LYNCH LAW

With the crime statistics for 1921 completed, the Dyer Bill, aimed to end lynching, becomes a prominent issue. The figures reveal not only that this form of public murder has increased during the past year; they show that during the last thirty-six years well over four thousand men in this country have been deliberately taken from the shelter of justice and put to death at the hands of angry mobs. Such a record compares only too favorably with the list of actual murders.

Whether the Dyer Bill, or any man-made law, can cure an ill in the very nature of man, is a matter of doubt. When a negro has committed the crime of assault the usual cause of lynchings--the white man's instinct tells him that no penalty can be too severe, and an appeal to reason is futile. His natural resentment, fired by mob spirit and an underlying antagonism to the negro race, flares up uncontrolled. No matter how thoroughly he may agree, in a dispassionate mood, to every man's right of fair trial; no matter how well he may know that the offender will be punished by the courts, all that is forgotten in the heat of the moment.

Nevertheless, the proposed law may have a desirable influence, even if it cannot be literally enforced. The fear that not he alone, but his government, will be punished for his hot-headedness, and the realization that his community will be disgraced in the eyes of the world, should act as a restraining influence upon any man. That is perhaps the real value of any law--not the individual punishment it inflicts, but the standard of right and wrong which it sets up for men to recognize and follow.

At present, lynching is looked upon by a large class, especially in the South, as a wholly just and honorable institution. When the Democratic Representatives, just before Christmas, blocked action on the Dyer Bill, they professed to object only to its form; but as a matter of fact, underneath their arguments was a defense of the practice itself. Such an attitude, to the unprejudiced, can admit of no defense. Lynching is a flagrant crime against reason and justice. It stands as a symbol of America's barbarism in the eyes of civilized nations. President Harding, not long ago, stated his hopes for the negro race, with emphasis on their right to equal justice. As long as lynching persists, that right is denied them, and racial antipathy will be kept open. If the Dyer Bill is defeated, it must be only because a more effective remedy has been produced. If it is passed, even though imperfect, it will at least have the value of putting on this crime the solemn stamp of the nation's disapproval.