Men who have been guilty of a crime like rape or murder should be visited with swift and certain punishment, and the just effort made by the courts to protect them in their rights should under no circumstances be perverted into permitting…

We must show that the law is adequate to deal with crime by freeing it from every vestige of technicality and delay.

But the fullest recognition of the horror of the crime and the most complete lack of sympathy with the criminal can not in the least diminish our horror at the way in which it has become customary to avenge these crimes and at the…

It is of course inevitable that where vengeance is taken by a mob it should frequently light on innocent people; and the wrong done in such a case to the individual is one for which there is no remedy.

But even where the real criminal is reached, the wrong done by the mob to the community itself is wellnigh as great.

There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina.

Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul.

This matter of lynching would be a terrible thing even if it stopped with the lynching of men guilty of the inhuman and hideous crime of rape; but as a matter of fact, lawlessness of this type never does stop and never can stop in such…

Every violent man in the community is encouraged by every case of lynching in which the lynchers go unpunished to himself take the law into his own hands whenever it suits his own convenience.

In the same way the use of torture by the mob in certain cases is sure to spread until it is applied more or less indiscriminately in other cases.

The spirit of lawlessness grows with what it feeds on, and when mobs with impunity lynch criminals for one cause, they are certain to begin to lynch real or alleged criminals for other causes.

In the recent cases of lynching, over three-fourths were not for rape at all, but for murder, attempted murder, and even less heinous offences.

Moreover, the history of these recent cases shows the awful fact that when the minds of men are habituated to the use of torture by lawless bodies to avenge crimes of a peculiarly revolting description, other lawless bodies will use…

Surely no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portends.

Surely all public men, all writers for the daily press, all clergymen, all teachers, all who in any way have a right to address the public, should with every energy unite to denounce such crimes and to support those engaged in putting them…

As a people we claim the right to speak with peculiar emphasis for freedom and for fair treatment of all men without regard to differences of race, fortune, creed, or color.

We forfeit the right so to speak when we commit or condone such crimes as these of which I speak.

The nation, like the individual, can not commit a crime with impunity.

If we are guilty of lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active participation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall assuredly suffer later on because of what we have done.

The cornerstone of this Republic, as of all free government, is respect for and obedience to the law.

Such a death, crowning the glory of such a life, leaves us with infinite sorrow, but with such pride in what he had accomplished and in his own personal character, that we feel the blow not as struck at him, but as struck at the nation.

On no conceivable theory could the murder of the President be accepted as due to protest against “inequalities in the social order,” save as the murder of all the freemen engaged in a town meeting could be accepted as a protest against…

Anarchy is no more an expression of “social discontent” than picking pockets or wife-beating.

He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a “product of social conditions,” save as a highwayman is “produced” by the fact that an unarmed man happens to have a purse.

The people would have torn him limb from limb if it had not been that the law he defied was at once invoked in his behalf.