CITY LIFE, CRIME AND POVERTY 135 



and Baltimore. These suljsided or changed their object under 

 the onconiinjz; tslaver}^ crisis, and the Civil war itself was a grand 

 resort to violence by the south on a question of race domina- 

 tion. Beginning again with the Kuklux and Whitecap up- 

 risings in the seventies, mob rule drove the negroes back to a 

 condition of subordination, but the lawless spirit then engen- 

 dered has continued to show itself in the annual lynching of one 

 hundred to two hundred negroes suspected or convicted of the 

 more heinous crimes. Nor has this crime of the mob been 

 restricted to the south, but it has spread to the north, and has 

 become almost the accepted code of procedure throughout the 

 land wherever negroes are heinously accused. In the northern 

 instances this mob vengeance is sometimes wreaked on the 

 entire race, for in the north the negro is more assertive, and 

 defends his accused brother. But in the south the mob usually 

 stops with vengeance on the individual guilty or supposedly 

 guilty, since the race in general is already cowed. 



Other races suffer at the hands of mobs, such as the Chi- 

 nese in Wyoming and California at the hands of American mine 

 workers, Italians in Louisiana and California at the hands of 

 citizens and laborers, Slovaks and Poles in Latimer, Penn- 

 sylvania, at the hands of a mob militia. With the rise of or- 

 ganized labor these race riots and militia shootings are in- 

 creasing in number, and they often grow out of the efforts of 

 older races of workmen to drive new^er and backward races 

 from their jobs, or the efforts of employers to destroy newly 

 formed unions of these immigrant races. Many strikes are 

 accompanied by an incipient race war where employers are 

 endeavoring to make substitution, one race for another, of 

 Irish, Germans, native whites, Itahans, negroes, Poles, and so 

 on. Even the long series of crimes against the Indians, to 

 which the term ''a century of dishonor" seems to have at- 

 tached itself without protest, m-ust be looked upon as the mob 

 spirit of a superior race bent on despoiling a despised and in- 

 ferior race. That the frenzied spirit of the mob, whether in 

 strikes, panicky militia, Indian slaughter, or civil war, should 

 so often have blackened the face of a nation sincerely dedicated 

 to law and order is one of the penalties paid for experimenting 



