The age-herald., 1901-09-09
WHAT NEXT AFTER rHE sTAKEa

From the Washington Evening Star.
 The future statistlcian. who follows the course of the lyhching evil in this country will doubtless note a surprising increase in the number of cases In which the stake has been substituted for the moose in the disposition of the mob's victim. The first instance of this kind shocked the coun> try only a few years ago. well within a decade. The very novelty of the crime caused 1t to be copied, and soon the rec ord of the year included. several burn- ings, and the next season produced more, and so the roll has grown, until today a lynching by the simple process of hang ing attracts attention by it's ihfrequency
 Thus It is that the fitirning of a prisoner by a mob is now almost the recognised manner of disposing of a black man who has committed an assault upon a white woman. What will come next? Will the mob be satisfied with It's progression to- ward savasery and rest content with the cremation of It's living victims? Or will 1t seek new means of punishment more severe tortures? It will be difficult to de- vise methods more brutal than the burn ing of a man alive, Nothing more horrible than this was done in the middle ages in the name of the induisition. Not even the Chinese process of infiicting death by the thousand cuts" is worse, nor is the trick of some savage tribes of burying a prisoner alive up to the neck near an ant hill and then allowing the insects to tor. ture the man till he dies. None of these refnements of cruelty can be considered as more shocking, more exquisite in the infiction of pain, than death at the stake
 For it seems to be @ question now not merely of putting a wretch out of the way, but of making his death go horrible as to frighten his kind from the possible commission of the same crime. The ex- ample must be made unmistakable. it is claimed in justification of the stake. Hanging has not checked the evil, and therefore the mobs act must be given more terrible meaning in the eyes of the black man. The answer to this apology for the recent development toward saw agery is that the stake has not done more than the moose for the preservation of the Southern home. And lynching has outgrown its original bounds as protector of woman's honor, and now shoots and burns the black perpetrators of misde- meanors as well as crimes, and has even run amuck, staying on mere suspicion or indiscriminately. Even the crime for which this mode of execution was origin ally reserved is no less frequent than when mob law prescribed the elementary penalty. Will the abandonment of the stake in turn for some greater torture yet to be devised accomplish any more?
 The remedy lies In another direction Some day the South will perhaps realize this fact, that the infiictfon of death by a mob whatever the agency employed, is a crime and that to meet one crime with another is neither corrective nor cura- tive. Having tried to meet the need by elaborating it's cruelty, why should not the mob now, confessing failure, turn the other way and seek a remedy by the em- ployment of the very processes of the law which 1t has so long abandoned? That will prove a novelty, perhaps fin itself more effective as cure than the elabor- ation of the horrors which have marked the development of the iynching evil dur ing the past few decades