Over 2,700 lynchings in eighteen years, with a steady increase in the barbarity of the method and with the last the most shameful instance of this barbarity, are enough to stagger the mind. Either we are relapsing into barbarism, or there is some terrific cause for our reversion to the methods of mediævalism, and our laws are inefficient to meet it. The only gleam of light is that, of late years, the number appears to have diminished. To get at the remedy, we must first get at the cause. Although in early times there were occasional assaults and even some burnings at the stake these outrages appeared to have passed out of fashion and time was when the crime of assault was substantially unknown throughout the South. Though criminal assaults had been sufficiently common at one time for many of the States to adopt laws of Draconian severity relating to them, yet during the later period of slavery, the crime of rape did not exist, nor did it exist to any considerable extent for some years after emancipation.[42] During the war the men were away in the army, and the Negroes were the loyal guardians of the women and children. On isolated plantations and in lonely neighborhoods, women were as secure as in the streets of Boston or New York, indeed, were more secure. Then came the period and process of Reconstruction, with its teachings. Among these was the teaching that the Negro was the equal of the white, that the white was his enemy, and that he must assert his equality. The growth of the idea was a gradual one in the Negro’s mind. This was followed by a number of cases where members of the Negro militia ravished white women; in some instances in the presence of their families.[43] The result of the hostility between the Southern whites and Government at that time was to throw the former upon reliance on their own acts for their defence or revenge, with a consequent training in lawless punishment of acts which should have been punished by law. And here lynching, in its post-bellum stage, had its evil origin.[44] It was suggested some time ago, in a thoughtful paper read by Professor Wilcox, of Washington, that a condition something like that which exists in the South at present, had its rise in France during the religious wars. The first instance of rape, outside of these attacks by armed Negroes, and of consequent lynching, that attracted the attention of the country after the war was a case which occurred in Mississippi, where the teaching of equality and of violence found one of its most fruitful fields. A Negro dragged a woman down into the woods and, tying her, kept her bound there a prisoner for several days, when he butchered her. He was caught and was lynched. With the resumption of local power by the whites came the temporary and partial ending of the crimes of assault and of lynching.