it not for the paternal
restrictions imposed by such laws, the downward course of the negro race
would doubtless have outrun considerably the speed it has actually
attained.

Besides the crimes which spring from racial tendencies, there is a
peculiar class of crimes springing largely from race prejudice and
hatred. These are lynchings and mob violence. The United States presents
the paradox of a nation where respect for law and constitutional forms
has won most signal triumphs, yet where concerted violations of law have
been most widespread. By a queer inversion of thought, a crime committed
jointly by many is not a crime, but a vindication of justice, just as a
crime committed by authority of a nation is not a crime, but a virtue.
Such crimes have not been continuous, but have arisen at times out of
acute racial antagonisms. The Knownothing agitation of 1850 to 1855,
which prevailed among religious and patriotic Americans, was directed
against the newly arrived flood of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and
was marked by a state of lawlessness and mob rule such as had never
before existed, especially in the cities of Boston, New York, Pittsburg,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Baltimore.[100] These subsided or changed
their object under the oncoming slavery crisis, and the Civil War itself
was a grand resort to violence by the South on a question of race
domination. Beginning again with the Kuklux and White-cap uprisings in
the seventies, mob rule drove the negroes back to a condition of
subordination, but the lawless spirit then engendered has continued to
show itself in the annual lynching of fifty to one hundred and fifty
negroes suspected or convicted of the more heinous crimes.[101] Nor has
this crime of the mob been restricted to the South, but it has spread to
the North, and has become almost the accepted code of procedure
throughout the land wherever negroes are heinously accused. In the
Northern instances this vengeance of the mob is sometimes wreaked on the
entire race, for in the North the negro is more assertive, and defends
his accused brother. But in the South the mob usually, though not
always, stops with vengeance on the individual guilty, or supposedly
guilty, since the race in general is already cowed.

Other races suffer at the hands of mobs, such as the Chinese in Wyoming
and California at the hands of American mine workers, Italians in
Louisiana and California at the hands of citizens and laborers, Sl