Evening Post. MONDAY, MAY 12, 1930. SHERMAN AND SHOLAPUR

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 110, 12 May 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. MONDAY, MAY 12, 1930. SHERMAN AND SHOLAPUR

Two of to-day's messages which seem to have been dispatched from New York within a few minutes of one another are very oddly contrasted, One tells us of a cablegram sent by 102 American clergymen to Mr. Kamsay Mac Donald

urging him to avoid, by amicable settlement with Gandhi and his people, "a conflict which means'catastrophe for both Britain and India."

According to the second of these messages,

Despite tho aid of National Guardsmen, Texas Rangers were unable to prevent a mob at gherm'an, Texas, from burning tho courthouse gaol in which a negro was hold for attacking a white woman, . . . The negro was cremated in a steel vault, where ho was placed for protection.

If Mr. Mac Donald had not been a man of peace and a man of discretion he might have been tempted to reply to his clerical advisers that, on the principle of keeping your breath to cool your own porridge, it would be as well forlhem to pay a little attention to Texas before giving India a turn. The arson, the anarchy, the looting, and the murder which Mr. Gandhi's gospel of non-violence has stirred up in India—a gospel preached so violently that, as we learn from our latest English files, the reports of his speeches have been severely censored—could of course be made the subject of an "amicable settlement" with the saint and his unsaintly followers. But the Americans themselves have a saying that a question is not settled until it 'is settled right. To surrender to violence might present an "amicable" appearance to the pulpits of New York, but in India it would settle nothing, and it would unsettle the very foundations of the country's security, and therefore of its freedom and its prosperity. The keeping of the peace and .the upholding of the law are the greatest of the many services that Britain has rendered India, and to falter in the task would be to , betray a sacred trust and to obliterate all the good work of a century and a half in a welter of anarchy. Beneath a general resemblance the riots at Sholapur and Sherman, which are reported to-day, present a still moie striking contrast. In both cases mobs of several thousands attacked the courthouse or the courthouse gaol, overpowered the guards, and set the buildings on fire. But at Sholapur they celebrated their victory bythrowing'into the flames the seven policemen who had resisted. With the aid of the troops their subsequent, attack •on the Post Office was repulsed with 50 killed and more than 400 wounded, and the women and children who had been concentrated at the railway station under a strong guard escaped safely to Poona. What .would have happened to the women and children under the only kind of "amicable 'settlement" that would have been possible with such assailants? And the fate of the women and children, not of Sholapur only but, of all India, may be said to depend upon showing the same uncompromising front to intending" murderers that was shown on this occasion. In Sherman, the Governor of Texas had, on the face of it, a less precious charge. He had no white women and children to protect against a coloured mob, but only a wretched negro who was probably guilty of the offence for which he had been arrested, and whom a white mob, doubtless led by some of Sherman's best citizens, desired to take from the hands of-the authorities and murder.^ But the honour and majesty of the lafw were staked on the protection of that negro until he had been found guilty, and they proved unequal to the strain. The responsibility for asserting the law and protecting the prisoner rested upon Governor Moody as the chief executive officer of the State, but he was evidently more concerned not to hurt the mob than to save the negro, and his desire for an "amicable settlement" had its inevitable result. If he had telegraphed, "Don't hesitate to shoot," the National Guardsmen and the Rangers might have cooled the passions of their assailants .in time. But he tied their hands when he said instead: Hold them if you can; do not shoot anybody. Such a message, of course, made the defence hopeless. The rioters were repulsed three times with gas bombs, but finally made their way into the gaol, poured petrol about, and set the place on fire. Who else was killed as long as they got their man does not seem to have troubled them, but fortunately he eluded them by the merciful death of suffocation. With the help of dynamite and acetylene torches they afterwards broke into the prisoner's cell, dragged away the corpse, and hung it on a tree. The negro had escaped the agonising tortures usual on these occasions, but it was at least possible to parade his dead body. In their ''Problems of Modern American Crime" Mr. and Mrs. Paul King cite from the same State a more striking example of a mob's disappointment and the sequel. In May, 1922, a negro accused of a similar crime was privately shot before the mob arrived. The nest performance was to have his corpse removed to an unclertaliov 's

parlour, but this in somo way annoyed tho township, as being the wrong thing to do; so presently a crowd of citizens, estimated at 6000 persons, went and stormed tho premises of tho hapless undertaker, seized tho corpse, tied it to a truck and dragged it through the stroots, and then burnt it to ashes on tho public square. . . It was probably a slight disappointment to ths crowd, but they seemed satisfied on tho whole; and so, apparently, wero tho authorities, as no action was taken. On the present occasion, however, popular passion did not cool so rapidly. For twelve hours the mob was rushing through the city of Sherman, seeking negro victims, destroying property, and burning three blocks of buildings in the negro quarter, with the result that that quarter has been deserted, and the Governor has been asked to put die whole city under martial law. But what would be the use of martial law against a mob that knew the soldiers were under orders not to hurt anybody? Not in recent years has an American city lived through such scones of awful rioting and uncontrolled mob passions as Sherman during this lynching. Though the number of .lynchings in the United States declined from 138 in 1886 to 30 in 1926, and the number of negro lynchings from 71 to 23, the record is still a terrible one for a great country which in so many less undesirable ways leads the world. And the most terrible feature of it is that while the number of these offences .declines the diabolical cruelty with which they are perpetrated is getting worse. On tho other hand, thoro has boon during recent years (according to Mr. Walter White in "Eopo and Fagot 1') a notable aggravation of tho1 brutality with which tho crime has been committed. Of tho 416 neg-roes lynched ■within tho last ten years, 14.9 per cent, wero done to death with abnormal savagery. ■

The possibly accidental absence of this hideous feature is the only redeeming point in Sherman's."record" performance.