less often successful than is generally supposed. About eleven
thousand persons were convicted of felonies in the County Courts
of New York during the five years from 1898 to 1902, inclusive of
each, and of these less than nine in a thousand pursued an
appeal, not a third of whom secured a judgment of
reversal.[Footnote: Nathan A. Smyth, _Harvard Law Review_
for March, 1904.] In Massachusetts, about a hundred thousand
criminal prosecutions are annually brought, and the appeals to
the Supreme Judicial Court from sentences of conviction rarely
exceed twenty to twenty-five in number, and upon these in each of
the years 1902 and 1903 only two new trials were
granted.[Footnote: _Law Notes_ for December, 1904.]

A comparison of the number of those put to death in the United
States for crime by the courts, and on a charge of crime by a
mob, for the past three years shows these results:

Executed by
Judicial Sentence. Lynched. Total.

1901 118 125 243
1902 144 96 240
1903 123 125 248

A large majority of those lynched were negroes, and met their
fate in the South. It is extremely difficult to secure a
conviction of those who take part in such acts of violence. They
commit the crime of murder, and the penalty is so heavy that
their fellow-citizens are unwilling to subject them to it. The
offenses with which the men whom they kill are charged are also