THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 827, 29 September 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1906.

The disgraceful outburst of mob lawlessness which has ooourred afc Atlanta, in Georgia, and whioh led to the killing of a large number of unoffending negroes, has produoej, no douat, a painful impression, not only in America, but throughout the civilized world. Suoh an occurrence in China or Russia or Turkey would have been accepted as in keeping with the barbarous and brutal conditions existing in tnose countries, where the masses are steeped in fanaticism, ignorance, and superstition. But that such a thing should happen in the United States is calculated to make us pause in our judgment of foreign nations. The American Govern/rent and the American peoclo will spare no effort to efface tbia terrible bloc on the name of America. Justice will not rest until the perpetrators of the Atlanta outrage have been laid by the heels. The law will be vindicated, for the law knows no distinction of race or colour in a crime of this character. It may be, even, that out of evil will oome good, and that the massacre of blaoks at the hands of a

frenzied and ignorant mob will have the effeot of rousing the oonaoienoe of the American people to the imperative necessity of solving in aomo satisfactory manner the great sooial problem wbidb oonfronts them in tne South. Georgia has always enjoyed an unenviable notoriety as a lynohing State. It lies, a oontem porary points out, within, the sooallea "Black Belt," and haa a population of 1,034,998 negroes, the largest black population of any in the Union. For the last twenty years' the majority of the lynchiuga which have occurred have taken place | within its boundaries. These crimes are sometimes sought to be palliated by the nature of the outrages which give rise to tbem. But how little there is in this excuse is seen from the remarks of the Southern press. "The men who commit w the crimes," says the Columbia State, "are the men having the least regard for the maintenance of Southern manhood and womanhood. To maintain that they are defending the integrity of thß race is either bold hypocrisy or utter lack of conception of the true conditions." The truth seems to be that a large proportion of the white population in the South are as ignorant as the negroes themsslvies. "There is no more humiliating fact," says the Atiauta Constitution, "that an intelligent Southern man has to faoe than this: that among the white people of the South we have aa many illiterate men over twenty-one years of age as we had fifty-two years ago!" It is worth while recalling that one of the strongest and most convincing appeals ever made to the people of a Stat« to unite for the suppression of this enormous crime was made by Governor Atkinson, of Georgia, in 1897, in his message to the Legislature. But it did not prove to be effective in destroying the preeminence of Georgia as a lynohing State. Appeals to the reason, the sense of justioe and the humanity of an ignorant, brutalised and de- ' graded mob can scarcely prove anything else than futile.