“I am well aware that in touching upon this point I am wounding the sensibilities of a people who have been shadowed by personal injury and embittered by a natural race prejudice; but I feel that I can speak the more boldly because I touch the matter not as an alien whose sympathies are foreign and whose theories are theoretical chimeras, but as a southerner--one whose interest is the stronger because he is a southerner. My audience may refuse to grant the justice of my argument, but it must admit the truth of the situation I outline. Whichever way we turn the tremendous problem of the lynching evil stares us in the face. It baits us, it defies us, it shames us. “Think of it! More than one thousand human lives forfeited to Judge Lynch form the South’s record for the past ten years. What a horrible record! It seems almost incredible that such lawlessness can exist in communities supposed to be civilized. Would to God it were but an evil dream and that I could to-day assure the world that this terrible condition is but the unfounded imagining of a nightmared mind. “Lynching is a peculiarly revolting form of murder, and to tolerate it is to pave the way for anarchy and barbarism. It cannot be truthfully denied that one of the most potent factors militating against the progress of this country is this frequent resort to illegal execution, and before we can realize the full benefits of your natural inheritance, your laws--our laws--must be impartially enforced, property must be protected, and life sacredly guarded by rigid legal enforcement, backed by an elevated public conception of duty. “It is no greater crime for one man to seize a brother man and take his life than it is for a lawless multitude to do the same act. The first, if there be any difference, is less criminal than the latter for it, at least often has the merit of individual courage and the plea for revenge on the ground of personal injury. But when a man is deprived of his liberty by incarceration in the jail and thus shorn of his power of self protection, it is the acme of dishonor and cowardice to wrest him from the grasp of the law and deprive him of his life upon evidence that possibly might not convict him before a jury. “I do not wish to be understood as saying that brave and good men do not sometimes, under strong excitement, participate in this outrage against human rights and organized society, for it is a fact that such rebellions are not infrequently led by the most prominent citizens, and, from this very fact, it is the more to be deplored.