Adlai Stevenson

Lynching a human creature is no less murder when the act of a mob than when that of a single individual.

There is no safety to society but in an aroused public sentiment that will hold each participant amenable to the law for the consequences of the crime he either perpetrates or abets.

Let him be accounted a public enemy who would weaken the bonds of human society, and destroy what it has cost our race the sacrifice and toil of centuries to achieve.

The sure rock of defence in the outstretched years as in the long past, will be the intelligence, the patriotism, the virtue of a law-abiding, liberty-loving people.

To a degree that cannot be measured by words, the temple of justice will prove the city of refuge.

The judiciary has no guards, no palaces, no treasuries; no arms but truth and wisdom; and no splendor but justice.

I believed it to be a measure in the interest of peace.

I never mistrusted for a moment that statesmen of high repute could in so perilous an hour, upon so grave a question, palter with words in a double sense.

The record will stand that this tribunal shut its eyes to the light of truth; refused to hear the undisputed proof that a majority of seven thousand legal votes in the State of Louisiana for Tilden was by a fraudulent returning-board…

By this decision fraud has become one of the legalized modes of securing the vote of a State.

But the decision of this tribunal is too startling and too far-reaching in its consequences to pass unchallenged.

The spirit of the mob is in deadly antagonism to all constituted authority.