The Evening statesman. [volume] (Walla Walla, Wash.) 1903-1910, 1908-08-18
THOSE RACE RIOTS.

Ine IOdQpenedtn the IidIION hio" :
Exactly where each tooth point goes
The butterfly upon the road
breaches contentment to that toad
Thus sang Kipling when he was
finding himself as an editor of a way
followers of this gifted English writer
have noticed that since that time he
has been less prone to criticise and to
find fault, especially where there was
Just q possibility that he was not ac-
quainted with both sides of the ques-
ton.
Such a sentiment might with pro-
priety be commended to those pious-
minded theorists who have been de-
voting column or two q day to a
discussion, running the entire gauntlet
from lamentation to scathing denun-
citation. Of the causes and effects Of
those riots down at Springfield Illinois.
where, if we are to credit the press
dispatches. race hatred, which has
long ranked in the breasts of white
men compelled to rub elbows with
those Of the Gafker color. Eas developed
Into a raging passion which has made
man forget statutes and constitutional
amendments and all that veneer which
civilization has thrown around them,
and yield to that spirit of other ages
which bids men of a dominant race
assert supremacy merely because they
know in their hearts that they are
supreme.
1t is lawiessness. OF course. it is
lawlessness. but down where the race
problem is an actual living, throbbing
fact rather than a dreamy theory, it is
bred in the bone of white men that
that vague, ominuus thing called the
white mans law takes precedence over
any formal enactments of congress,
men to assert this unwritten law, the
response to the call leaves no doubt of
it's meaning.
And of course it is terrible that the
members of a whole race should not
only be judged, but punished for the
acts of few of that race but the white
man in the southland will tell you that
this is only true because it is the ne
gro as a race, rather than as an in
dividual. that constitutes the ever pres
ent menace to white civilization in the
south and that back of the punishment
meted out to every black brute who
assaults a white woman back of every
lynching, back of every riot. back of
every incendiary blaze which with its
lurid light proclaims the destruction
of some poor and perhaps harmless
devils home, lies the white mans de-
termination that not only shall white
rule be maintained but that the white
mans blood Shall be transmitted to
coming generations, unpolluted by the
blood of an inferior race
And while. out here where we are
far removed from the scene of that
never ending conflict, of which
the riots at Springfield, on the border
land. are but an example, we can hurl
rhetorical bricks at those who have
shown but scant courtesy to existing
statutes or can fill column with full
some praise of a strong willed execu-
tive who will protect at the point of
the bayonet the rights of those whom
the law makes it his duty to protect,
better task for such wisdom. if wis
dom it is. might be to devise some plan
whereby the extremes of lynching and
rioting on the one hand and of le-
galized slaughter on the other might
. be Avoiied-always realizing that in
! the making Of such q plan due respect
must be accorded to white mans de-
cree that the negro in the south must
go.