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| the point of view of those intemperate, hasty and publicity-seeking individuals who rushed into print to denounce all citizens off the Eastern Shore when a colored man was lynched last year. We do not believe that the residents of the Shore counties as a class are any more backward than those of the rest of Maryland, Baltimore City included. Many of our finest men and women, whom we respect and admire, reside across the bay. Society has not yet learned how to prevent all individual acts of lawlessness; but most civilized communities have outgrown mob violence. Unfortunately, some of the citizens of the peninsula have been led by the extravagence jf the criticisms heaped on all Eastern Shoremen to reply in an equally violent and ill-considered manner and have thus played directly into the hands of their critias and the communistic agitators. There is much to be said in defense of the great majority of Eastern Shoremen, but nothing to be said in defense of those who participated in the recent lynching or who now seek to justify it. Lynch-ings, whatever the provocations, are barbarous and inexcusable crimes in those communities which have adequate agencies for apprehending and punishing criminals. Our courts, both nisi prius and appellate, are perfectly capable >f handling crime on the Eastern Shore. Every resident of that part of the state who possesses a decent sense )f civic responsibility should not only condemn the lynch-ng that disgraced Maryland 'out should repudiate all those persons who intimate that >uch a public crime was in any wise to be excused or vho suggest that mob action would be justified in the fu-ure. Efforts to apprehend and lunish the lynchers should be rept up, and mob-minded persons in this state made to un-lerstand that Maryland will lot tolei*ate the attempts of >rivate individuals to take the 'aw into their own hands. |