Yesterday at ten of the morning, near Memphis, Tennessee, a mob of five thousand white men burned with fire a negro to the death. The negro had been accused of the commission of a capital crime. Under the law he deserved death according to the law.

But those five thousand white men did not administer death according to the law. They seized the negro from a willing sheriff's posse, which was sworn by all honor to uphold the law. They hold him awaiting the final torture, while excursion trains ran from the city, while business houses shut down as for a holiday, while pleasure-seekers came by motor from the whole country-side to witness this festival. This festival of debauchery!

And then the throng having collected, representative of the South's chivalry and the South's courage, the mob thrust their victim into a small steel cage from which there was no escape. They bound him by chains at the hands and feet. Lest he, no doubt, should, although a member of the despised race and one against thousands, put to rout these courageous Southern gentlemen. When they had bound him, the chains being hard and the steel bars strong, they tortured him; the mob, with the fiendish tortures which from time immemorial have been the pastime of savages. And when he was near to oblivion from pain, they applied the torch to the oil-soaked fagots and aroused his spirit to a terrible death in the fire. It is noted that a few urged that he be shot. They should be honored, for they were merciful.

The crowd clamored at his tortured shrieks, rejoicing around the pyre till that which was once a man had become but bones and ashes. There were women in that mob in great numbers, singing at the gala day. Women! Those chivalric and holy women of the South to keep whom pure the last Southern gentleman would shed his romantic blood. The flower of chivalry! Did womanly pity, did womanly sorrow, which is the greatest compassion our race may know, move their hearts then? Did they weep at this bestiality?

The victim was seen to pray as the fires rolled over his flesh. To what God did he pray? The South is reputed religious, far more so than this Unitarian and materialistic North. Did the white man's God hear those agonizing prayers? Or does the negro worship an impotent Diety?

One negro in the throng tore down the flag of his nation and raised a cry for Germany. He was threatened with the death. There are millions of his race in the South who might well be moved with the same passion. Germany, in all her brutality, never did the like in Belgium.

It was not Memphis' sin alone. It was not Tennessee's sin alone. It was the sin of this nation, which allows such things to come to pass. It was the sin of our lawlessness, of our mad disregard of all that makes existence bearable to men.

Young men, you young men of the South, do not attempt from a barren sectional pride to defend a crime so horrible. For such lust of death in a whole city, a whole country-side, there is no shadow of defence, not now, nor in eternity. It is for those men who in time hope to lead the South to arouse such horror in their hearts of this mob blindness that they will do away with it forever; that our whole people, without sectional exception, will honor that law and justice upon which our nation rests.