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