Boo!

[rooty]

Wat hi-lar-i-ous

-------- Original Message --------
On Dec 17, 2019, 2:33 PM, Ryan Carboni wrote:

> “Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in
> the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all
> around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk
> over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to
> bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full
> of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a
> brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other
> people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your
> juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will
> shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do.
>
> “So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a
> hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your
> mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake,
> and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark and fetch your
> masks. You brought part of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you
> hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing.
>
> “You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and
> danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a
> man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ’Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re
> afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you
> are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that
> half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big
> things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s
> what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in
> them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their
> officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath
> pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and
> go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done
> it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come
> they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave—and take
> your half-a-man with you”—tossing his gun up across his left arm and
> cocking it when he says this.
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