The lynching of negroes in recent years can be justified on no other ground than that the law as formulated and administered has proved inadequate to deal with the situation—that there has been governmental inefficiency. Not that guilty negroes frequently escape conviction in the Southern courts, or that they fail to receive punishment to the full extent of the law, but rather that the law and its administration seem utterly unsuited to the function of dealing with negro criminals. A judicial system adapted to a highly civilized and cultured race is not equally applicable to a race of inferior civilization, and the failure to realize this fact and act upon it, by making special provision for the control of the negro population in the Southern States since slavery was abolished, is a fundamental reason for the disrepute into which legal procedure has fallen as regards negroes accused of offenses against the whites.[271] The mistakes of Reconstruction times are not yet blotted out in the South. Abstractions still control where racial characteristics, circumstances, and conditions should be the determining factors. Ever since the Civil War the Southern people have been blindly groping after some system other than slavery whereby two races of widely different interests and attainments can live together in peace and harmony under a republican form of government, and at the same time a vast number of Northern people have been misinterpreting their motives and watching every move with a critical and suspicious eye, ready at any moment to shout across Mason and Dixon’s line that the negroes must have their rights under the Constitution of the United States and the amendments thereto.[272] Under such conditions it has been practically impossible for the South to find a satisfactory solution of its problem, and herein lies all the justification that can be found for the use of summary measures in dealing with the increasing criminality which has manifested itself in the younger generations of the colored race.