have, within the last month, saved the lives of half a dozen innocent negroes who were pursued by the mob, and brought them to trial in a court of a law in which they were acquitted." As Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, has finely said: "When the rule of a mob obtains, that which distinguishes a high civilization is surrendered. The mob which lynches a negro charged with rape will in a little while lynch a white. man suspected of crime. Every Christian patriot in America needs to lift up his voice in loud and eternal protest against the mob spirit that is threatening the integrity of this Republic." Governor Jelks, of Alabama, has recently spoken as follows: "The lynching of any person for whatever crime is inexcusable anywhere it is a defiance of orderly government; but the killing of innocent people under any provocation is infinitely more horrible; and yet innocent people are likely to die when a mob's terrible lust is once aroused. The lesson is this: No good citizen can afford to countenance a defiance of the statutes, no matter what the provocation. The innocent frequently suffer, and, it is my observation, more usually suffer than the guilty. The white people of the South indict the whole colored race on the ground that even the better elements lend no assistance whatever in ferreting out criminals of their own color. The respectable colored people must learn not to -harbor their criminals, but to assist the officers in bringing them to justice. This is the larger crime, and it provokes such atrocious offenses as the one at Atlanta. The two races can never get on until there is an understanding on the part of both to make common cause with the lawabiding against criminals of any color."

Moreover, where any crime committed by a member of one race against a member of another race is avenged in such fashion that it seems as if not the individual criminal, but the whole race, is attacked, the result is to exasperate to the highest degree race feeling. There is but one safe rule in dealing with black men as with white men; it is the same rule that must be applied in dealing with rich men and poor men; that is, to treat each man, whatever his color, his creed, or his social position, with even-handed justice on his real worth as a man. White people owe it quite as much to themselves as to the colored race to treat well the colored man who shows by his life that he deserves such treatment; for it is surely the highest wisdom to encourage in the colored race all those individuals who are honest, industrious, law-abiding, and who therefore make good and safe neighbors and citizens. Reward or punish the individual on his merits as an individual. Evil will surely come in the end to both races if we substitute for this just rule the habit of treating all the members of the race, good and bad, alike. There is no question of "social equality" or "negro domination" involved; only the question of relentlessly punishing bad men, and of securing to the good man the right to his life, his liberty, and the pursuit of his happiness as his own qualities of heart, head, and hand enable him to achieve it.

Every colored man should realize that the worst enemy of his race is the negro criminal, and above all the negro criminal who commits the dreadful crime of rape; and it should be felt as in the highest degree an offense against the whole country, and against the colored race in particular, for a colored man to fail to help the officers of the law in hunting down with all possible earnestness and zeal every such infamous offender. Moreover, in my judgment, the crime of rape should always be punished with death, as is the case with murder; assault with intent to commit rape should be made a capital crime, at least in the discretion of the court; and provision should be made by which the punishment may follow immediately upon the heels of the offense; while the trial should be so conducted that the victim need not be wantonly shamed while giving testimony, and that the least possible publicity shall be given to the details.

The members of the white race on the other hand should understand that every lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilization; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all the foul and evil creatures who dwell therein. No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered. Every lynching means just so much moral deterioration in all the children who have any knowledge of it, and therefore just so much additional trouble for the next generation of Americans.

Let justice be both sure and swift; but let it be justice under the law, and not the wild and crooked savagery of a mob.

There is another matter which has a direct bearing upon this matter of lynching and of the brutal crime which sometimes calls it forth and at other times merely furnishes the excuse for its existence. It is out of the question for our people as a whole permanently to rise by treading down any of their own number. Even those who themselves for the moment profit by such maltreatment of their fellows will in the long run also suffer. No more shortsighted policy can be imagined than, in the fancied interest of one class, to prevent the education of another class. The free public school, the chance for each boy or girl to get a good elementary education, lies at the foundation of our whole political situation. In every community the poorest citizens, those who need the schools most, would be deprived of them if they only received school facilities proportioned to the taxes they paid. This is as true of one portion of our country as of another. It is as true for the negro as for the white man. The white man, if he is wise, will decline to allow the negroes in a mass to grow to manhood and womanhood without education. Unquestionably education such as is obtained in our public schools does not do everything towards making a man a good citizen; but it does much. The lowest and most brutal criminals, those for instance who commit the crime of rape, are in the great majority men who have

had either no education or very little; just as they are almost invariably men who own no property; for the man who puts money by out of his earnings, like the man who acquires education, is usually lifted above mere brutal criminality. Of course the best type of education for the colored man, taken as a whole, is such education as is conferred in schools like Hampton and Tuskegee; where the boys and girls, the young men and young women, are trained industrially as well as in the ordinary public school branches. The graduates of these schools turn out well in the great majority of cases, and hardly any of them become criminals, while what little criminality there is never takes the form of that brutal violence which invites lynch law. Every graduate of these schools -and for the matter of that every other colored man or woman who leads a life so useful and honorable as to win the good will and respect of those whites whose neighbor he or she is, thereby helps the whole colored race as it can be helped in no other way; for next to the negro himself, the man who can do most to help the negro is his white neighbor who lives near him; and our steady effort should be to better the relations between the two. Great though the benefit of these schools has been to their colored pupils and to the colored people, it may well be questioned whether the benefit has not been at least as great to the white people among whom these colored pupils live after they graduate.

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Be it remembered, furthermore, that the individuals who, whether from folly, from evil temper, from greed for office, or in a spirit of mere base demagogy, indulge in the inflammatory and incendiary speeches and writings which tend to arouse mobs and to bring about lynching, not only thus excite the mob, but also tend by what criminologists call "suggestion," greatly to increase the likelihood of a repetition of the very crime against which they are inveighing. When the mob is composed of the people of one race and the man lynched is of another race, the men who in their speeches and writings either excite or justify the action tend, of course, to excite a bitter race feeling and to cause the people of the opposite race to lose sight of the abominable act of the criminal himself; and in addition, by the prominence they give to the hideous deed they undoubtedly tend to excite in other brutal and depraved natures thoughts of committing it. Swift, relentless, and orderly punishment under the law is the only way by which criminality of this type can permanently be suppressed.

XV

CENTRALIZATION AND CHANGES IN THE CONSTITUTION

[The expansion of the activities of the federal government has aroused much discussion. Those who believe in a strong national authority welcome the activity of the federal government as a symptom of strength in our national life. They see in it only the normal adaptation of instruments of government to social and economic needs of the nation. Others who believe strongly in local and state autonomy express the fear that the federal government may entirely supersede the states, and that there will result an over-concentration of political action. This matter has already been brought out in many of the extracts printed on preceding pages. The speeches of Senator Newlands and of Senator Beveridge, on national resources, express a strong belief in the justification of federal initiative. The same ideas are developed in the messages of President Roosevelt. The different points of view are very strongly presented in the following debates and addresses.]

HOW TO PRESERVE THE LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT OF THE STATES 1

BY ELIHU ROOT

THIS gathering peculiarly represents two ancient Commonwealths, each looking back to a century and a half of colonial history before the formation of the American Union, each possessed of strong individuality, derived from the long practice of self-government, and both conspicuous among all the States for leadership in population and wealth, for commerce and manufacture, for art and science, and for the priceless traditions of great citizens in former generations. It seems appropriate to make here some observations upon a subject which is much in the minds of thoughtful Americans in these days.

What is to be the future of the States of the Union under our dual system of constitutional government?

The conditions under which the clauses of the Constitution distributing powers to the National and State governments are now and henceforth to be applied, are widely different from the conditions which were or could have been within the contemplation of the framers of the Constitution, and widely different from those which obtained during the

1 A speech delivered by Secretary Root at the dinner of the Pennsylvania Society in New York, December 12, 1906.

carly years of the Republic. When the authors of The Federalist argued and expounded the reasons for union and the utility of the provisions contained in the Constitution, each separate colony transformed into a State was complete in itself and sufficient to itself except as to a few exceedingly simple external relations of State to State and to foreign nations; from the origin of production to the final consumption of the product, from the birth of a citizen to his death, the business, the social, and the political life of each separate community began and ended for the most part within the limits of the State itself; the long time required for travel and communication between the different centers of population, the difficulties and hardships of long and laborious journeys, the slowness of the mails, and the enormous cost of transporting goods, kept the people of each State tributary to their own separate colonial center of trade and influence, and kept their activities within the ample and sufficient jurisdiction of the local laws of their State. The fear of the fathers of the Republic was that these separate and self-sufficient communities would fall apart, that the Union would resolve into its constituent elements, or that, as it grew in population and area, it would split up into a number of separate confederacies. Few of the men of 1787 would have deemed it possible that the Union they were forming could be maintained among eighty-five millions of people, spread over the vast expanse from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Lakes to the Gulf.

Three principal causes have made this possible.

One cause has been the growth of a National sentiment, which was at first almost imperceptible. The very difficulties and hardships to which our Nation was subjected in its early years, the injuries to our commerce, and the insults and indignities to our flag on the part of both of the contestants in the great Napoleonic wars, served to keep the Nation and National interests and National dignity constantly before the minds and in the feelings of the people. As the tide of emigration swept westward, new States were formed of citizens who looked back to the older States as the homes of their childhood and their affection and the origin of their laws and customs, and who never had the peculiar and special separate political life of the colonies. The Civil War settled the supremacy of the Nation throughout the territory of the Union, and its sacrifices sanctified and made enduring that National sentiment. Our country as a whole, the noble and beloved land of every citizen of every State, has become the object of pride and devotion among all our people, North and South, within the limits of the proud, old colonial Commonwealths, throughout that vast region where Burr once dreamed of a separate empire dominating the valley of the Mississippi, and upon the far-distant shores of the Pacific; and by the side of this strong and glowing loyalty to the Nation, sentiment for the separate States has become dim and faint in comparison.