sown the seeds of lynching as a panacea which will correct all ills and especially those emanating from Negro sources. Primitive impulses to vengeance of violent character upon those whom the possessors of such minds do not like are thus nourished and form one step to further mob murder. Lynchings justified and extolled, lynchers exalted as men of bravery and forthrightness, efforts at punishment of the lynchers blocked and derided—such frequently repeated acts cannot fail to shape young minds in moulds which seem destined later to demand more victims.
Nearly a century of lynching and nearly five thousand mob murders within less than half a century have done an incalculable harm to American minds and particularly in those states where lynchings have been most frequent. Some of the effect can be seen in the frequency with which the phrase is heard—often from the lips of normal, law-abiding people even in the North and West—"he ought to be strung up to a tree."
Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, found that each succeeding generation of the rats he was observing went with fewer lessons at the sound of a bell to a fixed feeding place. Culturally, something of the same reaction to the use of mobbism affects certain Americans as, genetically, affected Pavlov's rats. Approximately similar conditioned responses actuate the human beings and the animals—the bell acted as an excitant for the
