524 Presidential Addresses 



ways has been., the handmaiden and forerunner 

 of tyranny. 



I feel that you have not only reflected honor upon 

 the State which for its good fortune has you as its 

 Chief Executive, but upon the whole nation. It is 

 incumbent upon every man throughout this country 

 not only to hold up your hands in the course you 

 have been following, but to show his realization 

 that the matter is one which is of vital concern 

 to us all. 



All thoughtful men must feel the gravest alarm 

 over the growth of lynching in this country, and es- 

 pecially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often 

 taken by mob violence when colored men are the vic- 

 timson which occasions the mob seems to lay most 

 weight, not on the crime, but on the color of the 

 crinimal. In a certain proportion of these cases the 

 man lynched has been guilty of a crime horrible be- 

 yond description ; a crime so horrible that as far as 

 he himself is concerned he has forfeited the right to 

 any kind of sympathy whatsoever. The feeling of 

 all good citizens that such a hideous crime shall not 

 be hideously punished by mob violence is due not 

 in the least to sympathy for the criminal, but to a 

 very lively sense of the train of dreadful conse- 

 quences which follows the course taken by the mob in 

 exacting inhuman vengeance for an inhuman wrong. 

 In such cases, moreover, it is well to remember that 

 the criminal not merely sins against humanity in in- 

 expiable and unpardonable fashion, but sins par- 

 ticularly against his own race, and does them a 



