will brood, and wear, and decay itself to the
killing-point and produce that tragedy.

Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain of
another one--I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the lurid
theatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; and
that begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on. Every
lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white
men, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8
months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.

Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane when
not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants this
Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchings--of men who are
not dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom
will keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause.

And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death
attempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent. It
would have no effect--or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space is
all occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no room
in it for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after the
crime.

It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the
subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy
the criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by stupendous
Kings and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest
details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps,
what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty
thousand dollars a day--and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!--like
the assassin of the President of France--in debt three francs to his
landlady, and insulted by her--and to-day she is proud to be able to say
she knew him "as familiarly as you know your own brother," and glad to
stand till she drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur and
her happiness upon the eager interviewer.

Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute
silence--the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to manage
that? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life;
by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by
extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race. It is quite
simple, quite easy,