I have called attention to the fact that the lynching town nearly always has a previous bad record of homicide. Disregard for the sacredness of human life seems to be in the air of these places. Springfield was no exception. Between January 1, 1902, and March 7, 1904, the day of the lynching, a little more than two years, no fewer than ten homicides were committed in the city of Springfield. White men committed five of these crimes and Negroes five. Three of the cases were decided within a short time before the lynching and the punishment administered was widely criticised. Bishop, a coloured man who had killed a coloured man, was fined $200 and sentenced to six months in the workhouse. This was for _killing a man_. O'Brien, a white man, who killed a white man, got one year in the penitentiary. And only a week before the lynching, Schocknessy, a white man who killed a white man, but who had influential political friends, went scott-free! On the morning after the Collis murder, the _Daily Sun_ published a list of the recent homicides in Springfield in big type on its first page and asked editorially: "What are you going to do about it?" It then answered its own question: "Nothing." The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its headlines: AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS _They Have Temporised With the Criminal Classes Until Patience was Exhausted_ I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law--with corrupt politics, vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice. _Gathering of the Lynching Mob_