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law's delay is an excuse rather than a reason for the existence of lynch law, recommends the enactment of a law leaving to the trial judge the sole power to pass upon motions to continue, and denying the Supreme Court the power to grant a new trial on account of alleged error in so doing. Perhaps the most effective law yet enacted with a view to the prevention of lynching is a Virginia statute making the crime of assault with attempt to commit rape punishable with death or imprisonment, at the discretion of the jury. The object of the law is not to secure the extreme penalty for an attempt to commit outrage, but rather to provide against failure to convict and to lessen in some degree the terrible ordeal which the victim of the outrage must undergo in court. That the juries of the State have not abused the power thus placed in their hands is evident from the fact that while 95 convictions were secured for the crime of assault during the past four years, only eight persons suffered the death-penalty.

Taking in the entire field at a glance, one cannot but be struck with the fact that the laws proposed outnumber the laws enacted by a distressingly large majority. And one will suspect what is plain to every observer on the field that the politicians are fighting shy of the problem. It is true that not a few law-makers of the better class would gladly promote any legislation which, in their opinion, would reach the trouble, but it is an open secret that the average politician would greatly prefer to put an anti-lynching plank in the party platform as a sop to the better element -as the Georgia Democrats did in the last campaign and refrain from going on record on either side in a representative capacity.

That nothing has yet been done to secure the conviction of lynchers is the most discouraging fact connected with the problem. It is, in the nature of things, impossible to secure a jury in a community where lynch law is epidemic that will bring in an indictment against their law-breaking neighbors for taking the life of a criminal. If they are not in sympathy with the lynchers they are afraid of them, and either sympathy or fear is sufficient to blind them to the facts. It is becoming more and more apparent that there is no short method of reaching lynchers in an unenlightened community under a democratic form of government. If lawlessness is to cease in such communities it must cease through the personal efforts of the few intelligent citizens who live in them. There is no community in the South without its intelligent citizen, and there is no intelligent citizen upon whom does not rest the responsibility for the prevalence of lax views of law among his less enlightened neighbors.

But right here one touches what the South

erner calls the weak spot in his make-up. He does not, as a rule, feel deeply the responsibilities of citizenship. The Northerner is impressed with the idea of the common good. The Southerner is impressed with the idea of attending to his own business and letting other people's alone. The Northerner is a Roman, ready to sink individuality out of sight for the state; the Southerner is a Greek, whose highest ideal is not a perfect state, but a perfect man. The intelligent Southerner sits under his own vine and fig-tree and does not presume to teach his neighbor anything. There are hundreds of well-to-do farmers, college-bred men of unmistakable talent, living in out-of-theway communities of the South, who have never moved a thumb to exert either an intellectual or a moral influence upon the ignorant masses around them. It is not selfishness-no people ever opened their granaries wider to the poor or enjoyed social intercourse more; it is individualism-the natural product of long years of independent agricultural life in thinly settled communities.

Another need which appears equally clear to the Southern mind, though it may not be as readily recognized by the observer from without, is a trumpet-blast from the Northern press on the subject of negro crime-a blast that will be heard by every negro who has the interest of his race at heart. It is time for Northern philanthropy to suggest to negro educators that future help will depend in some degree upon the earnestness which they shall manifest in trying to secure better behavior among their people. There are worthy leaders of the race who need no exhortation on the subject, but there are thousands of intelligent negroes who are more interested in negro mentality than in negro morality. Thus far the main object of the friends of the negro in the North has been to stir up the better element in the South to take some action for the protection of the blacks against mob violence. Naturally, with such an object in view the stress has been placed upon the crime of lynching, while negro crime which so often leads to lynching has received little serious notice. It does not seem to have occurred to Northern editors that their utterances on the subject of lynching are promptly echoed by the negro pulpits of the South, and that to the mind of the average negro the comparative silence of his friends in the North on the subject of his crime leaves him free to do as he pleases; while such statements as that made by a New England paper that the prevailing epidemic of assault is a divine judgment sent upon the whites of the South relieves him of all responsibility in the premises. If the Northern editor imagines that negroes as a race realize the enormity of their crimes, and especially of the crime of assault

and do not need to be reminded of it, let him recall the negro's past-the years of slavery here and the centuries of savagery across the sea: surely these did not teach him virtue or regard for the honor of woman. We have wronged the negro in many things, but in nothing more cruelly than in assuming that there is a nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon beneath his colored skin.

And that sentence brings me to a matter which has been too often overlooked in discussions of this sort. We are demanding of the negro a harvest where we have not sown.

When the war ended, the extravagant conceit that education is the remedy for all human ills was still in the air, and naturally it was determined that the emancipated race should be given the full benefit of the newly discovered blessing. What has been the result? To-day fully ninetenths of the men who are best qualified to lead the race are teaching school. What does this mean? Simply that the men who have been qualified for leadership (with a few notable exceptions) are not leading the race. They are not leading it for the reason that the center of influence in the negro world is not the school-room, but the pulpit. (It seems not to have occurred to the early educators of the colored people that the pulpit was the oracle and motor of the race and would continue 'so to be while the negro retained his religious nature.) And so it has come to pass that while there has been gratifying progress along intellectual lines, the material advancement of the negro has been seriously hindered by his lack of opportunity for moral progress. For after all that has been said of the noble men who adorn the negro pulpit, the fact remains that the great majority of colored preachers are wholly unfit for the places of influence which they occupy, and that the kind of moral teaching the masses of the people get continues to be the greatest obstacle to the development of family life-the greatest need of the race. No one who is familiar with the condition of the average negro home expects negro crime to materially decrease until the pulpit the moral fountain of the race-is cleansed; and there is little hope for the improvement of the pulpit so long as the best-equipped young negroes are urged to enter other callings.

The indifferent attitude of white people toward the young negro is another serious hindrance to his moral progress. Southerners are not indifferent to the old-time darky "- -a type now nearly extinct-but they feel no interest in the new negro. They pay their taxes to send him to school, but they pay them for conscience' sake and not with any lively interest in his future. The fact is, the majority of them believe that there is no future in him. This is a more serious

matter than one who is unfamiliar with the negro character would imagine. It is often said that the new negroes are not drawn to the white people as their fathers were; but while they stand aloof there is nothing which an aspiring youth of the better type desires so much as the good opinion of white people. It is nothing to him to be honored by his own race if the superior race refuses to see any difference between him and the low mass from which he has risen. That is all he is complaining of-that we insist on counting him in the unclean mass. We do not encourage him to lead a virtuous life. He no longer asks for social equality--he no longer wants it; but what he does want and what he has the right to ask is a recognition of the lines which his own strivings and the strivings of others of his sort are making in the race. He wants to be distinguished from those who do not strive. To adopt his own phrase, he wants to be distinguished from a "nigger. It is time for the people of the South (and the people of the North, for that matter) to accord to him this right. It is time we were putting a premium upon virtue for the young negro, employing virtuous negroes preferably to others, and in every way possible showing the new generation that the colored youth who strives to rise is held in honor by the white race.

:

3.

To sum up Not to mention the special legislation that may be needed in some of the States to secure a better enforcement of the laws in existence, these six things ought to be done for the prevention of lynch-law epidemics: 1. Execu tive officials should be chosen with regard for their personal courage. It is not enough to know how the candidate stands on the law the question is whether he can be depended upon to stand by the law. 2. The intelligent citizens of the South should individually undertake to awaken in their neighbors a higher regard for law. The papers of the two sections should exchange texts, and the Northern press should preach against negro crime and the Southern press should preach against lawlessness and race prejudice. The good that has been already accomplished by the few papers that have made this exchange ought to encourage the rest to follow their example. 4. Southern newspapers should omit from their news columns the suggestive details of lynchings as well as the inflammatory details of assaults. 5. The higher education of negroes should be pushed with a view to supplying the demand for capable teachers of righteousness for the race. 6. The South should take the worthy young negro by the hand as earnestly as the mob has taken the unworthy negro by the neck, and encourage him in all high endeavor, that the race may not be without salt to save it.

THERM

HE State of Missouri is to put a new ballot law into execution at the election for Congressmen and State officers this fall, and in St. Louis the board of election commissioners is planning to teach by a novel method the election officers and voters of the city how to handle the ballot quickly and accurately. Schools of instruction are being established in the various wards. They will be in charge of the commissioners and their assistants, and election officers, political workers, and citizens generally will be asked to attend them and inform themselves as to the new law, which will be explained with the aid of blackboards and ballot charts. This plan was ployed by the commissioners of St. Louis during the summer and fall preceding the last Presidential election with excellent results.

ELECTION OFFICERS GENERALLY UNTAUGHT.

em

Generally election officers in large cities get no drill when new ballot laws are to be enforced. They get from the election boards copies of the election laws and sometimes circulars of instruction, which they seldom read and hardly ever understand when they do read them. The voter gets not even this information, and relies on his intelligence and the newspapers for the information that will enable him to cast a ballot that will not be void through faulty preparation. The consequence of this is that the officials in the polls quarrel, voters get confused, legal ballots in large numbers are thrown out in the counts, and a law is credited with being ineffective when, in truth, its enforcement is inefficient. The worst of this unintelligent canvass of the vote, too, is that the ballots that are hard to understand and are rejected by the counting officers are the split tickets, those cast by the independent voter. Straight party tickets cause no dispute and are counted. I know that in New York, Brooklyn, and Chicago the officers of election are not properly informed as to their duties, and I have no reason to believe, with all the information I can get, that it is otherwise in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, and in San Francisco, or even in Boston, where I have found in most respects the most careful and modern system of election machinery in the United

States. I have spent some time looking into the election systems of the three cities just named, by correspondence and by talking with the election officers as to their duties, and last November I went to a score of the polls in New York and Brooklyn to watch the conduct of the election officers and talk with them. In these two places a much better class of men has been got since the system of examinations was adopted, the year before the last Presidential election, but this plan is not thorough and does not teach as it is intended to do. No man of ordinary intelligence who has had no experience as a ballot officer can read an election manual and from it learn to register voters and receive and count ballots. It goes without saying that this lack of careful training of election officers is equally conspicuous in smaller places.

MISSOURI'S BALLOT REFORM.

In the summer of 1895 the Legislature of Missouri abolished the whole system of ballot laws that had governed elections in St. Louis, and adopted one radically different, modeled upon the laws of New York and Illinois. Under the old laws, elections in St. Louis were managed by a recorder of voters, appointed by the governor ; and as the State has been Democratic ever since the days of reconstruction, this official was always a partisan Democrat. He supervised the regular and primary elections and appointed the counting and returning officers, registration being managed by his clerks. He was vested with great powers, very dangerous ones, and grave election scandals grew out of the system. The new law replaced the recorder of voters by a board of election commissioners, two Democrats and one Republican, giving the Republican the right to appoint three of the six officers in each precinct; and these six officers had to register the voters of the precinct as well as receive and count their votes afterward, registration and election being conducted in the same place for each precinct. law further ordered the commissioners to efface even the remnants of the old election system by dividing the city into smaller precincts and mak ing an entirely new registration of the voters.

The

AROUSING NEGLIGENT VOTERS.

The commissioners began this work by making a census of the voters of the city. Thirty active and experienced men were employed, and an inquiry from house to house was made-on foot in the thickly settled parts of the city and by bicycle and buggy and on horseback in the outlying wards, daily reports being made by each. canvasser to the commissioners. When the new law was made there were only 82,929 voters registered in the 189 precincts. The canvass, which took six months, gave the election commissioners a map showing the number of males of voting age in each block of the city, numbering in all 148,769. Thousands of these men had never voted nor registered and many of them owned property. Most of these told the canvassers that they had not registered because it took too much time and trouble to go to the central office for the purpose, but it was not uncommon for them to say that they had no interest in politics and did not want to invite annoyance from political agents by registering. The canvass showed the politicians that their work in the past toward getting out the vote of the city had been of the most superficial kind and that their campaign plans under the new law would have to differ from those on which they had been depending.

The election commissioners, dividing the city into precincts, each with fewer than 400 voters,

had maps printed, showing the number of voters on each block, and distributed them to party committees, ward clubs, and independent civic associations, all of which went at once to canvassing for their respective objects. The voters of the city had never been so stirred, and it was apparent that an enormous vote would be polled at the Presidential election.

INTRODUCING ELECTION SCHOOLS.

At this point of the campaign the commissioners began to realize that they would have to adopt unusual means of explaining the new law to the election officers and the public, and they decided to go out in the wards and lecture. They knew it would be entirely useless to try by circulars or by any system of examinations to teach the 2,600 poll officers who were to be appointed how to pass on the qualifications of an applicant for registration and to do the accurate clerical work and precinct canvassing insisted on by the law. Moreover, recent decisions of the court had increased the difficulty of correctly voting the quasi Australian ballot that has been used in Missouri since 1889, by forbidding the election officers to count the ballots in accordance with the intention of the voter, no matter how clear it seemed, and defining a legal ballot rigidly; and it seemed absolutely necessary that officers should be taught plainly what a legal ballot was. Of course the ideal plan would have been to make these talks

from a non-partisan standpoint, but the commissioners doubted the wisdom of bringing large parties of men of opposite politics together in a heated campaign, and carried on their schools at different places. It must not be inferred from this, however, that the commissioners and assistants who did the teaching disagreed in their interpretation of the law or taught different things. At intervals during the school season the commissioners and the assistants who did the teaching met and exchanged ideas and agreed upon certain constructions to be placed on ambiguities of the law.

NO TRUANT OFFICERS NEEDED.

From the beginning the schools of instruction succeeded in their object. The equipment of the school was

simple. The lecturer carried in one bundle a cloth prepared for chalk, like a blackboard, about 20 feet long and 5 feet wide, ruled and lettered in white to represent a page of the registration book which the election officers had

TEACHING A FEW NEGROES.

to use, and in another parcel several large sheets of tough paper showing by broad charcoal strokes a legal ballot and every variation from it that a voter might make. A package of block maps of the ward, a number of copies of the law, a hammer, big-headed tacks, and chalk in coat pockets, a clear head and nerves in good condition, and the lecturer was ready. When he got to the hall he tacked up his blackboard and ballots, put his maps and laws on a table, and announced that he wanted some man in the hall to stand up and be registered. Ten minutes of registering those who stood up, and he went to the ballots, which he talked about for a few minutes more. Then he would say: "Is there anything about the ballot or registration that you do not understand?"

The next hour or two hours was a great strain on the teacher. The men who came to these meetings were keen, anxious to know, and practical to the last degree. They asked questions that had to be answered quickly and authoritatively, and that answer became to them a rule by which a voter would be registered or not or a ballot would be counted or not. I have left a meeting, in a hall where the temperature was only fifty degrees, wet with perspiration and drained of vi

tality. I had studied the whole detail of the new law closely with the board's lawyer before I undertook a school, and after the first one I informed myself thoroughly upon the naturalization laws also, finding that the questions bore on them also. I feel mildly proud to think that in all the talks I made, about fifty, I was only twice unequal to a question. Once a young man asked:

"If a boy comes to the United States with his father and is a minor when his father is naturalized, does that make him a citizen?"

"Yes," I said.

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Well, if the father dies without being naturalized and the mother marries a man who is a citizen, does that make a citizen of the boy?"

Congress has never provided for a case of this kind. I had to say I did not know what the position of this boy was, and advised the youth to take out minor papers. At another time a man asked me :

"What is the difference between a householder and a freeholder?"

"None," I said, and was promptly corrected by a lawyer among those present.

No call was neglected.

Whenever

a ward club or any organization asked for a lecturer a commissioner or an assistant went. One night I took my packages and went to a hall on the outskirts of the city, where I expected to meet the negro voters of the ward. The president of the club which had asked me to come, an old man who to Stephen Foster would have suggested instantly some plaintive melody, met me with the grateful remark:

"I'm mighty glad you're come, Mr. Commissioner. I tell you, suh, this is another star in my crown of glory."

The hall was small and badly lighted with lamps. We waited an hour, while now and then a man dropped in. I put up my blackboard and charts and began talking when there were fewer than a score of men in the hall, four of them on the platform. A few more dropped in during the evening. The president beamed delight, but asked no questions, nor did any of the others. It afterward appeared that the enemies of the president, conspiring to dim the brilliancy of his crown, had busied themselves to keep people away from the meeting and had got up a rival one with beer and sandwiches in abundance.

On the other hand, several of the ward meetings had to be held in theaters to accommodate the people who applied for admission. The ordi