Listen to this out of the depths of one Southern woman's experience: "I stood once with other friends, who were trying to nurse her back to life and reason, by the bedside of a girl--a beautiful, gentle, high-born creature--who had been outraged. We were using all the skill and tact and tenderness at our command. It seemed impossible for her to have one hour's peaceful sleep. She would start from slumber with a shriek, look at us with dilated eyes, then clutch us and beg for help. But the most unspeakable pity of it all was her loathing for her own body; her prayers that she might die and her body be burned to ashes. I heard her physician say to an officer who came to take her deposition: 'I would be signing that girl's death warrant if I let you in there to make her tell that horrible story over again.' When a grim group came with some negroes they wanted to bring before her for identification, her brothers and her lover said: 'Only over our dead bodies.'" Lynching is inexcusable, even for this crime, which is comparable to no other, and to which murder is a trifle. So we may coolly argue when the blow has not fallen upon ourselves or at our own door. When it has, we think there's a wolf abroad and we have lambs. Those to whom the wrecked woman is dear are quiveringly alive to her irreparable wrong. The victim has rights, they argue; if, unhappily for herself, she survive the outrage, she is entitled to what poor remnants of reason may be left her; it is naturally their whole care to preserve her from memories that sear and craze, and from rehearsal before even the most private tribunal, of events that the merciful, even if not of her blood, must wish her to forget. Under such strain, men see as the one thing imperative the prompt and informal removal from existence of the offender, whom they look upon, not as man, but beast or fiend. The "poor white" is the most frequent sufferer from assault; the wife of the small farmer attending household duties in her isolated home while her husband is in the fields or otherwise absent about his work; or the small farmer's daughter when she goes to the spring for water, or to the meadow for the cows, or trudges a lonely road or pathway to school; these are more convenient material than the lady of larger means and higher station, who is more rarely unattended. In cases on record the ravished and slain were children, five, six, eight years old; in others, mothers with babies at their breasts, and the babies were slain with the mothers. Here is a case cited by Judge M. L. Dawson: A negro raped and slew a farmer's five-year-old child. Arrested, tried, convicted, appealed, sentence reversed, reappealed (on insanity plea); people took him out and hung him.