The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable cotton crops, is highly prosperous--all influences working toward the solution of this problem. When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the South was lawless and did not care--an impression that arises from the wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs, and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the surface--an account of which I have given. I came away from the South deeply impressed with two things: That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming _its_ peculiar forms. II.--LYNCHING IN THE NORTH Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and illuminating. Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern towns exactly as in the South, the two classes of Negroes: the steady, resident class, more or less known to the whites, and a restless, unstable, ignorant class, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build a bridge, and going elsewhere to-morrow to dig a canal. For years no such thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the typesetters in a publishing house compelled the discharge of Negro workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen