In using this record as the basis of this investigation such means as were available have been employed for purposes of correction and verification. In every case where an error was apparent, or there was any reason for doubt, the original report of the lynching has been examined in some newspaper of the proper date, either the Chicago Tribune, or the New York Times, or the New York Tribune. Only a very few points have been left unsettled because of insufficient information. The Cyclopedic Review of Current History gives confirmatory evidence for a period covering the last twelve years. It, however, mentions only the “notable crimes” and this evidence, therefore, applies to a comparatively small number of cases. For the last six months of the year 1902 a subscription to a newspaper clipping agency was maintained as a further means of determining the reliability and completeness of the Tribune record. The agency selected was an old and well established one. Instructions were given the readers to send full accounts of every lynching, together with a few editorial comments from various parts of the country. Clippings on lynchings were received from newspapers in every section of the United States. Out of the fifty-three victims of lynching given in the summary published by the Chicago Tribune for the six months, July-December, 1902, forty-six were reported by the newspaper clipping agency and no errors of any importance were shown. A few additional cases were mentioned in the clippings, but they were mainly on the border line between murder and lynching and could rightly be disregarded. Undoubtedly there are errors and inaccuracies in particular cases in the Tribune record.[207] Any one who has endeavored to sift the truth from conflicting newspaper reports will readily appreciate the difficulty of obtaining an accurate account of a lynching from such a source. For the purpose of this investigation, however, only the most general facts are required, and it is believed that in regard to these the reporter or the newspaper correspondent is less likely to indulge his imaginative powers. Furthermore, by reason of the popular excitement which usually attends lynching-bees and the extraordinary methods of execution oftentimes employed, it is fair to presume that but few lynchings escape the reporter; the details of most lynchings exhibit so clearly the journalistic idea of facts of contemporaneous human interest that the publication of such news is not often intentionally omitted. There is neither the motive nor the opportunity to keep lynchings from the newspapers that there often is in the case of suicides and murders; not only indeed is every such motive for secrecy absent, but there is usually, more or less strongly expressed, a public sentiment approving or excusing a lynching.