and scored the growers for cheering such sentiments. Why do you cheer, when it is said that soldiers should not have been sent to Hopkinsville? Do you recall that two weeks ago, armed and masked criminals rode into Hopkinsville, shot into innocent homes and burned up property, and that up to this day, not a man has been arrested? The law of the state must and will be supreme. These soldier boys are Anglo-Saxon too. I am an Anglo-Saxon myself, and so are you, and I know that down in your hearts you want the law enforced. If necessary, we will call on every one of you to shoulder a musket and help enforce it, and you will comply, and it is wrong for other sentiments to be expressed and for the high judges of the state to advise anything else.

"Every outbreak decreases the value of every acre of land in Kentucky and endangers the liberty of every man who is cheering these utterances, and unless suppressed, the state will be abhorred as a place unfit to live in. The liberty of the people is worth more than all the tobacco that ever was or ever will be raised in Kentucky. Sometimes the only way to force the idea of law and order through an obstinate Anglo-Saxon's head is by the bayonet. The soldiers were necessary and had been called for by the county officers and great numbers of people who had reason for their fears, and all the troops needed will be ordered on duty whenever and wherever needed if I have to call out the reserve and bankrupt the state treasury. When an Anglo-Saxon takes up arms against the people's law, the arms of the law will put him down. Violence and intimidation, night riders and so-called peaceful armies" will be suppressed relentlessly, and all the power of the state government will be used to do it.""

The representative of the tobacco company, the chief buyer, made a short address, which gave promise of an understanding being reached between the rival interests, and committees were appointed, and the negotiations brought on by this meeting finally ended in a settlement in which the tobacco trust and the growers' pools-the two trusts-agreed on a very good price for the pooled tobacco, to their mutual satisfaction. Such a sale. of the pooled tobacco would in my judgment never have been made, but for the conference. There would have been strife, bitterness and violence, which would have ended all chance of agreement upon good prices. But the result has not helped the cause of liberty or law and order; indeed it has strengthened the hands of the two combinations, the tobacco trust and the

farmers' pool, and the independent buyers and the independent growers, who had not already sold, have the "bag to hold." The conference thanked the Governor, and

"Resolved, further, That this meeting of Kentuckians heartily endorses the purpose of Governor Willson to discover and punish the perpetrators of the recent outrages in Western Kentucky and especially at Hopkinsville; and we do with all possible earnestness condemn those and similar outrages . . . . and hereby pledge to Governor Willson every assistance at our command, including the power and influence of the organizations which we respectively here represent, in his efforts not only to restore, but to permanently maintain peace and good order throughout Kentucky."

This resolution of the meeting, composed almost wholly of tobacco farmers, following so quickly the rebuke of the fierce applause of the speech against the use of troops to put down the armed attacks on the peaceful people, was very gratifying proof of the justice of the Governor's confidence in the devotion of the people of Kentucky to the law.

Not less effective than the troops was the organization in several counties of law and order leagues, and finally a state league, enrolling a very large number of fearless and determined men, who were organized into companies and money was subscribed to pay all of the expenses. These leagues helped patrol the roads and guarded their neighbors. There were also many instances of individual heroic defense of homes and property by. men and even by women against the night riders. For months, hundreds of homes were guarded by their families who kept night watches under arms. The dangers were often as great and the anxieties as thrilling as those which the pioneers had to endure from the Indians.

Then followed many acts of oppression: plant bed scraping, barn burning, burning railroad stations, threatening, whipping and beating white citizens and destroying property in different parts of the state by organized bands. On the application of citizens who were in danger, small detachments of soldiers were sent to several counties, and shipments of state guns and ammunition were made to responsible parties in a great many places, and detachments were on duty with gatling guns at Hopkinsville and

Lexington. Five hundred dollars, the largest reward authorized, was offered for the conviction of each of the men guilty of the raids and intimidation in all of the troubled counties, and to every man who should give advance information of contemplated raids.

A succession of outrages, forcible seizures of tobacco and whipping more than fifty white men, went on for months in Bracken county. Tobacco buyers were whipped by night riders in Lyon county at the town of Kuttawa, and many people sold their property and left the state; the newspapers reported that fifty moved to Texas in a single day. The disorders in western Kentucky continued, and further detachments of militia were sent there.

Two hundred masked men seized on the town of Dycusburg. Two men and a woman were beaten and a tobacco warehouse and a distillery burned. This outrage was very brutal in its character. The raiders left their horses at the edge of the town, and after cutting the telephone wires, began to shoot up the town. It is estimated that about two thousand shots were fired. The first victim was unmercifully whipped with thorn switches. They then fired into a family home, dragged the owner out and whipped him until he begged for mercy, and when his wife tried to rescue him, she was beaten.

In Nicholas county, Hiram Hedges, a poor farmer, was called to his door and murdered in cold blood before the eyes of his wife and children, by a band of night riders. Hedges, before he was shot, threw himself on the mercy of the men, and promised to comply with their wishes and dig up his plant beds if they would leave his home, but they paid no attention and shot him to death. Two men identified by the widow were arrested and released on examination by a county judge.

Farmers all over the state were warned not to raise a crop in 1908. At Paducah, the circuit judge, who acted with great courage and vigor throughout all of these troubled times and impaneled a grand jury to investigate the raids in Marshall county, received long distance telephone threats of violence.

A company of mounted infantry was put on duty as a night

patrol of the roads in the counties of Mason, Bracken, Harrison, Grant and Owen.

There is not time to detail the many wrongs done. Through all the story of violence it was plain that every crime was part of a plan to make all tobacco growers afraid not to pledge their crops to the association.

It is of some interest to record the night rider oath, which was in these words:

“I, in the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, do solemnly promise and swear to become a member of this order. If I should betray this order in any way by signs, acts or writing or cause to be revealed the secrets of this order, I shall have to submit to the penalty which is put upon me, which is death. I solemnly promise and swear that I will obey all orders which may be given me, and I will go at any time they may call upon me unless I or my family are sick."

A member of the band testified that he went with the night riders to the homes of various men who were forced to come out and take this oath of membership on their knees.

During these occurrences, the Governor was receiving from men and women all over the state the most earnest and touching appeals for help and protection against the night rider outrages, threats and crimes. I quote from a letter from one lady, which is a fair sample of many:

"But I feel like this terrible mental strain on account of threats and also actions from what is called night riders, I cannot endure much longer. When we lie down at night we do not know whether it is for the last time or whether all our property will be destroyed before morning. My husband has had a written notice that his house and barns would be burned and his hide split, and last Friday night, his old blind mother, 84 years old, had all of her tobacco destroyed by them, and last summer they would not let her wheat be threshed, and notified the man that did thresh it, that they would blow up his machine with dynamite, if he went into her field, until it was nearly ruined. The torture that the poor country people are suffering is worse than death. What can you do for us?.... It seems to me half the people of Kentucky will be crazy before July and so much property destroyed."

The Governor is, by law, authorized only to employ two de

tectives and to expend not exceeding three thousand dollars in any year for investigations; this was entirely inadequate for investigating a state-wide conspiracy like this. A very serious hindrance to the state administration in putting down these disorders was due to the fact that some members of the general assembly were in sympathy with the lawlessness. There was an opposition majority in both houses, and part of the general assembly was opposed to law and order measures.

During all of this time, it had been impossible, generally, to secure any indictment by a grand jury against the night riders in any but two or three of the counties where a brave circuit judge used all the power of his great office to suppress lawlessness, as in Calloway, where fifty-two were indicted, while other officers, professing virtuous sentiments, connived at packing the juries with night riders, so that the trials in some courts, where men were plainly guilty, were farces.

For nearly a year the militia-mounted infantry-patrolled large districts of the state. It was hard service: detachments riding long, hard rides every night, through the winter and inclement spring, lonely all night patrols through hostile neighborhoods. And then the state law and order league, by resolution, demanded that the Governor should call out the whole militia force of the state and post men in every county, and reproached him for not taking more active measures.

The whole force of militiamen on guard in the state never exceeded three hundred soldiers, whose patrols covered many counties and many thousands of square miles and thousands of miles of roads. They were at all times under strict orders not to parley or compromise with the lawless in any way, but to attack them instantly wherever they found them in masked bands, taking every care to be certain that they were night riders, so that no innocent persons should be attacked. The lawless men, ordinarily brave enough to fight their numbers or more than their numbers, became panic stricken at the idea of being killed in masks, and, even in large bodies, they would not venture to ride the roads patrolled by a squad of only two or three militiamen. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the power of the senti