but one Chinaman in a community, and coming, as he naturally would, into hostile contact with a wide area, he should be arrested and convicted. The criminal records of that community would show that one hundred per cent of the Chinese population belonged to the criminal class.

I append the following table, extracted from the census of 1880, to establish this principle. The Negro in the country at large shows a much higher criminal rate than the foreign whites, but if we limit our inquiry to those states where the foreign population is small, the conditions will be reversed.

 Number of prisoners in several southern states (to the million of population.)

[Pg 30]If, on the other hand, we select those states in which the Negro element is small and the foreign element large the result is very decidedly to the disadvantage of the Negro.

[Pg 30]

The Northern Negro has a criminal record which is not only out of all proportion to his numerical strength, but is two or three times as great as that of his black brothers in the South. It is hard to see how “race traits” could account for this discrepancy.

 Rape and Lynching.

Rape and Lynching.

The attempts at rape and the consequent lynchings are also offered in evidence of the evil propensity of the race. It is undoubtedly true that the alleged assaults upon white women by colored men have done more than all other causes combined to give the race an evil reputation and make it loathsome in the eyes of mankind. “It throws over every colored man a mantle of odium and sets upon him a mark for popular hate more distressing than the mark set upon the first murderer ... It has cooled our friends and heated our enemies.”[53]

The alleged culprit in such cases, especially if he be a colored man and the victim a white woman, is almost certain to die without due process of law. The native, savage furor of human nature asserts itself in the presence of such dastardly outrages, and neither legal enactments nor moral codes nor religious sanction can restrain it. The perpetrators cannot be defended or pitied. It is a waste of sympathy to wail over the deep damnation of their taking off. And yet we must remember that when the two races are concerned rape has a larger definition than is set down in the dictionaries. There can be no doubt that there have been many lynchings chargeable to rape, when the true cause should be 

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