then to be
irresistible--that mankind coveted, stole, lied, were disobedient to
parents, were adulterers and murderers from the earliest times, and
only ceased to be so, measurably, in proportion as the sanctions of
law were strong or weak. The Christian religion and civilizations
other than Christian, with their religions, growth, and development
under the influence of good, wise, and godly men, have contributed
more than all else, to the decrease of crime and among all classes and
conditions of men. "Thou shalt not" stays the course of crime.

The history of the black or African race, since the decadence and
destruction of the cities of North Africa and the Nile Delta and the
loss of prestige of the peoples who held sway in them, has been
shrouded and obscured, and hence gratuitous arguments are made in
regard to the savagery and bestiality (which it is claimed we inherit)
of the progenitors of Negro Americans that are wholly unsupported by
reliable data. The acts of the Puritan fathers of New England and of
the cavaliers and Huguenots of the South, toward Indian and Negro
heathen in the New World--men of whom it has been facetiously said
that, "they fell first upon their knees and then upon the
aborigines,"--these acts, together with the horrors of the middle
passage and the unrequited toil of centuries, of which the blacks were
victims, must be taken into account in considering the matter of crime
in connection with this race, and go far to explain a condition which
otherwise would be abnormal. The baleful influences of a dead and
buried past account for crime among the old and the young Negro
Americans, the responsibility for which rests upon the United States
rather than the Southern states, upon this nation rather than any part
of it.

In Virginia and Maryland there were indentured white slaves. When the
system was abolished the same conditions plagued the colonists that
annoy us now. Mr. Doyle, in his work entitled _English Colonies in
America_, says, "The liberated servant (white) became an idler,
socially corrupt and often politically dangerous." The whites became
an irresponsible, shiftless, and criminal class, just as the Negroes
have become to an alarming extent since freedom. There are to-day in
certain sections of the South whole neighborhoods of whites almost
without moral sense and near to barbarism. It will not be pretended,
however, that there has not been and is not now, criminality among the
Neg