Compare the justification of the frontier type of lynch-law given by Owen Wister in his recent novel, “The Virginian.” After describing the lynching of some Wyoming cattle-thieves, and emphasizing the fact that “many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context,” the author puts into the mouth of “Judge Henry” these words: “They (the ordinary citizens) are where the law comes from, you see. For they chose the delegates who made the Constitution that provided for the courts. There’s your machinery. These are the hands into which ordinary citizens have put the law. So you see, at best, when they lynch they only take back what they once gave.... We are in a very bad way, and we are trying to make that way a little better until civilization can reach us. At present we lie beyond its pale. The courts, or rather the juries, into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them, no grip. They cannot hold a cattle-thief. And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this primitive, if you will, but so far from being a _defiance_ of the law, it is an _assertion_ of it—the fundamental assertion of self-governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based.”—pp. 435–436. Footnote 229: C. A. Murray: “Travels in America” (1839), II, 81. Footnote 230: Bancroft’s justification of popular tribunals and vigilance societies has been referred to above. See Chapter IV, p. 133. Footnote 231: “History of the Negro Race in America” (1883), I, 121, 131. Footnote 232: See J. A. Tillinghast: “The Negro in Africa and America”—Publications of the American Economic Association, May, 1902 (3d Ser., Vol. III, No. 2). This monograph presents an admirable historical perspective of the native characteristics and of the acquirements of the colored race in America. Footnote 233: Fanny Kemble, writing in 1838–39, attributed the “personal offensiveness” of negroes to dirt and habits of uncleanliness, asserting that the negroes had no respect for their personal appearance, and that this lack of respect was due to slavery. In her journal, these words are found: “The stench in an Irish, Scotch, Italian, or French hovel are quite as intolerable as any I ever found in any of our negro houses.” In another connection, however, when describing a certain negro named Isaac, she refers particularly to his strong physical resemblance to a monkey, and says that she is much comforted by the fact that this individual “_speaks_.” See “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation” (1863), pp. 23–24, 219.