This subject is inextricably connected with the crimes by Negroes, for which lynching is held to be an appropriate punishment. The statistics collected by Mr. Cutler, and stated in a previous chapter, show in the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 a record of 1,997 lynchings in the South; of the Negroes lynched, 707 were charged with violence to women and 783 with murder. These figures absolutely disprove the habitual statements in the South that lynching is common to all sections of the Union; that it is almost always caused by rape; and that rape is a crime confined to Negroes. The details of some of these cases would show that the mob not infrequently gets an innocent person; that it is liable to be carried away into the most horrible excesses of burning and torture; that a lynching is really a kind of orgy in which not only the criminal class among the Whites, but people who are ordinarily swayed by reason simply let go of themselves and indulge the primeval brutishness of human nature. Said Confucius: "The Master said, 'I hate the manner in which purple takes away the luster of vermilion. I hate the way in which the songs of Ch'ing confound the music of Gna. I hate those who with their sharp mouths overthrow kingdoms and families.'" Professor Smith, of Tulane University, is spokesman for thousands of respectable and educated men when he says: "Atrocious as such forms of rudimentary justice undoubtedly are, and severely reprehensible, to be condemned always and without any reserve, it cannot be denied that they have a certain rough and horrible virtue. Great is the insult they wreak on the majesty of the law and brutalizing must be their effect upon human nature, yet they do strike a salutary terror into hearts which the slow and uncertain steps of the courts could hardly daunt. In witness stands the fact that lynch-lightning seldom strikes twice in the same district or community. Such frightful incidents tend to repeat themselves at wide intervals, both of time and place."