a radical division of Negro sentiment. Washington would have made his race thrifty and industrially efficient, waiving social equality and even political equality for a period of years. On the other hand, at the Anti-Lynching Conference, Dr. William Pickens, dean of Morgan College in Baltimore, said: