It is a peculiar situation when the United States can thus be called upon to pay indemnities for lynchings and yet cannot take steps in the several States to prevent their occurrence and cannot in any way hold the State governments responsible. That this defect in the federal constitution should be remedied seems, from this standpoint, wholly desirable. It is very doubtful, however, whether such an object could be accomplished at the present time, and still more doubtful whether a federal law could be enacted and enforced against lynching at the present time, without reviving the sectionalism and many of the evils of the Reconstruction Period. When Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire offered a resolution in the 57th Congress that the Committee on the Judiciary be directed to make an inquiry into the subject of lynchings and to report whether there be any remedy for the evil, his reference to a recent lynching in a Southern State was instantly resented by the senators from that State, and the course which the debate took upon the resolution made it apparent at once that an attempt to make such an investigation would be an unwise step. The matter was dropped by Senator Gallinger’s making the request that the resolution lie on the table subject to his call.[329] Of the numerous proposals that have been made for reform in the system of legal procedure in the United States, as a remedy for lynching, none is more noteworthy or fundamental than that put forward by Justice Brewer of the United States Supreme Court. He argues that men are afraid of the law’s delays and the uncertainty of its results; that if all were sure that the guilty ones would be promptly tried and punished, the inducement to lynch would be largely taken away. He suggests, therefore, the taking away of the right of appeal in criminal cases as one means of checking lynching.[330]