arguments in defense of lynching (except on the frontier, where civil institutions do not yet exist) never touch on this point. It is unseemly that any one should be burned at the stake in a modern civilized state. It is nothing to the purpose to show what a wicked wretch the victim was. Burning alive has long been thrown out of the folkways of our ancestors. The objection to reviving it is not an apology for the bad men or a denial of their wickedness; it is the goodness of the lynchers. They fall below what they owe to themselves. Torture has long been thrown out of our folkways. It might have been believed a few years ago that torture could not be employed under the jurisdiction of the United States, and that, if it was employed, there would be a unanimous outburst of indignant reprobation against those who had so disgraced us. When torture was employed in the Philippines no such outburst occurred. The facts and the judgment upon them were easily suppressed."
Even though there be some who feel that Sumner was over-optimistic in his certainty that torture had been wholly abandoned, one can agree readily with his picture of the self-inflicted injury to the lyncher. With the exception of the larger centres, and even in some of those, there exists in practically the entire South the possibility of a lynching at any time as a result of generation after generation of mob violence. Here are to be found the most depressing examples of the crowd as defined by Professor Ross, of the University of Wisconsin—"essentially atavistic and sterile . . . the lowest form of human associations." Reaction, ignorance, unrestrained passions, resistance to progress, wild beast
