Salt Lake Telegram | 1924-03-30 | Page 14 | Timely Topics Fewer Lynchings

0 0 0 I TIMELY TOPICS I p 0 0 FEWER Willie While the twenty eight lynching lynching- in n the United States lor tor last year rear are black enough there Is a silver linIng to the cloud doud In the fact that the record L Is the lowest in hi The years explanation is ig to be bt i found not in the fear of ot possible legislation but in ir L the power of ot public opinion which Jias as been enlisted I on the side of law and order The lynching habit in America was not due to an Inherent depravity in the American people but came down from the days of ot pioneering when society Inadequately organized was forced to take the law into its own hands It is not riot a sectional vice for in in the old day days in the western country horse and cattle thieves dangling dan dan- gling from ropes in the forest were commonplace And It is significant too that public sentiment has hag been aroused not because ot of the Uie Isolated instances in In stances of lynching In Southern states but because of the violence of mobs bent on murder In the northern northern north north- em ern city where Lincoln sleeps in the city of Chicago where Lincoln was wa nominated for the presidency in East St. St Louis and elsewhere in the North North- where racial hate was the motive The difference between the Southern and our Northern mobs has hat been that In the South they have centered usually P on a single ingie culprit while in the North the mob has hat I struck indiscriminately at a race raco And it is Northern more than Southern mobs moos that thai have shocked the nation Into a a. realization that l lynching a man means lynching the law law and and that c civilization c cannot exist where the law is lynched i The Evening World