Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/150

132 His passions are easily excited, and his feelings readily inflamed to the point of reckless vindictiveness, though a natural unsteadiness of character renders him fickle and unstable in purpose" (pp. 208, 209).

By nature, the negro is, in fact, capable of committing any known crime in so far as his intelligence will permit him to be the author of it. For the lack of such intelligence and often for the lack of a sufficient amount of courage, there are fortunately limitations to some of the heinous criminal acts he might otherwise be guilty of, and be forever committing. But lacking in courage, intelligence, forethought, and the necessary staying powers, the criminal negro is perforce restricted to certain of the coarser and grosser crimes in the calendar, not requiring these several prerequisites. His murders are clumsy and brutal; his thefts of all kinds are usually paltry and liable to being easily detected ; except for the purposes of spite or to cover other crimes, he rarely resorts to arson; while to the refinements of criminality in other directions he is quite a stranger.

However, all things considered, and notwithstanding the enormous amount of crime of all kinds committed by negroes in the United States, the one above all others for which he is held especially responsible by the American descendants of the Anglo-Saxon race, is that of his assaults upon white women. These heinous, devilish, fiendish cases of rape are often associated with the murder of the victim after the assault, and they have become so common in many parts of the country where negroes abound, that a fearful species of terror has come to prevail and haunt the minds of all the white women who for one reason or