Jasper County Democrat, Volume 14, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1911 — MOB SPIRIT IN AMERICA. [ARTICLE]

MOB SPIRIT IN AMERICA.

Country Needs a Few Good Sheriffs Who Can Shoot Straight. American contempt of law, American worship of force, reached their apotheosis of absurdity and outrage in that Kansas community where a girl of 18, suspected of gossip, wa f decoyed by a youth of her acquaintance to a lonely spot and there set upon, stripped and tarred and feathered by a band of men and. boys. Although it is the palliation for lynching that its purpose is to vindicate womanhood under irretrievable wrong, the purpose here was to dishonor it. Whatever the pretext —and statistics show that in only one lynching in five is a woman’s wrong even alleged—-everywhere the effect of lynching is to degrade womanhood, as it is to degrade society. It devises a spectacle of atrocious suffering, exhibits it for the edification of men and women, boys and girls, and looses a spirit in the community which causes to be sought as souvenirs the rope that dragged the victim, the charred wood in which he was consumed and the fragments of his bones. Wherever lynching raises its head —whether in Pennsylvania, in Oklahoma, in Kansas or in the South—the phenomenon is not -of a masterful brutality, but pf degeneracy. Blood-thirst is in it. and cowardice and disregard of the traditions' and processes which have made society, and a perverting propensity to find light amusement in torture and death. Utter trivalitv is associated with a premeditation that stages the spectacle and contrives immunity. Of a typical American lynching may be said what Lord Acton said of the Reign of Terror: he appalling thing about it is not the tumult, but the calculation.”. The weakness of the law officers is very nearly at the bottom of the matter, and this, more than the mob impulse, is our disgrace. A few r sheriffs , able to shoot straight, willing to die if need be before a prisoner’s cell, the object lesson of a single lyncher sent to the scaffold, would go far to make these outbreaks a bad dream of yesterday. —New York World.