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THE CRISIS

other States which have not followed the trial of Fair intently? What of the Mississippi mob which lynched the Negro whose guilt was doubtful? If he had not been lynched would the mob shadow have influenced the trial?

"Lynch law has always been a blot upon the South. When the tentacles of the octopus of mob rule begin to spread out and grasp our courts, to intimidate our officers of justice, it is time for all citizens to lend their aid to the stamping out of this barbarism."

Prof. Ryntaro Nagai, writing in the Japan magazine on "The White Peril," says:

"Our American friends who talk more about freedom and equality than most other nations have nevertheless many hard things said of them by their own citizens in regard to their treatment of the Indians and the Negroes. At any rate it would be difficult to parallel in any country in the East such savagery as the lynching and burning of Negroes. According to the census of 1909 the Negroes of twelve Southern States made up 40 per cent. of the population; yet out of $32,000,000 spent in common school education in these States only $4,000,000 went to the education of the colored people, less than 12 1/2 per cent. of the total. Nor are conditions better in India, if we are to believe the accounts given by the English themselves of the treatment of the natives there."

Dr. Frances Hoggan, of London, England, in the Individualist, quotes the following passage from one of her former lectures:

"All other wrongs of the present day pale before that depth of savagery, the lynching of Negroes. It is appalling in its revolting horror when one reflects that it is the crime of a nation which claims to lead the world. No analogous development of brutality and lust of cruelty have taken place in our times in any nation calling itself civilized, if we except Russia's barbarous treatment of political prisoners and her Jewish pogroms or mob massacres.

"There have been attempts to extenuate this crime by asserting that it is only assaults on women that are thus avenged; but, unfortunately, this is not borne out by fact, and perfectly innocent victims are frequently offered up to the mad fury of the mob. And even were the sufferers guilty of the most atrocious of crimes, there is little chance that they would escape conviction and punishment at the hands of the law, if law were allowed to take its normal course. Lynching in a wild, unsettled community may wear a semblance of justice; in a settled, civilized country it is almost unthinkable in its savagery and barbarism. It lets loose the tiger in man which it has taken so many ages to control, and it sinks the human below the brute. What is all our civilization, what are all our courts and legal procedure worth if we feel constrained to fall back at last on the most primitive mob law, and, whiat is worse, defend it? For my own part, I have often, on reading reports of the lynching of Negroes, felt ashamed of being a white woman, so deeply did the racial disgrace sink into my soul. More humiliating and degrading to the lyncher than the lynched, this modern crime must be uprooted, and saner methods of dealing with crime followed, unless we are prepared to retrograde indefinitely into a very hell of savagery, and to lose every attribute of the divine in man."

EDUCATION.

Florida has clandestinely enacted a law for driving white teachers out of colored mission schools. The Northwestern Christian Advocate says:

"Some weeks ago the Northwestern gave a fairly comprehensive report of the cruel and inhuman enactment of the Florida legislature in prohibiting whites from teaching Megroes, the penalty being imprisonment in case the law was not observed. That this startling bit of legislation escaped the alertness of the religious press generally is somewhat strange, since by it Florida has gone the limit of race prejudice and hate.

"The Michigan Christian Advocate reviews the situation in a recent issue and concludes that the only thing for our freedmen's aid teachers to do is to retire from the field and leave their colored pupils to their fate; that to resist the law would be unlawful and would set a bad example before the Negro himslef.

"The Northwestern originally advocated, and still insists, the only course to pursue is to stand by the colored schools and continue to teach. The law was enacted in the bitterness of race hate; it is altogether counter to the spirit of our people, and is

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OPINION

a violation of the constitutional rights of 9,000,000 citizens. Words can scarcely be summoned to properly characterize the act, and the only way it can be brought to a definite head is to carry the matter to the courts–the Supreme Court if necessary–where the rights of these citizens can be clearly understood.

"It is with the same spirit that the 'passive resisters,' including some of the bravest and foremost ministers of England, have served time in jail for the cause of educational justice, that we suggest that our white teachers stand by their post in this hour of persecution. One prominent Methodist who has spent years in Florida remarked recently that no greater boon could come to him than the opportunity to teach the black boys and girls of that State in the face of such wicked legislation. It is only by such resistance that the law can be repealed."

In New Orleans the colored people have been deprived of their only chance for public high-school education by the sale of the Southern University. They have appealed for aid from the city, but the city evidently thinks with this writer in the New Orleans States:

"I see it has been suggested that the city buy the property of the Southern University for a Negro high school. I am not informed as to the law on the subject of providing higher education for the Negro race, but I am opposed to Negro literary education altogether, much less higher literary schools for that race. When the Negro is taught book learning it disqualified him for the work for which he is naturally adapted–manual labor.

"When we educate the Negro we unfit him for usefulness. Now I am not prejudiced. I used to be enthusiastic on the subject of educating everybody, Negro and all. That was when I was much younger than now. Observations extending over a period of more than twenty years have caused me to change my mind on this subject. The Negro is specially adapted to physical activities, and in that sphere alone will he serve himself and his country to the best advantage. OBSERVER."

This well illustrates the attitude of the great mass of the middle-class white Southerners.

A correspondent of Life brings us more light concerning conditions in Alabama:

"By the way; it may interest you to know that there is not only being waged in the State a campaign to do away with the leasing of prisoners–virtually the selling of them into slavery–but also one, even more important, for an amendment to the constitution which will permit counties and school districts to spend more than a certain fixed sum for the education of their children.

"It may be hard for some folks to believe that the makers of a State constitution would ever have thought it necessary to protect the people against too much education, but they did it in this State. And that fact goes far to explain a great many of our shortcomings."

THE CHURCH.

A writer in the New York Independent declares:

"It is my deliberate judgment that if the advancement of the American Negro, financial, educational, industrial and moral, in his forty-odd years of effort as a freeman, and the advancement in the ideals for him among those who call themselves Christians, could stand before us revealed as they must be measured in God's sight, the Christian church of America would stand convicted of a degree of prejudice, inhumanity and cowardice for which no consideration of its great achievements in other directions can ever atone."

This seems to be fully borne out by the disgraceful exhibition of race prejudice at the recent general convention of the Episcopal Church in New York City. With the audience composed largely of educated and well-to-do colored people two Southern bishops gave talks that were insulting. Familiar untruths were repeated; namely, that the Fifteenth Amendment was the cause of the Negroes' condition, that the whites had spent $165,000,000 on the Negroes' education, that the Negroes' great need is "moral training."

The yearly congress of the church of England had a symposium on "The Kingdom of God and the Races." Lord Selborne said that if a civilized people were ruling a native race their duty was to confer on the native race good government in the fullest sense of the word and, above all, government which gave every opportunity