There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enraged Negroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic. Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution. A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to the Negro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions: 1. Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to fight white enemies? 2. When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army? The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native” troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening of morale. The second question was merely an important practical detail that had been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is being illegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community?