The lynching of Negroes was kept up after the war, and carried into a system by the Ku Klux Klan and later White Caps, though usually applied by them for political reasons. About 1880 lynching of Negroes began to increase, nominally because of more frequent rapes of white women; and to this day one often hears it said: "Lynchings never occur except for the one crime." In the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903, Cutler has recorded 3,337 cases of lynchings, an average of 150 a year, rising to the number of 235 in 1892. In 1903 there were 125 persons lynched and 125 executed legally. Of these lynchings, 1,997 took place in the Southern states, 363 in the Western states, 105 in the Eastern states, and not a single one in New England. Of the 3,337 lynchings, 1,169 were of Whites (109 for rape) and 2,168 were Negroes, thus completely disposing of the notion that this practice either began because of negro crime, or was continued as a safeguard against it. Of the blacks lynched, 783 were charged with murder; 707 with violence to women; 104 with arson; 101 with theft; and from that on down to such serious crimes as writing a letter, slapping a child, making an insolent reply, giving evidence or refusing to give evidence. A Negro was lynched in 1908 for killing a constable's horse. The common notion that rape of white women, the most serious crime committed by Negroes, is on the increase, is also exploded by these statistics, which show that the proportion, which has been as high as one half of all lynchings, has come down to about one fourth. It may be said, therefore, without fear of contradiction that lynching did not originate in offenses by Negroes, is not justified by any increase of crime, and is applied to a multitude of offenses, some of them simply trivial. Successful attempts have been made to lynch Negroes in Northern states, and in 1903 one was burned at the stake, in Wilmington, Del., which, however, is a former slave state, and the last to adhere to the whipping-post. Lynching has also much diminished in the West, so that it is becoming more and more a Southern crime. In 1903, 75 of the 84 lynchings were in the South, in 1907 the total lynchings had come down to 63, of which 42 were in the four states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and only 2 in the North. The proportion of causes of lynchings remained about the same: murder, 18; violence to women, 12; attempted violence, 11; miscellaneous causes, 22.