So long as the negro race was in bondage to the white race, then, not only were the inciting causes of negro lynching largely held in check, but such provisions were made for the trial and punishment of miscreant slaves that resort to lynching was wholly without justification. Even after the anti-slavery agitation had begun in the early thirties and summary measures were occasionally taken against negro offenders, justification was claimed on the ground of the incendiary publications and utterances of the abolitionists rather than the specific crimes committed by the blacks. The fact that during the period of slavery, in the case of the raping of white women, as well as of other crimes, the law was generally allowed to take its course, goes far toward refuting the argument that lynching is necessary to repress crime among the negroes in the South to-day. History has shown it to be a fundamental mistake to assume that illegal and summary procedure against a particular offense will deter from that offense. As one writer has very forcibly said, if an argument based on this assumption were put into plain language, it would read: “Let past crime be met with present crime in order that future crime may be prevented.”[266] All revengeful dealing with crime has increased crime rather than lessened it. The only deterrent from crime that men have found is the prompt and certain and solemn punishment by law, sustained and supported by a confident, unyielding body of public opinion.[267] The attempt to justify the lynching of negroes on the plea that lynching for rape committed upon white women is necessary to repress that crime is without support in any respect. Frederick Douglass lessened the force of this plea very considerably when he pointed out that there have been three distinct excuses offered for the persecution of negroes in the United States. First, it was because of insurrections; then, it was the fear of negro domination and supremacy; then, when neither of these was any longer defensible as an excuse, the crime of assault upon white women was put forward to justify their persecution.[268] The fact that not more than thirty-four per cent of the negroes lynched in the last twenty-two years have been lynched for that crime likewise vitiates such a plea of justification. The facts as known indicate that lynching for that crime, instead of having a repressive influence, has directly stimulated its perpetration. Assaults on white women have occurred again and again immediately following a lynching for such crime, and they have so occurred in the same neighborhood where the lynching took place.[269] It has been publicly stated that in one instance a negro who had witnessed a lynching for this crime actually committed an assault on his way home.[270]