invite the certain death which awaited him
outside that cordon of police if he had told the truth and shown the
letters he had from the white woman in the case.

Col. A.S. Colyar, of Nashville, Tenn., is so overcome with the horrible
state of affairs that he addressed the following earnest letter to the
_Nashville American_.

Nothing since I have been a reading man has so impressed me with the
decay of manhood among the people of Tennessee as the dastardly
submission to the mob reign. We have reached the unprecedented low
level; the awful criminal depravity of substituting the mob for the
court and jury, of giving up the jail keys to the mob whenever they are
demanded. We do it in the largest cities and in the country towns; we do
it in midday; we do it after full, not to say formal, notice, and so
thoroughly and generally is it acquiesced in that the murderers have
discarded the formula of masks. They go into the town where everybody
knows them, sometimes under the gaze of the governor, in the presence of
the courts, in the presence of the sheriff and his deputies, in the
presence of the entire police force, take out the prisoner, take his
life, often with fiendish glee, and often with acts of cruelty and
barbarism which impress the reader with a degeneracy rapidly approaching
savage life. That the State is disgraced but faintly expresses the
humiliation which has settled upon the once proud people of Tennessee.
The State, in its majesty, through its organized life, for which the
people pay liberally, makes but one record, but one note, and that a
criminal falsehood, "was hung by persons to the jury unknown." The
murder at Shelbyville is only a verification of what every intelligent
man knew would come, because with a mob a rumor is as good as a proof.

These efforts brought forth apologies and a short halt, but the lynching
mania was raged again through the past three months with unabated fury.

The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe
punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public
sentiment demands and sustains such action.

The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain
silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis,
accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with
the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that
neither the