And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.
