about eleven o'clock
This event , the Chronicle suggested , had only confirmed the opinion , which had been of late growing upon the white people , that drastic efforts were necessary to protect the white women of the South against brutal , lascivious , and murderous assaults at the hands of negro men . It was only another significant example of the results which might have been foreseen from the application of a false and pernicious political theory , by which ignorance , clothed in a little brief authority , was sought to be exalted over knowledge , vice over virtue , an inferior and degraded race above the heaven-crowned Anglo-Saxon . If an outraged people , justly infuriated , and impatient of the slow processes of the courts , should assert their inherent sovereignty , which the law after all was merely intended to embody , and should choose , in obedience to the higher law , to set aside , temporarily , the ordinary judicial procedure , it would serve as a warning and an example to the vicious elements of the community , of the swift and terrible punishment which would fall , like the judgment of God , upon any one who laid sacrilegious hands upon white womanhood . Dr. Miller , who had sat up late the night before with a difficult case at the hospital , was roused , about eleven o'clock , from a deep and dreamless sleep . Struggling back into consciousness , he was informed by his wife , who stood by his bedside , that Mr. Watson , the colored lawyer , wished to see him upon a matter of great importance . `` Nothing but a matter of life and death would make me get up just now , '' he said with a portentous yawn . `` This is a matter of life and death , '' replied Janet .