The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 | Page 3

trail. The murderer must be immediately pursued. The person against whom the crime is committed or his next of kin must raise an immediate outcry, and they and the neighbors must proceed at once in pursuit. If they caught the criminal within a reasonable distance or within a reasonable time, they then were endowed by primitive law with the right to execute justice upon him themselves. Commonly the criminal was hanged (even for theft) when caught in the act, but barbarous punishments were not uncommon. That was legal procedure, provided the cry was raised, the pursuit undertaken, and the criminal caught within a reasonable number of hours or days as the case might be. The mob had the right to execute the law, and it is not often that lynchings take place long periods after the commission of the crime. Such for many centuries was the law in Europe for whites. Self-help applied in particular to men of different tribes or communities who were not of the same blood kin.
If self-help applied under certain conditions within the blood kin as it unquestionably did, that is to say, within the law, it applied with greater force to all classes and offenders who were outside the blood kin and were outside the law. If a stranger or an alien came within the community bounds and did not sound his horn, community law sanctioned his instant killing by anyone who met him. Men could not peaceably enter the precincts of the German tribes as late as the year 500 or 600 A.D. without being liable to instant death unless they complied with certain definite formularies. Until within five hundred years, the stranger was practically without rights in any country but his own, and might be dealt with violently by individuals or bodies of citizens. One has but to remember the tortures visited upon the Jews in all European countries with impunity to realize the truth of the doctrine of self-help when applied to strangers. There was literally no law to govern the situation. The courts did not deal with it, no penalties were provided for the restraining of individuals or of the community at large, dealing with strangers until a relatively recent time.
Is it not true that the difference in blood between the Negro and the white man has caused a survival of this notion of self-help, today illogical, unreasonable, absurd, but powerful none the less despite its technical infraction of the law of the land? Is not the lynching of a Negro or of a white man simply the old primitive self-help with the hue and cry and the execution of the victim when caught by the mob or by the sheriff's posse? There is perhaps no field of speculation so fascinating as this of the survival of bygone customs, traditions, and notions, in present society. At the same time he will be a poor and uncritical student who will not recognize the ease of erecting vast structures upon slender foundations. My purpose in this article is not to allege the necessary truth of this proposition, but, if possible, to stimulate along different lines than has been common the researches of those who are interested in the psychological attitude of the white man toward the Negro.
There will be no doubt those who will exclaim that if I am right in this analysis of the problem--indeed, if there be any reasonable modicum of truth in what I say--then the solution of the problem will be difficult in the extreme. The whole method of attack upon it will be altered. A long educational campaign will become the main feature, intended to expose the true basis of the white man's denial of real equality to the Negro race. It will look like a battle too long to be waged with courage because the victory will be far in the future. I do not agree. The attack, if properly directed, and vigorously followed up, will, like the assault of the woman suffragists upon equally ancient instinctive promptings, be unexpectedly successful. The walls of the fortress are thin and the defenders the wraiths of a dim past.
ROLAND G. USHER.

LINCOLN'S PLAN FOR COLONIZING THE EMANCIPATED NEGROES[1]
The colonization of the emancipated slaves had been one of the remedies for the difficulties created by the presence of freedmen in the midst of slave conditions. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 with the object of promoting emancipation by sending the freedmen to Africa. Some of the slave States, moreover, had laws compelling the freedmen to leave the State in which they had formerly resided as slaves. With an increasingly large number securing legal manumission, the problem caused by their presence became to the slaveholding group a most serious one. The Colonization Society, therefore, sought to colonize the freedmen on