“The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to kill a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind as long as it’s daylight and you’re not behind him.
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 man 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 onto 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 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.”
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
