certain places in the Texas Panhandle; also that a negro settlement in the Indian territory displays a similar warning to the white man.[159] Parties of black and white children meeting on unfrequented streets of Atlanta nearly always exchange opprobrious language, often throw stones at one another, and sometimes fight--a proof so significant that, whenever I see it, it always makes me serious. The most decided change from old times that I note is that white society everywhere proscribes mixed sexual intercourse and the procreation of mulattoes with rapidly increasing severity. The advocate of mixed marriages is more and more regarded as a fiend. The white woman seized by a negro man--how gladly would she change place with the victim of the torturing savage or of the tiger that would mangle and eat her alive! This menace is everywhere, and naturally it is magnified by excited imagination. It increases in fact. The trial of negroes for capital offences was given the superior court of Georgia in 1850. From then until the end of the brothers' war but two cases of rape of white women by negroes are in the supreme court reports;[160] and I never heard of but two other cases occurring in that time. But there have been many since. It steadily becomes more frequent. Women more and more dread to be left alone. And now there is hardly a man in the Black Belt who, when he is to be a night away from wife, daughters, mother, and sisters, without help at call, does not have uncomfortable thoughts of the sooty desecrator. The increasing effect of these multiplying outrages and the increasing horror which they cause is proved by a fact which ought to receive more intelligent recognition from everybody. This fact is that lynching of a negro for rape, and lately for other crimes of violence against whites, whether in the south or in the north, seems to be every time marked with a greater outburst of popular fury. The public grows more decidedly anti-negro. They give as little heed to the appeals of the papers in these matters as they do to the editorials always advocating the projects of the machine and corporations. The mob sweeps aside the military. The military will not load its rifles. If they were loaded it would probably refuse to fire, or would fire into the air. A few exclaim against lawlessness, while it is plain that the great mass of the whites do not really condemn in their hearts.