Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/190

168 rapist, but he holds him mightily in check. As a sheer, cold, patent fact, the mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the negro race. The masses of the negro, he held, are not afraid of death coming in a regular way. They love display and the spectacular element of a trial and execution to their imaginations. " Expediting the processes of the law would not be adequate to eliminate lynching, said Mr. Graves. The repeal of the amendments and the establishm.ent of the negro's interiority in law and society, though desirable, are not sufficient, ' for the negro,' he added, ' is a thing of the senses, and with this race and with all similar races the desire of the senses must be re- strained by the terror of the senses, if possible under the law.' " But this, like curfew edicts, separate laws for white and black, or the treatment of the crime of criminal assault as separate and outside of all other codes, are but expedients, he maintained ; there is no real remedy but one. No statute will permanently solve this prob- lem. Religion does not solve it, he said. Education complicates it. PoHtics complicates it. " ' The truth, which lies beyond and above all these temporizing expedients,' he concluded, ' is that separa- tion is the logical, the inevitable, the only solution of this great problem of the races.' " His words and address provoked very general dis- cussion throughout the country, and hundreds of dif-