The Southern South Part 9

Nevertheless, there is in the North a strong impression that crime is on a different footing in the South; that a.s.saults, affrays, and homicides are more frequent; that the South has a larger crime record than seems reconcilable with its numerous churches, its moral standards, and its fairly good state and city governments. Light may be thrown on the problem of race relations by inquiring whether the South is as much shocked by certain kinds of crime and violence as the North, whether a criminal is as likely to be tried and convicted, whether the superior race, by its practice in such matters, is setting before the inferior race a high standard of conduct.

Statistics indicate that in desperate crimes against the person, and especially in murder, the South far surpa.s.ses other civilized countries, and other parts of the United States. In London, with a population of 6,500,000, there were in a year 24 homicides; 4 of the criminals committed suicide, and the 20 others were brought to justice. In New York City, with about two thirds the population of London, there were 331 homicides with only 61 indictments and 46 convictions. In the state of South Carolina, with a population about one third that of New York City, there were 222 homicides in a year, and not a single execution of a white man.

Popular phrases and the press in the South habitually put a gloss upon many of these crimes by calling them "duels"; but a careful study of newspaper cuttings shows that the old-fas.h.i.+oned affairs of honor with seconds and exactly similar weapons, measured distance, and the word to fire, have almost disappeared. Nearly all the affrays in which the murdered man is conscious of his danger are simply street fights, in which each man lodges in the body of the other as many shots as he can before he himself sinks down wounded. It can hardly be considered an affair of honor when Mr. John D. Twiggs, of Albany, Ga., walks through the streets with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, looking for Mr. J. B. Palmer, who has gone home to arm himself.

Even this uneven kind of warfare is less frequent than the outright a.s.sa.s.sination of one white man by another. Where was Southern chivalry when Gonzales, the editor of the _Columbia State_, was in 1902 killed in the open street before he could draw his pistol, by Lieutenant-Governor Tillman of South Carolina, about whom the editor had been telling unpleasant truths? Where do you find the high-toned Southern gentleman when a man walks up to a total stranger, seizes him, and with the remark, "You are the man who wanted to fight me last night," plunges his knife into the victim's back. The newspapers are full of the shooting of men through windows, of their disappearance on lonely roads, of the terror that walketh by night, and the pestilence that waiteth at noonday.

Then there are the numerous murders of friend by friend, on all kinds of frivolous occasions; a man trespa.s.ses on another man's land, goes to apologize, and is shot; another makes a joke which his friend does not appreciate, and there is nothing for it but pistols. The feeling that a man must a.s.sert his dignity at the end of a revolver was revealed in New Orleans in 1908 when Inspector Whittaker, head of the police, with five of his men, walked into the office of the _New Orleans World_, which had criticised his enforcement of the liquor laws, struck the editor in the face and several times shot at him. After he had taken such pains to vindicate the majesty of the law, it seems a hards.h.i.+p that his superiors compelled the Inspector to resign. There is hardly a part of the civilized world where homicide is so common as in the South, and the crime is quite as frequent in the cities as in the back country. Pitched battles by white men with policemen and with sheriffs are not uncommon; and sometimes three or four bodies are picked up after such a fight.

In many ways this unhappy state of things is a survival of frontier practices which once were common in the Northwest as well as in the South, but which have nearly disappeared there as civilization has advanced; but in the South there is a special element of lawlessness through the Negroes. One of the few advantages of slavery was that every slaveholder was police officer and judge and jury on his own plantation; petty offenses were punished by the overseer without further ceremony, serious crimes were easily dealt with, and the escape of the criminal was nearly impossible.

Freedom, with its opportunity of moving about, with its greatly enlarged area of disputes among the blacks, and between Whites and Negroes, has combined with the influence of the press in popularizing crime, and perhaps with an innate African savagery, to make the black criminal a terrible scourge in the South. To begin with the less serious offenses, there is no doubt that the Negro has a very imperfect realization of property rights, partly because of the training of slavery. The vague feeling that whatever belonged to the plantation was for the enjoyment of those who lived on the plantation is deliciously expressed by Paul Dunbar:

Folks ain't got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits; Him dat giv' de squir'ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu' de rabbits.

Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys, Him dat made de streets an' driveways wasn't 'shamed to make de alleys.

We is all constructed diff'ent, d' ain't no two of us de same; We cain't he'p ouah likes an' dislikes, ef we'se bad we ain't to blame.

If we'se good, we needn't show off, 'case you bet it ain't ouah doin'

We gits into su'ttain channels dat we jes' cain't he'p pu'suin'.

But we all fits into places dat no othah ones could fill, An' we does the things we has to, big er little, good er ill.

John cain't tek de place o' Henry, Su an' Sally ain't alike; Ba.s.s ain't nuthin' like a suckah, chub ain't nuthin' like a pike.

When you come to think about it, how it's all planned out, it's splendid.

Nuthin's done er evah happens, 'dout hit's somefin' dat's intended; Don't keer whut you does, you has to, an' hit sholy beats de d.i.c.kens,-- Viney, go put on de kittle, I got one o' mastah's chickens.

Not so genial is the usual relation of Negro with Negro; both in town and city there is an amount of crude and savage violence of which the outside world knows little, and in which women freely engage. Jealousy is a frequent cause of fights and murders; and whisky is so potent an excitant that many competent observers a.s.sert that whisky and cocaine are at the bottom of almost all serious negro crimes. Practically every negro man carries a revolver and many of them bear knives or razors; hence, once engaged in a fracas, n.o.body knows what will happen. A woman describing a trouble in which a man shot her brother was chiefly aggrieved because "Two ladies jumped on me and one lady bit me." There is constant negro violence against the Whites, and they occasionally engage in pitched battles with white gangs.

Here, as in so many other respects, even well-informed people run to exaggeration. Thus President Winston, of the North Carolina Agricultural College, declares in public that the Negroes are the most criminal element in the population, and are more criminal in freedom than in slavery (both of which propositions are indisputable); that "the negro is increasing in criminality with fearful rapidity"; that "the negroes who can read and write are more criminal than the illiterate"; that they are nearly three times as criminal in the Northeast as in the South; that they are more criminal than the white cla.s.s, and that "more than seven tenths of the negro criminals are under thirty years of age." This statement, like almost all the discussions of criminal statistics, ignores the important point that as communities improve, acts formerly not covered by the law become statutory crimes; and hence that the more civilized a state the more likely it is that criminals will be convicted, and the larger will be the apparent proportion of criminals. In Connecticut are enumerated 68 white juvenile delinquents to 100,000 people, in Georgia only four, but the Georgia boys are not seventeen times as good as their brothers in the Northern state. It further overlooks the fact that most criminals of all races are under thirty years of age, for crime is the accompaniment of youth with white men as with Negroes.

To say that the Negroes furnish more than their proportion of criminals is no more than to say that the lowest element in the population has the lowest and most criminal members. The excessive criminality of the Negroes, which is marked in all the states of the Union, is of course a mark of their average inferiority, and a measure of the difficulty of bringing them up to a high standard; and the proportion is often exaggerated. In South Carolina where the Negroes are three fifths of the population they furnish only four fifths of the convicts. As for the a.s.sertion that the educated Negroes are specially criminal, the statement is contradicted by the records of the large inst.i.tutions of negro education, and by the experience of thousands of people. Education does not necessarily make virtue, but it is a safeguard. As a matter of fact, white Southerners in general know little of the lives or motives of thousands of the immense noncriminal cla.s.s of Negroes, with whom they have no personal relations; but are wide awake to the iniquities of the educated men who fall into crime.

The experience of two centuries shows that the Negroes are not drawn to crimes requiring previous organization and preparation; no slave insurrection has ever been a success within the boundaries of the United States; and blacks are rarely found in gangs of bandits. The incendiarism of which there is now so much complaint is probably the expression of individual vengeance. The Negroes, according to the testimony of those nearest to them, are inveterate gamblers, and many affrays result from consequent quarrels, so that murders may be most frequent where there is the best employment and largest wages and greatest prosperity among the thrifty. Murder, manslaughter, and attempts to kill make up three quarters of the recorded crimes of the blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Murders of Negroes by Negroes are very common and many of the criminals escape altogether.

Negro crime is much fomented by the low drinking-shops in the city and in country, by the lack of home influence on growing boys and girls, by the brutalizing of young people who are sent to prison with hardened criminals, and in general, by close contact with the lowest element of the white race, which leads to crimes on both sides. It is a striking fact that where the Africans are most numerous there is the least complaint of crime. The so-called race riots are usually rows between a few bad Negroes and the officers of the law, or a group of aggrieved Whites. Fights with policemen and sheriffs are frequent, and desperate men not infrequently barricade themselves in houses, and sell their lives as dearly as they can. Quarrels over the settlement of accounts are not uncommon, and the Negro who feels himself cheated sometimes takes his revenge at the end of a gun. As weapons are ordinarily sold without the slightest check, to men of both races and of every age, there is never any lack of the means to kill.

Occasionally a cry is raised that proof has been found of the existence of "Before Day Clubs"--that is, of organizations of Negroes for purposes of violence. The thing is possible and difficult to disprove, but a sequence of crimes through such an organization seems alien to the Negro's habits, and is at least unlikely. The serious charges that the blacks habitually protect any negro criminal who comes to them will be considered farther on.

The negro crime about which Southern newspapers print most, Southern writers say most, and which more than anything else aggravates race hatred, is violence to white women. The crime is a dreadful one, made worse by the spreading abroad of details, but it has such a fateful relation to the whole Southern problem that something must here be said, less on the thing itself than on some of the common misunderstandings and misstatements which cl.u.s.ter about it.

Statistics are unfortunately too available, inasmuch as for twenty years the number of such crimes has been nearly balanced by the number of lynchings for that offense, which have been tabulated from year to year by the _Chicago Tribune_, and have been thoroughly a.n.a.lyzed by Professor Cutler in his recent book "Lynch Law." From 1882 to 1903 these statistics show an average of thirty-two lynchings per year for violence or attempted violence to white women, though of late they have been reduced to under twenty. This includes some cases of innocent men, probably balanced by a.s.sailants who escaped. These figures completely dispose of the allegation that the crime is very frequent. Contrary to common belief in the North, some such cases are tried before regular courts; and in Missouri the Governor in 1908 very properly refused to pardon a Negro under a sentence of death for that crime. Adding in these cases, and the half dozen which perhaps escaped the newspaper reporter, at the utmost there are not over fifty authenticated instances of this crime in the whole South in a twelvemonth. Among something like 3,000,000 adult negro males the ratio of the crime to those who might commit it is about 1 to 600,000; and out of 6,000,000 white women, not over fifty become victims, or 1 in 120,000. For this degree of danger to white women ten million human beings are supposed to be sodden with crime and actuated by malice, and the whole South from end to end is filled with terror.

The allegation frequently made that these crimes are committed by highly educated Negroes, graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee, is absolutely without foundation. Most of them are by men of the lowest type, some undoubtedly maniacs. Most of these occurrences take place where the Whites and Negroes are most closely brought into juxtaposition, sometimes where they are both working in the fields. Hence they are of rare occurrence where the Whites are fewest and the Negroes most numerous. In many places in the Black Belt, white people have no fear of leaving their families, because sure that their negro neighbors would give their lives, if necessary, for the protection of the white women. The Northern white teachers, who are accused of arousing in the Negro's mind the belief that he is the equal of the Whites, have never in a single instance been attacked; and in communities where the Negroes are literally fifty to one, have not the slightest fear of going about alone at any necessary hour of day or night.

These statements are not intended to minimize the dreadful effects of a crime which brings such wretchedness upon the innocent. The two worst enemies of the white woman in the South are "The Black Brute," whom the Southern press is never tired of describing in unrepeatable terms, and the white buzzard journalist who spreads her name and her dreadful story abroad to become the seed of another like crime. Where is the Southern chivalry and respect for white women when every such crime is sought out and flashed abroad, in all the details obtainable, and the victim is doomed to a second wrong in the lifelong feeling that she is known and branded throughout the land?

A general and well-grounded complaint is that any fugitive, no matter what his reason for flight, even though he is guilty of rape, is fed and sent on his way by his own people, a practice which goes back to slavery days when there were many strays whose only offense was a love of liberty. "The worst feature," says an observer, "is that other negroes help to conceal them and their crimes. They seem to have entered into a racial agreement that they must help each one of their race to escape the penalties of the white man's law by resorting to every artifice of untruthfulness and concealment." Judge Cann, of Georgia, charges that "as a race, negroes shelter, conceal and protect the criminals of their race; that they produce riots by attacking officers of the law while in the discharge of their duty; that they openly show sympathy with the negro criminal; that they conspire against the enforcement of law; that they have made first a hero, and then a martyr, of a legally convicted and executed murderer."

Like all such general statements, these allegations go too far. In the first place, it is not altogether a sentiment of race solidarity. Negroes have been known to give similar shelter to white vagabonds and criminals.

In the second place, black criminals are frequently apprehended through blacks, and large numbers are brought into court, tried and convicted, entirely on negro testimony. Something has been done in the way of negro Law and Order a.s.sociations, which pledge themselves to give up criminals.

Still, it is discomposing to know that when a search was making for a particularly odious fellow in Monroe, La., who had for a year or two made himself the nuisance of the neighborhood by looking into windows, his father and brothers, who must have known his practices, unhesitatingly signed such a law-and-order pledge. The Brownsville incident of 1907 also, with the apparent determination of scores of men not to "split" on some ruffians and murderers among them, produced a painful feeling throughout the country. In few respects could the Negroes do so much good for themselves as by helping in the detection of the crime of their own people.

If Negroes are violent to Whites and among themselves, they follow an example daily and hourly set them by the members of the Superior Race. In the first place, the Negro listens habitually to rough and humiliating language. You get a new view of race relations when a planter in his store on Sat.u.r.day night calls up for you one after another three specimen Negroes. "This man Chocolate," he says, "is a full-blooded n.i.g.g.e.r, the real thing." "Chocolate" says nothing, shrugs his shoulders, and looks as he feels, literally like the devil. The next is introduced as "One of your mixed ones--How did that come about, hey!" and the mulatto, who has been the official whipper on the plantation, grins at the superior man's joke.

The third is called up and presented as "The Preacher, very fond of the sisters." This is a fair sample of what constantly takes place wherever there is a rough, coa.r.s.e white man among Negroes.

The office of the whipper is usually performed by the master himself, if he is one of those numerous employers who believe in that method. As one such put it: "I follow up a hand and tell him to do what he ought? If he won't, I just get off and whip him." "Suppose he summons you before a magistrate?" "I lick him again before the magistrate and send him home."

Other planters have given up whipping and charge a fine against the Negro's account. Of course such fellows would rather be whipped than prosecuted, and think that the riders (that is, the overseers), if they once take it out of them in a thras.h.i.+ng, will harbor no further malice. In some states, as North Carolina, whipping is unusual; in others it is frequent.

Another race trouble is the driving out of blacks who make themselves disliked by the Whites. A Negro pa.s.ses an examination for post office clerk, but is warned that if he tries to take the place he will be shot. A colored editor, whose paper is much less offensive than any of the white journals in his neighborhood in bad language and incitement to crime, is thought well treated because he leaves the state alive. A Negro who is too conspicuous, who builds a house thought to be above his station, who drives two horses in his buggy, may be warned to leave the place; and if he refuses to sacrifice his little property, may be shot. A black doctor may be warned out of the county because there are enough white doctors.

The South is not the only community where people that are obnoxious are hustled out of town, and Southern Whites sometimes receive the same unofficial "ticket of leave"; but it makes bad blood when irresponsible people, often in no way superior in character to the Negroes whom they a.s.sail, uproot their neighbors.

Then comes the long list of homicides of Negroes by Whites. Ever since Ku Klux times there have been occasional instances of "whitecapping"--that is, of bodies of disguised men riding through the country, pulling people out of their houses and whipping them. Such practices are not confined to the South and are condoned sometimes in the North. Down on Buzzard's Bay in Ma.s.sachusetts a few years ago a jury absolutely refused to convict the perpetrators of a similar outrage on a white man; while in Alabama, in 1898, five Whites were sentenced for twenty years each for killing a Negro in that sort of way. Still convictions of white men for killing Negroes are very unusual. Since practically every adult negro man has a gun about him, the theory of the White is that if you get into a quarrel and the Negro makes any movement with his hands, you must shoot him forthwith. To this purport is the testimony of a Mississippi planter who reproved a hand for severely whipping his child; the black replied that it was his business and n.o.body should stop it; the white man said he would stop it; whereupon the Negro drew, but was met by a bullet in his forehead; and, explained the planter, "A steel bullet will go through a n.i.g.g.e.r's skull."

Take another case: An a.s.sistant manager on an estate in the Delta of Mississippi tried to take a pistol away from a new hand and felt himself safe because the man had his hands in his pockets; but the Negro fired through the pocket, instantly killed the white man, and decamped. It afterwards was shown that he had previously killed another white man.

The responsibility is not always on the Negro's side. There are many disputes over labor contracts, in which the Negro justly believes that the white man has cheated him, and his attempt to audit is stopped by a quarrel in which the black is killed. Even boys under twelve years of age have been known to shoot Negroes over trivial disputes, and a young lady in Was.h.i.+ngton recently shot and killed a black boy who was stealing fruit.

The Negroes complain of harsh treatment by the police. For instance, a good-looking, very black young man is glad to get out of Savannah and among the white people on the Sea Islands. "They like the colored people better; even if they do get drunk and are fierce, they treat them better.

In Savannah the other day I saw a man going back to his vessel, and a policeman asked him where he was going. He answered up rough like,--I wouldn't do that, I'd go down on my hands and knees to 'em rather than have any trouble with em,--and the policeman broke his club over his head, arrested him, and they sent him to the chain gang. I don't want to be arrested; I never have been arrested in my life." That the police are often in the wrong is shown by such instances as the recent acquittal of a Negro by direction of an Alabama judge; he had shot a policeman who was arresting him without reason, and the judge who heard the case justified him.

Perhaps, comparing city with city, the North is as disorderly as the South, but the rural South is a much more desperate region than the farming lands of the North, as is shown by the statistics of homicide and similar crimes. In Florida in 1899, with a population of 528,000, there were about 40 murders and 200 a.s.saults with attempt to murder. In Alabama in 1895-96 there were about 350 homicides. In one twelvemonth some years ago there were 6 murders in Vermont, 96 in Ma.s.sachusetts, 461 in Alabama, and over 1,000 in Texas. Judge Thomas, of Montgomery, has shown that the homicides in the United States per million of population are 129 against 10 per million in England; and when the sections are contrasted, New England has about 47 per million, against 223 per million in the South.

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 circ.u.mstances. 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.

A general impression in the North is that the Southern courts are very severe with colored men; and (if he has not already been lynched) it is true that they are likely to pa.s.s heavy sentence on a Negro who has killed a white man, and juries are often merciless; but there are many cases where blacks are lightly treated on the express ground that they have had less opportunity to know what is right and wrong. In Brookhaven, Miss., a very rough region, in a year three white men have been heavily sentenced for killing Negroes; while many cases could be cited where a Negro was acquitted or let off with a light penalty for a like offense.

When it comes to less serious crimes, the Negro enjoys a special protection whenever he can call in a respectable white man to vouch for him as in general straightforward; the Court is then likely to impose a light sentence. Even in serious cases a man is sometimes acquitted or lightly treated at the request of his master, so that he may return to work. That is what the planter meant who boasted: "I never sent a n.i.g.g.e.r to jail in my life; and I have taken more n.i.g.g.e.rs out of jail than any planter in Alabama." That is, he never gave information against one of his own hands, but inflicted such small penalties as he saw fit; and he would pay the fine for his men who came before the courts, or even secure their pardon, so as to get them on his plantation. That principle sometimes goes terribly deep. In the case of a Negro who whipped his child to death, the natural inquiry was, "What did they do with him?" To which the nonchalant answer was, "Oh, nothing, he was a good cotton hand."

The great majority of negro convicts are sentenced for petty crimes, stealing, vagrancy, and the like, and for rather short terms; but the name for this punishment, "the chain gang," points to a system practically unknown in the North. There are literal chain gangs, with real shackles and b.a.l.l.s, working in the streets of cities, white and black together; and large bodies of convicts are worked in the open, stockaded, and perhaps literally chained at night. Right here comes in one of the worst features of the Southern convict system. The men on the chain gang are perhaps employed on city or county work, and if their terms expire too fast, the authorities will run out of labor; hence, the Negroes believe, perhaps rightly, that judges and juries are convinced of their guilt just in proportion to the falling off of the number of men in confinement; and that if necessary, innocent people will be arrested for that purpose. That is probably one reason why Negroes feel so little shame at having been in prison. "Did you know I was in the barracks last night?" is a remark that you may hear at any railroad station in Georgia.

The whole subject is complicated with vagrant laws. For instance, in Savannah Negroes not at work, or without reasonable excuse for idleness, shall be arrested; and in Alabama if arrested as a vagrant the burden of proof is on the black to show that he is at work. It is a mistake to suppose that colored tramps are common in the South; but irresponsible men, loitering about a city and sponging on the working Negroes, are frequent, and furnish many serious criminals.

On the whole, one would rather not be a negro convict in a Southern state, or even a white convict, for many state and county prisons are simply left-over examples of the worst side of slavery. A Northern expert in such matters in Atlanta a few years ago, in a public address, congratulated the people on the new jail which he had just visited. At least it looked like the most improved of modern jails, for it had large airy cells provided with running water, and the only defect in it was that it was intended for the state mules and was far better than any provision made there for human prisoners.

The first trouble with the Southern convict system is that it still retains the notion, from which other communities began to diverge nearly a century ago, that the prisoner is the slave of the state, existing only for the convenience and profit of those whom he serves. In the second place, it has been difficult to find indoor employment for the men, and most of them are worked out of doors, a life which with proper precautions is undoubtedly happier and healthier than that inside. In the third place, whipping is still an ordinary penalty, and very frequently applied.

Furthermore, a number of states in the Lower South have been in the habit of letting out convicts, and that is still done in several states, as Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. They used to be rented to cotton growers, and a planter could get as few as two convicts or even one, over whom he had something approaching the power of life and death. This was a virtual chattel slavery, which long ago ought to have been disallowed by the Supreme Court of the United States, as contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment. If still retained on a state or county plantation, the convicts are in the power of wardens whose interest it is to drive the men unmercifully. Governor Vardaman in a public message in 1908 thought it necessary to say that "Some of the most atrocious and conscienceless crimes that have been perpetrated in this State are chargeable to the county contractor. I have known the poor convict driven to exhaustion or whipped to death to gratify the greed or anger of the conscienceless driver or contractor. The tears and blood of hundreds of these unfortunate people cry out for this reform."

The Governor suggests that white men suffer under this system, and there have been recent cases where vagrant Whites were sold on the auction block for a period of months. It might perhaps be argued that the South is always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently hanged in Ma.s.sachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the community suffers. With regard to all those penal inst.i.tutions one might share the feelings of the good Northern lady, when told that her grandson had been sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years: "What did they do that for? why, he won't be contented there three weeks!"

This sympathy with the criminal the governors of the Southern states appear to feel, as is shown by some astonis.h.i.+ng statistics. When Governor Vardaman went out of office January 1, 1908, he pardoned 8 white men and 18 Negroes, most of them convicted of murder or manslaughter, and 11 of them life men. A Memphis paper has tabulated the state pardons for a period of twelve months, and if the results are accurate, they show 1 in Wisconsin, 22 in Ma.s.sachusetts, 81 in Georgia, 168 in Alabama, and over 400 in Arkansas. Just how the Negroes get sufficient political influence to secure pardons is one of the serious questions in Southern jurisprudence. For these lavish pardons the Whites are wholly responsible, for from them spring all the governors and pardoning boards.

The same responsibility rests on the Whites for the inefficiency of criminal justice and for the mediaeval prison system. The North might fairly plead that its efforts to reform its judicial and punitive system are resisted by the lower elements of society, which have such power through choosing prosecutors and judges and legislators, in framing laws and const.i.tutions, that the better elements cannot have things their own way. Not so in the South, where the Superior Race has absolute control of the making of law and the administering of justice, and the treatment of prisoners. Every judge in the South, except a few little justices of the peace, is a white man. Negroes, although still eligible to jury service, are rarely impaneled, even for the trial of a Negro. Negro testimony is received with due caution; hardly any court will accept the testimony of one black against one white man. For failures in the administration of justice, for unwillingness to try men for homicide, for technicalities in procedure, for hesitancy of juries, the Superior Race is wholly responsible. The system is bad simply because the white people who are in control of the Southern state governments are willing that it should be bad. With all the machinery of legislation, and of the courts in its possession, the white race still resorts to forms of violence which sometimes strike an innocent man, and always brutalize the community, and lead to a contempt for the ordinary forms of justice. The place for the white people to begin a real repression of crime is by punis.h.i.+ng their criminals without enslaving them.