This is the reasoning of many of the men chosen as jurors; I heard it over and over again, not only in Huntsville but, in substance, everywhere that I stopped in the South: "If we convict these men for lynching the Negro, Maples, we shall establish a precedent that will prevent us from lynching for the crime of rape." Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to this question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen--the very highest--if he believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, "No." Ask him about lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will instantly weaken. "If my sister or my daughter--look here, if your sister or your daughter----" Lynching, he says, is absolutely necessary to keep down this crime. You ask him why the law cannot be depended upon, and he replies: "It is too great an ordeal for the self-respecting white woman to go into court and accuse the Negro ravisher and withstand a public cross-examination. It is intolerable. No woman will do it. And, besides, the courts are uncertain. Lynching is the only remedy." Yet the South is deeply stirred over the prevalence of lynching. The mob spirit, invoked to punish such a crime as rape, is defended by some people in the North as well as in the South; but once invoked, it spreads and spreads, until to-day lynching for rape forms only a very small proportion of the total number of mob hangings. It spreads until a Negro is lynched for chicken stealing, or for mere "obnoxiousness." In the year 1903, out of 103 lynchings, only 11 were for rape and 10 for attempted rape, while 47 were for murder, 15 for complicity in murderous assault, 4 for arson, 5 for mere "race prejudice," 2 for insults to whites, 1 for making threats, 5 for unknown offenses, 1 for refusing to give information, and 3 were wholly innocent Negroes, lynched because their identity was mistaken. It is probable that lynching in the South would immediately be wiped out, if it were not for the question of rape. You will hear the problem put by thinking Southerners very much in this fashion: "We must stop mob-law; every month we recognise that fact more clearly. But can we stop mob-law unless we go to the heart of the matter and stop lynching for rape? Is there not a way of changing our methods of legal procedure so that the offender in this crime can be punished without subjecting the victim to the horrible publicity of the courts?" _Governor Cunningham--A Real Leader_