Barbarism in civilization.

A letter from New York, dated the 5th of November and addressed to the Gazette des Tribunaux, contains the following details of a horrible tragedy that occurred in Dalton, in the county of Carolina (Maryland):

“Recently a young black man had been arrested under the accusation of an offense against decency upon the person of a young white woman. Grave suspicions weighed upon him. The young woman, the object of his criminal violence, declared that she recognized him perfectly. The accused had been imprisoned in the jail of Dalton. He had been there only a few hours when a great crowd, with cries of anger and of vengeance, demanded that the unfortunate black man be handed over to it.

“The representatives of order and of authority, seeing that it would be impossible to defend, by main force, their prisoner against the irritated crowd, vainly tried to calm it with the most insistent speeches. Their words in favor of the law and of regular justice were received with hisses.

“The populace, whose number grew without ceasing, began to throw stones at the jail. Some revolver shots were fired at the agents of authority, without, however, any bullet striking them. Understanding that resistance was impossible, they opened the doors of the prison. After an immense hurrah! as a sign of satisfaction, the crowd rushed in with fury. It seized the prisoner and dragged him, amid the cries of anger of the bystanders and the supplications of the victim, to the main square of the village.

“A jury was improvised immediately. After having examined, pro forma, the facts of the case, the accused was declared guilty and condemned to the gallows immediately. They tied a rope to a tree and proceeded with the execution. While the body writhed in the convulsions of agony, the black man was the target of the insults and the violence of the spectators. Several pistol shots were fired at him, contributing to increase the tortures of his death.

“Thirsting with anger and vengeance, the crowd did not wait for the body to be completely motionless before taking it down from the rope. It paraded its ignoble trophy through the streets of Dalton. Men and women, and even children, applauded the outrages done to the corpse of the young black man.

“But the fury of the people was not to stop there. After having gone through the village in every direction, it went to the front of a church of black people. They made an immense bonfire; the corpse was mutilated and, amid noisy demonstrations, the limbs and pieces of flesh were thrown into the flames.”

This account gave rise to the following question, posed at the Spiritist Society of Paris, on the 28th of November, 1862:

“It is understandable that isolated and individual examples of ferocity should occur among civilized people. Spiritism explains them, saying that they come from inferior Spirits, in a certain way astray in a more advanced society; nevertheless, throughout their whole life, these individuals revealed the baseness of their instincts. What is more difficult to understand is that an entire population, which has given proofs of the superiority of its intelligence and, even, on other occasions, of humanitarian sentiments, which professes a religion of gentleness and peace, can be seized by such a bloodthirsty vertigo and, with a savage rage, feast upon the tortures of a victim. Here there is a moral problem about which we will ask the Spirits to be so kind as to instruct us.” (Spiritist Society of Paris, 28 November 1862. – Medium: Mr.

A. de B…)

The blood shed in those regions, famous to this day for their tendencies toward human progress, is a rain of malediction, and the anger of the just God will not be long in passing over there, where, so frequently, abominations similar to this one, whose reading you have just heard, are carried out. In vain does one try to dissimulate to oneself the consequences that they will necessarily unleash; in vain does one wish to attenuate the scope of the crime. If it is in itself horrible, it is no less so by the intention, which makes it be committed with such horrible refinements and with such bestial relentlessness. Interest! human interest! sensual pleasures, the satisfactions of pride and of vanity, were once again its motive, as on all other occasions, and the same causes will give rise to similar effects, causes, in their turn, of the effects of celestial anger, with which so many iniquities are threatened. Do you believe that there is no real progress other than that of industry, of all the resources and of all the arts that tend to soften the rigors of material life and increase the pleasures with which one wishes to satiate oneself? No; the progress necessary for the elevation of the Spirits, who are only temporarily human and who ought to attach to human things only the secondary interest that they merit, is not found only in that. The perfecting of the heart, the lights of the conscience, the diffusion of the sentiments of universal solidarity of beings, that of fraternity among humans, are the only authentic marks that distinguish a people in the march of general progress. Only by these characteristics is a nation recognized as the most advanced. But those which, within their bosom, still nourish sentiments of exclusivist pride and see such a portion of Humanity only as a servile race, made to obey and suffer, will experience, without a shadow of doubt, the nothingness of their pretensions and the weight of the vengeance of Heaven. Your father, V. de B.