If the United States had a monarchical form of government the most practicable means for the suppression of lynchings would consist merely in the publication of an edict by the monarch for the better enforcement of the law. Most lynching mobs could be easily dispersed were the officers of the law resolute and determined men intent upon protecting their prisoners and letting the law take its course; if they were responsible only to their superior officers and not more or less directly responsible to the people, and if they were not in sympathy with the mob to a greater or less degree. Our system of government, however, is in form representative and popular, and all our traditions are against a highly centralized form of government. In the United States it is therefore necessary to depend very largely upon public sentiment for a strict enforcement of the law. Lynch-law will not cease to exist in this country until there is a strong and uncompromising public sentiment against it in every community, a public sentiment which, with a full recognition of the ethnic and “societal” factors involved in the “race question,” and of the necessity for a legal system consistent with these factors instead of one based on abstract principles concerning the rights of all men, will invariably condemn lynchings because they are a crime against society, if for no other reason, and will under no circumstances countenance them because they may be the administration of deserved and well-merited punishments. LIST OF PERIODICALS CITED