The tendency toward public disorder has existed in this country from its earliest settlement, and as the line of the frontier has slowly moved westward there has always been a region on the border where the forces of law were unorganized. There has thus been a constant opportunity for a plea of necessity in certain cases for resorting to the popular execution of justice. In recent years the customary explanations of lynchings attribute them to mob rule, emotional insanity of the crowd, race prejudice, contempt for the “niggers,” intense community feeling, vivid hatred of crime, _lex talionis_ and the like. It is often asserted that lynchings occur because the courts are slow, uncertain, and unduly sympathetic with the rights of the accused, because corrupt jurymen, shrewd lawyers, the technicalities of the law or the undue sympathies of the pardoning powers frequently prolong and save a guilty person’s life. While it is true on psychological grounds that punishment to be effective must be prompt and certain, and while such explanations have validity in particular cases, the fundamental explanation lies deeper. It is to be found in the peculiar and distinctively American attitude toward those institutions connoted by the term “the law.”[342] There is a readiness on the part of the people in the United States to take the law into their own hands which is not found in other countries, and the consequent immunity from punishment which is generally accorded to lynchers renders an American mob exceedingly open to the suggestion of lynching. It is on such grounds that the existence of lynching as a peculiarly American institution is to be explained. Such are the conditions and such has been the conception of the law which has fostered a public sentiment in the United States excusing and apologizing for lynchings. The writer of a book published in London in 1837 was not far wrong when he wrote: “The Lynch law, is not, properly speaking, an opposition to the established laws of the country, or, is at least, not contemplated as such by its adherents; but rather as a supplement to them,—a species of _common_ law, which is as old as the country.”[343]