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Saturday, May 7, 2022

If You Take Law Into Your Own Hands, You Are Not Law-Abiding, Says Editor, May 7, 1922

Taking the Law in Their Own Hands

It is not very pleasant to have it suspected by officials of the sheriff’s jurisdiction and apparently by officers somewhat generally that the young boy who was shot on the highway early Saturday morning was wounded by men interested in the enforcement of the law, but acting without the investment of such authority in them by local authorities. It is distasteful because it smacks of a reign of terror.

The only men who are commissioned to shoot another man are those who are clothed with the powers of the law, who act under the oath to which they swear and who shoot in the name of the law. It makes no difference how good a citizen may be himself nor how zealously he may insist upon the enforcement of the law he has no right to shoot his sentiments into others and to compel society to accept his own high notions of government at the point of a pistol. We are not at all concerned with the identity of the man shot, don’t know anything about him except that he has been connected therefore with liquor transactions. If he was a violator of the whiskey laws, the whiskey laws have their own defenders and these defenders are commissioned by the people to act, in delegated authority, in all of these matters. If we suppose that Carl Lippard was notorious, that would not change the status of things one iota. The shooting down of a thug by so-called good citizens is no more to be justified than the shooting down of citizens by so-called thugs, insofar as the law is concerned, and no atonement can e brought about for one wrong done society by doing society the another wrong of breaking its laws to get revenge on a man.

If Lippard should have been shot, it was the business of the duly constituted authorities to shoot him, and NOT THE BUSINESS OF ANY OTHER MAN. Any other man who shot him without having first been invested with property authority, is amenable to the same law for the vindication of which he aimed his gun. It is manifest where this sort of thing will take us. It will take us to mobocracy. And mobocracy is lynching and lynching is the grossest sort of disrespect for law.

We can quite understand the notions that get into the head of men who are impatient when the courts move slowly and the officers seem not to be as alert as they might be. A virile, red-blooded citizen who is passionately against certain forms of evil and wants to see them broken up is tempted to take an extreme position and to advocate measures and methods which, in sober moments, would clearly present themselves to him as being improper, inexpedient and unlawful.

But it is never any single man’s right nor the right of any single group of men to associate themselves together for the purpose of doing for the State what the State ha snot asked or empowered them to do. Otherwise, if somebody should be adjudged guiltless in the court house by a jury, we would stand on the steps and shoot the criminal down as he stepped out. In every instance where the verdicts of the court should, perchance, fail to satisfy every citizen, such citizen would be justified in having the law carried out according to his own notion, under this system of things.

Obviously, no good citizen would subscribe to such an administration as that, where every man makes himself judge, solicitor and jury, tries, condemns and then executes judgment without any sort of a process of investigation. No community has ever survived under the absurd and extravagant spirit of the aristocracy of virtue. Respect for the law is the first element in good citizenship and it is the business of every good citizen to aid duly-elected officers in the enforcement of law and putting the fear of it in the hearts of the people, but it is not the business of any man, except an officer, to take upon himself the duty of executing that law. The State is supreme; government must be held responsible instead of the individual citizen, otherwise the so-called law-abiding become the most lawless and terrorism will be spread by those who allege themselves to be its enemies.

Editorial from The Charlotte News, May 7, 1922. W.C. Dows, president and general manager; Julian S. Miller, editor.

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