ious factor behind many
very vital notions and ideas. Is it not true that international law
has been, more often than not, a law between white men?

The next point I hesitate somewhat to make because it is difficult to
state without over-emphasis and without saying more than one means. I
think it probable that in one way or another the idea of Christianity
became connected with the notion of the blood kin and in that sense
limited to the blood kin of those to whom Jesus came. Everyone is
familiar with the Jewish notion that Jesus was their own particular
Messiah, and that the Gentiles were foreclosed claims upon him. As
Christianity grew, it grew still among the white nations, and the
notion of it was not, I think, extended for a good many centuries to
any except white people. The premises of Christianity unquestionably
included the Negro, but the notion of the blood kin excluded him, and
Christianity, like other religious ideas, was limited to the people
who first created it and to those who were actually or by some
plausible fiction their kin in blood. The idea of the expansion of the
blood kin by adoption either of an individual or of a community of
individuals was very old and thoroughly well established, but I think
the idea never was applied to Negroes, Indians, or Chinamen except in
unfrequent cases of individuals. A volume would be required to bring
forward all the available evidence regarding this idea, and another
perhaps to examine and develop it, to consider and weigh the _pros_
and meet the _cons_. But it will perhaps suffice for present purposes
to throw out the idea for consideration without an attempt at more
considerable defense.

Another fact which has been most difficult to explain has been the
continued lynchings of Negroes not merely for crimes against women,
but for all sorts of other crimes, large and small. Here the traces of
primitive law are very much clearer. Lynching is after all nothing
more nor less than the old self-help. The original notion was that the
individual should execute the law himself when he could, and that he
was entitled in case of crime to assistance from the community in the
execution of the law upon the offender. Murder, arson, rape and the
theft of cattle were the particular crimes for which self-help by the
individual and by the community in his assistance were authorized by
primitive law. The preliminaries and formularies were very definite,
but they do not look to us