Lyncli Lain). this indifference is so widespread and so gen erally acknowledged that there would be no excuse for even its mention, if it were not that in its analysis may possibly be found the cause and cure for lynching. It is doubtful whether we appreciate the real causes of this crime which Prof. Bryce justly characterizes as a reproach to our civilization; and until we do our remedies are likely to remain in the air. It is not sufficient to attribute lynching to mob rule, emotional insanity of the crowd, race hatred, contempt for the " niggers," loss of self control, intense community feeling, vivid hatred of crime, lex talionis and the like. It may be true that courts are slow, uncer tain and ^unduly sympathetic to the rights of the accused; that corrupt jurymen, shrewd lawyers, the technicalities of the law or the undue sympathies of the pardoning powers, may often prolong and save a guilty person's life; but it is extremely doubtful whether Judge Lynch ever was influenced by any fears inspired by these facts. These cus tomary explanations of lynchings have no doubt a certain validity in each case, but the fundamental explanation goes deeper. These free born men of the South and West lynch because they believe they have the right to do so. This popular perversion is due ap parently to the gradual development of a distinct and peculiar American attitude or spirit of the masses towards those institu tions we can best call " The Law." The Europeans never lynch, not because they are more civilized or more law abiding than the farmers of Maryland and Illinois, but because their attitude towards law is dif ferent; they are influenced and governed by a different esprit des Lois, and as Montes quieu long ago pointed out it is this attitude or spirit of the community which give laws their effectiveness and their sanction. Using the term law in the comprehensive sense of the schools of Bentham and Hobbes, it need hardly be said that historically our attitude or spirit towards it has been the
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same as the English. Prof. Dicey's " Rule of Law" has been the key to American as well as to English institutions; but every student of our institutions must have ob served that the spirit and temper of the peo ple towards law and government and the powers that be has been gradually changing, and that we have been developing and have developed what may reasonably be called a distinctive American "Spirit of Law" as distinguished from the English, French or German spirit. Law meant something different to the early Southern planter, from what it means to his grandson : it was more of a force, power, institution, reality to him. The rule of law today is as solemn and serious an actuality to an Englishman as is Her Majesty the Queen, or the law of gravi tation or the certainty of an hereafter; law in its institutional sense is as much a pre determined factor in his daily affairs as is one of the laws of nature. All his business ventures and daily affairs presuppose the rule of law. This too is our traditional at titude, but our real attitude has changed; we outwit, defy, avoid and forget the law; we make our own laws, therefore, in certain cases, we feel unconsciously that we can be a law unto ourselves. So long as English traditions and the English spirit or notion of the law prevailed with us lynchings were unknown; but in the South and West, and for that matter in the North and East, the masses no longer unconsciously reverence and fear the law as their fathers did; they feel that they are the law; they make it, they can unmake it. In lynching an enemy of society they do not mean to violate or de spise the law, but rather to vindicate and enthrone it. They are acting simply in their sovereign capacity as lawmakers. Laws seems to them local in their origin, there fore local in their application and in their breach; law to them is no longer an institu tion dominating the community—the com munity is the law. The right to lynch par takes as much of the nature of law to them
