be
supported, that the courts should pass on the punishment, is in the
first place the plea of the weak, and in the second place, the plea of
the ignorant. He has not read the history of this country, and has never
understood the American character who says lynch law is wrong. It has
been the salvation of America a thousand times. It may perhaps again be
her salvation.

In one way or another the American people will assert the old vigilante
principle that a man's life, given him by God, and a man's property,
earned by his own labor, are things he is entitled to defend or have
defended. He never wholly delegates this right to any government. He may
rescind his qualified delegation when he finds his chosen servants
unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great
and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable.
An unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast
off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American
Revolution earth's greatest example of lynch law!

[Illustration: "AFTERWARD"
Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
buried here]

Conclusions parallel to these are expressed by no less a citizen than
Andrew D. White, long United States Minister to Germany, who, in the
course of an address at a prominent university of America, in the year
1906, made the following bold remarks:

"There is a well-defined criminal class in all of our cities; a class of
men who make crime a profession. Deaths by violence are increasing
rapidly. Our record is now larger than any other country of the world.
The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number
punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or
ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in
favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, that 'there are communities in which
lynch law is better than any other.'

"The pendulum has swung from extreme severity in the last century to
extreme laxity in this century. There has sprung up a certain
sentimental sympathy. In the word of a distinguished jurist, 'the
taking of life for the highest crime after due process of law is the
only taking of life which the American people condemn.'

"In the next year 9,000 people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day
I tell you that 9,000 are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the
criminal heart, and with no regard for