OUR NATIONAL DISGRACE.

For more than a generation American statesmanship has persistently striven to avoid, ignore or forget an inconsistency in our American institution whose existence is a blot upon our national honor the criminal practice of lynching. Outbreaks like that which held the city of Omaha, Nebraska, in a reign of terror for nine hours, culminating in the felling of one citizen, the serious injury of at least two others, an unsuccessful attempt to lynch the Mayor of the City, and the successful lynching of a prisoner charged with a heinous crime,--are but the eruptive symptoms of a disease which has eaten into the fabric of American life.

Lynching is a denial of the right secured by law to every man accused of a crime to a fair trial before an established court. It brutalizes the communities which suffer it by breeding a spirit of lawlessness and cruelty in those young people who constantly witness barbarities unpunished and uncondensed. It blots our fair fame as a nation, for we cannot claim to be civilized until our laws are respected and enforced and our citizens secured against the hideous cruelties of which we are constantly furnishing fresh examples.

How many more such outbreaks must occur? How much longer must we congratulate ourselves upon "only 62 lynchings" for a given year, before the aroused conscience of the American people, efficiently asserting itself through Federal authority, moves to stamp out this national disgrace?

Lynching, like Slavery, has never recognized racial or geographic limits; as the fate of the Mayor of Omaha forcibly reminds us. Hundreds of white men in this country have been victims of lawlessness and mob violence; it was the lynching of a Montana labor leader that called forth President Wilson's utterance of July 26th. It cannot be confined to the South: excluding New England there is not a single section of the Union which has not been the scene of at least one lynching in the past 22 years. The evil is national in range and scope; the nation must provide the remedy.

America is the accepted spokesman of world democracy, but a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. A doctrine which breaks down at home can hardly be propagated abroad. We have passed the day of the pious slave holder who became so deeply impressed with the plea for foreign missions that he sold one of his slaves to contribute liberally to the cause. If democracy cannot control lawlessness, then democracy is a failure.

A few years ago a Turkish Ambassador was handed his passports for calling attention to the inconsistency between our national preaching and practice. Never once during the late war did the German press fail to gloat over American atrocities, while now, with the Treaty of Peace not yet signed, our Allies can hardly restrain the accusing finger at our "peculiar American practice of lynching." When it was considered that President Wilson might intervene in Ireland's behalf, it was seriously moved in the English House of Commons that a committee be appointed to investigate and report upon the American institution of lynching, while only this past week a Boston paper publishes a reprint from a French daily expressing astonishment and horror at this "relic of barbarism in America."

The practice of lynching does not prevail in Canada, nor in England and France. How long must America be compelled to accept the reproach:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye--"