The Tacoma Times

Mob Law, What Is It?

The bulldog in all of us snarls with slight provocation. Perfect Christian gentlemen when gathered in a mob lose their identity as kindly fathers and loving sons and cherishing husbands, and become cliff dwellers, stone age hairy men, with all the blood lusts and carnal hatreds that were supposed to be buried with the great sloth and the sabre tooth tiger.

Every little while somewhere in this country the veneer is scraped and the blood rust that dyed the bones of humanity through geologic epochs gleams red under a sun of hate.

Every little while some act smites the rock of repression and the bitter waters of revenge and cruelty and wanton torture gush forth, a hell stream.

Leo Frank for months on months was put on the rack by the mob spirit. Evidence was discarded; the forms and manners of civilized courts were cast aside to convict him; he dangled over the pit of an ignominious death for months until an aroused national heart beat so upon his judge and the governor of Georgia that he was saved from the noose.

Then he was betrayed by indifferent guardians to the merciless knife of a fellow convict and butchered in body as he had been in spirit.

Recovering a little, he was left nearly alone with sleepy guards in that isolated "hospital," and there the toothed and fanged and clawed demon of the mob caught him up and in the night made at last an end to what feeble mortality still clung.

Leo Frank suffered a thousand deaths, as did his loyal wife and mother, and mob spirit may slink back to the caverns and caves and pits, where it mumbles over the bones of its dead, at last content.

We have baked them and flayed them alive; and hanged them and lashed them and tortured them with devilish devices in desperate pits and holes and cells, and we have called it the will of the people, or the rule of the law, or the anything but what it was: THE MOB SPIRIT THAT HOWLS FOR ITS KILL AND WILL NOT BE DENIED.

Legal delay, degenerates uncaught, little children ruined by fiends, these things may in part explain but cannot excuse.

The cold, deadly fact is that we are not far removed from the beasts that perish. Hate and violence and blood lust roll their sullen waters over men's souls whenever the winds of the Old Order blow aside the mists and vapors of culture and, love and goodness, and only by inches through the night of our weakness do we crawl towards the more pleasant places, where peace abides forever and the songs of little children are not drowned in the ghastly wails of the lost.

SCRATCH THE MAN AND YOU REVEAL THE DEVIL.