home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.” 24 Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.[5] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.[6] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably 25in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it. |A Malign Enchantment.| | | 25 “During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.” |Who is to Blame?| | | That is true. It is admitted on every hand
Prev.
Back
Top