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"Some years apo a brute who had outraged a woman near my home at Ruxton, in Baltimore count/, was lynched by her infuriated neighbors My recollection is that this brute was dragged from the Towson jail by the lynchers and that no legal punishment was ever inflicted upon any one. of them.
"This is but a single illustration that I might employ for the purpose of reminding the people of the Western Shore of Maryland that there has been lynching on both sides of the Chesapeake. Indeed, I might go further north than Maryland and recall another brute who some years ago was lynched at Port Jervis, on the Hudson river, in the full sight of a large concourse of human beings, not one of whom apparently witnessed the lynching.
Favors "Stern Retribution."
"God forbid that even such crimes as those which wrought frenzy in the brain of that Salisbury uprising—the crime of the wild beast, Euel Lee, who wiped out, at one fell stroke, the lives of a worthy wedded paid and their two innocent young daughters, because of a disagreement over a dollar—the crime of the other wild beast who butchered his employer, a prominent and useful citizen of Salisbury, because he thought that he should receive for his services more than fifteen cents an hour—should hurry me into an attempt to justify the killing, much less the burning of the criminal last mentioned, Matthew Williams.
"Close as every group of American citizens are to the representative agencies of their government, and passionately impelled, as they may be, at times to reclaim the authority that they have delegated to courts of jus-they have no right, when they lynch, to expect anything but stern retribution at the hands of the law.
!lt is easy to see where lynching begins, but not so easy to see where, if unchecked, it would stop; but the indefensibility of lynching furnishes no just reason why, when a lynching occurs in a single community on the Eastern Shore, the entire population of that extensive region should be defamed as mentally and spiritually backward. Edmund Burke did not know how to frame an indictment a-gainst an entire people; apparently, Dr. Mitchell does, though our own flesh and blood.
Warns of Wilder Gulf.
"The mental and spiritual backwardness of the Eastern Shore is sup. posed by him to be attributed to geographical isolation, due to the interposition of the Chesapeake Bay between the Eastern and Western
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