“My friends, have you never thought to what this practice may lead? Has the frequency of mob violence no alarming indications for you? Directed, as it more often is, against our negro population, instead of making better citizens of the depraved and deterring them from crime, it has a tendency to cultivate a race prejudice and stir up the worst of human passions. It is inculcating a disregard of law because it ignores that greatest principle of freedom--that every man is to be considered innocent until proven to be guilty by competent testimony. “Judge Lynch is the enemy of law and strikes at the very foundation of order and civil government. His rule is causing large classes to feel that the law of the land affords them no protection. The courts furnish an adequate remedy for every wrong. One legal death on the scaffold has a more salutary effect than a score of mob executions. The former teaches a proper dread of offended law, leaves no unhealing wounds in the hearts of the living, stirs up no revengeful impulses, creates no feuds and causes no retaliatory murders. What a field of home mission stretches before us! We owe it to the South to remove this blot on our good name. Let us hasten the day when Judge Lynch shall be spoken of with a shudder, as a hideous memory. “This pitiful people, our former slaves, if instructed by intelligent ministers and teachers, might be delivered from the cramped mind, freed from the brutalized spirit which causes these crimes among us. They are naturally a religious people and this principle, which seems to be strong within them, under the guidance of an earnest enlightened ministry, might prove to be the key to the race problem find open up a social and political reformation, unequalled in modern times. “Already the negro race is doing much for its own advancement and good. To-day there are thirty-five thousand negro teachers in the elementary schools of the South. Six hundred ministers of the gospel have been educated in their own theological halls. They own and edit more than two hundred newspapers. They have equipped and maintain more than three hundred lawyers and four hundred doctors and have accumulated property which is estimated at more than two hundred and fifty millions. I note this fact with pleasure. It makes them better citizens by holding a stake in their community. Let us show our appreciation of what they have already done by helping them to do more.” CHAPTER VII. The strange faces, the new scene, the suddenness of the call had shaken Elliott’s self-possession, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he finished his speech. The mayor and municipal council crowded around him with outstretched hands, foremost amongst them, an old man with Roman features. “I was interested in your speech, young man,” said he, “but wait until this thing strikes home before you condemn our code.” “You’re right, Mr. Carr, you’re right!” cried several voices in chorus.