The Union times. [volume] (Union, S.C.) 1894-1918, 1915-09-03
CRIME IS NOT SECTIONAL

perhaps four hundred or more per-
sons are killed by their fellows in
year. With three times the number
of inhabitants there were 40 homi-
cides in New York city last year. But
suppose South Carolina had 5000
armed rural policemen, who believes
that lynching would not be almost
impossible. To keep the number
of homicides down to 140 a year in
an area of 100 square miles. an armv
of $4,000, an army of more than half
so large as the mobile army of the
United States, is required in New
York! Chicago's conditions, one sus-
poets, are similar. Withdraw nine
tenths of the policemen of Chicago
and would Mr.. Armour dare to walk
it's streets unarmed? Yet, in South
Carolina;-we have not ten per cent.
proportionally, of the police force
required in any great American city.
We have not the money to pay their
wages.
"Ah, but these cities have the
foreign elements" one answers. So
they answer whose fathers stood by
approving while their representatives
came here fifty years ago and taught
an alien race to rob and steal, to
plunder the State, to corrupt the dali
lot box and finally exasperated the
white people to resort to violence and
intimidation to save their civiliza-
tion. True it is that the resistance to
carpet-bagger government demoral-
lied the white people of the South to
great extent and recovery. from the
evils of that time is not yet complete
but, despite that, no great American
city may preach civilization to the
South. Nightly Chicago teams with
crimes unknown to the crude and
simple-minded criminals of rural
States and communities and the
problem of saving civilization in any
great American city is greater than it
is in the South (where no great cit
les have been built) even as it was
too great for human solution in the
"Cities of the Plain"
In the indictment that The Tribune
brings there is much truth, but there
are no more condonement and de-
South Carolina for example, and
those whom for he speaks for than by
The Tribune and those people of Illi-
nois who denounced the Lorimer leg
islatures or the race riots few years
ago in Abraham Lincoln's home
town.
The Tribune indicts the whole peo-
pie. 1t was itself in assumed
righteousness and "abuses" the South
as through the decent, self-respecting
! and informed people of the South and
the North did not need to stand
against the forces of evil in every
State and section.
We pretend to be no better than
our neighbors by nature, but we tell
The Tribune that, because we are
rural people, with all our ruffianism
our homicides, our lynchings, moral
ity and civilization are safer in South
Carolina than in the reeking atmos-
phere of Chicago and New York. If
there be need for chiding and "a bit
ter word" they need it more than
does South Carolina where crime at
least is yet primitive enough to be
recognized at glance.
The pity is that a newspaper of
power and good purpose lacks the
vision to perceive that crime is not
sectional or geographical, that South
and North there are good and bad
and that the forces Of righteousness
can i'll afford to spend their energies
In warning among themselves. And
let The Tribune remember another
time that the press of the country
can not rescue a prisoner from the
law at the cost of discrediting the
law without inviting rescue by ruff
fians in rude land and that one
kind of lynch law breeds another.
Sometimes the wages of sin is