In 1843 the practice of employing lynch-law in frontier settlements was justified in the following way: “Until the law ... is completely established the Lynch tribunals assert a concurrent jurisdiction, so to speak, with the ordinary courts; and this jurisdiction they preserve until the population loses the habit of resorting thereto, and acquires that of confiding in the protection afforded by the legal tribunals; a change of habit which takes place, we believe, as soon as those tribunals have power to protect. In a new and thinly peopled country every man feels that he may at any time be called upon to act as his own protector. A habit of self-reliance is thus generated which time alone can convert into a habit of relying upon the law.”[227] In a book descriptive of border life in Texas, which was published in 1852, the frontier type of lynch-law received the following justification: “It is the stern primary law of self-preservation—this border custom of bringing criminals before the whole body of citizens for judgment—from which men sitting beside law-guarded hearths recoil in dismay, and hearing only its cruel side, stigmatize as the utterly unpardonable Lynch Law. Most true it is, that nothing but urgent and deplorable necessity will drive a just and merciful man to participate in its tribunals, but it is not less true that in frontier settlements, if the fear of its quick vengeance did not overawe the wicked, the innocent and peaceful would be in hourly danger of wrong and outrage.... “The wild verdicts borderers sometimes enact, in the faith that they are just and needful, sound uncouthly to those fenced round with regular courts, and must seem dreadful to Christian men accustomed to the solemn decorum with which constituted courts deal out their legal awards of chains, lashes, and hangings; yet, seen close at hand, with a knowledge of the situation of the community, and of the life and deeds of the evil-doer, many of Judge Lynch’s verdicts will appear more just and necessary than half of the sentences of the regular courts.... “Statute law is but the formal expression of what the larger community deems wisest and most just for the general welfare, the small, crude, remote settlement does the same for itself; only without writing down its enactments, and in the more summary way enforced by its peculiar situation. It has no prison houses in which to detain a criminal, no courts in which to try him, no funds wherewith to support him in long duress. If a crime is committed the accused has the whole community for judges and jury, and if he is found guilty by common suffrage they proceed to execute the verdict.”[228]