In the last analysis lynch-law in this country is without any justification whatsoever. In a government founded on the idea that ultimate power and authority shall rest with the people, and in which sufficient facility has been given to the expression of the collective will of the people so that the acts of the government, the formulation of the law, and the administration of justice, ought adequately to represent this collective will, there is no tenable ground on which to vindicate the practice of punishing criminals other than by the regularly constituted courts and the officers of the law. But if circumstances and conditions be taken into consideration and the history of the practice carefully noted, it is possible to see how justification has come about through the different points of view that have been taken. From the standpoint of the frontiersmen and pioneers summary procedure in certain cases was wholly justifiable. From the standpoint of the Southerners during the period of Reconstruction summary procedure was likewise wholly justifiable. To men living in a community where a particularly brutal and barbarous crime is committed upon a white person by a negro, the prompt lynching of the negro, even with some torture and cruelty, seems entirely defensible. Thus, while we cannot justify the practice of lynching on any ground whatever, yet the fact remains that it has been repeatedly justified in one way or another. CHAPTER VIII REMEDIES In the consideration of remedies for lynching it is to the type of lynch-law procedure which prevails in well settled communities that attention is to be directed. The type of lynch-law procedure which is characteristic of a frontier society naturally ceases to exist with the disappearance of that unorganized form of society. The changed social conditions incident to an increasing density of the population in a frontier region, and the establishment of a regular and adequate judiciary, remove every cause for the existence of the frontier type of lynch-law. The rapid colonization of the western section of the United States has thus made that phase of the lynching question no longer a serious matter. But how to put an end to the practice of lynching in older communities possessing well established civil regulations is a problem for which the people of the United States have not yet found a satisfactory solution.