It is not easy to compare the criminal spirit in the North and the South by the records of the courts or the statistics of convictions; acts which are penitentiary offenses in one state may be misdemeanors, or no crime at all, in another. A very recent tabulation, made from statistics of 1905, shows in the Lower South 16,000 prisoners against 13,000 in a group of Northwestern states having the same total population; and in the whole South, 27,000 prisoners against 24,000 in a group aggregating the same number of people in the North and West. Of the Southern prisoners, about two thirds are Negroes, the proportion of criminals to the total numbers of the African race being decidedly less than in the North. The only safe generalization from those statistics is therefore that the Southern courts send more people to jail, white and black, than the Northern. Statistics throw little light on the question of relative crime. A comparison is, however, possible between the ordinary course of justice in the South and in the North. The most notorious defect in the South is the conduct of murder trials, as shown by the evidence of Southern jurists. Says one, "Unreasoning and promiscuous danger stalks in any community where life is held cheap by even a few, and where the laws are enforced by privilege or race. In such a community there is no sufficient defense against a mob, or even a drunken fool." If one credited all the editorials in Southern newspapers, he would believe that "a man who kills a man in this community is in much less danger of legal punishment than one who steals a suit of clothes"; and experienced lawyers tell you that they never knew of a white man being convicted for homicide. These statements are exaggerations, for the records of pardons show that a certain number of white men have reached the penitentiary for that offense and leave it by the side door. The reason for the failure of justice in numerous cases is, first of all, the technicalities of the courts, which are probably not very different in that particular from those of the North; and, secondly, the unwillingness of juries to convict. It must be accepted as an axiom that the average plain man in the South feels that if A kills B the presumption is that he has some good reason. Counsel for such cases habitually appeal to the emotions of the jury, and ask what they would have done under like circumstances. Even conviction may not be uncomforable; take the case of a young White in Florida, who killed a policeman, was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment, was then hired out as a convict by his uncle at fifteen dollars a month, and paraded the streets at his pleasure.