the poor darkey. Lynching, in brief, is a
phenomenon of isolated and stupid communities, a mark of imperfect
civilization; it follows the hookworm and malaria belt; it shows itself
in inverse proportion to the number of shoot-the-chutes, symphony
orchestras, roof gardens, theatres, horse races, yellow journals and
automatic pianos. No one ever heard of a lynching in Paris, at Newport,
or in London. But there are incessant lynchings in the remoter parts of
Russia, in the backwoods of Serbia, Bulgaria and Herzegovina, in Mexico
and Nicaragua, and in such barbarous American states as Alabama, Georgia
and South Carolina.

The notion that lynching in the South is countenanced by the gentry or
that they take an actual hand in it is libelous and idiotic. The
well-born and well-bred Southerner is no more a savage than any other
man of condition. He may live among savages, but that no more makes him
a savage than an English gentleman is made one by having a place in
Wales, or a Russian by living on his estate in the Ukraine. What
Northern observers mistake for the gentry of the South, when they report
the participation of "leading citizens" in a lynching, is simply the
office-holding and commercial bourgeoisie--the offspring of the poor
white trash who skulked at home during the Civil War, robbing the widows
and orphans of the soldiers at the front, and so laying the foundations
of the present "industrial prosperity" of the section, _i.e._, its
conversion from a region of large landed estates and urbane life into a
region of stinking factories, filthy mining and oil towns, child-killing
cotton mills, vociferous chambers of commerce and other such swineries.
It is, of course, a fact that the average lynching party in Mississippi
or Alabama is led by the mayor and that the town judge climbs down from
his bench to give it his official support, but it is surely not a fact
that these persons are of the line of such earlier public functionaries
as Pickens, Troup and Pettus. On the contrary, they correspond to the
lesser sort of Tammany office-holders and to the vermin who monopolize
the public functions in such cities as Boston and Philadelphia. The
gentry, with few exceptions, have been forced out of the public service
everywhere south of the Potomac, if not out of politics. The Democratic
victory in 1912 flooded all the governmental posts at Washington with
Southerners, and they remain in power to this day, and some of them are
amon