[Unedited]
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”
John Hay.
On Picket Duty.
Gold monometallism is doomed in this country. Both Democratic and Republican conventions are dropping it and declaring more or less openly for bimetallism. The politicians are profoundly ignorant on the subject, and their jargon about “parity,” intrinsic value, etc., is perfectly meaningless, but they realize that silver buys votes. Bimetallism will prove disappointing, but it will pave the way, with the masses, for something better. The important thing is to destroy the gold superstition.
Speaking of the statesmen in our Senate, the New York “Evening Post” says: “If Corey had turned them out of the Capitol and installed his army in their places, the net result would have been good for the country, because it would have taught them some sense, which they are not likely to learn in any other way, and would have produced a shock in the ‘dee-stricks’ which would have led to the election of better men hereafter.” Then why did Godkin demand the imprisonment of Coxey on such ridiculous grounds as “trampling upon the grass” and “marching”?
The railroad employees who have been boycotting Pullman cars should not attribute their failure to anything inherent in the boycott. They were really not boycotters at all, but strikers. They were not allowed to “boycott” the cars; as soon as they threatened to do so they were discharged, and those who took their places handled the Pullman cars without protest. The public did not boycott the cars, and a public boycott is the only thing that the company could not have stood. There are plenty of unemployed to take the places of the trainmen, but the unemployed could not ride in Pullman cars.
Our friend Traubel remarks in the “Conservator” that “the gravity of the labor question is not appreciated by American editors as it is by those who control the great papers in England, France, and Germany,” and adds that “some will yet wake up, hoist by their own dangerous ignorance.” No, there is little hope of that. It is not so much ignorance (although there is no lack of it) as depravity, lack of principle and of the sense of responsibility. Our newspaper men write, not because they have ideas which they feel it necessary or useful to express, but because they can earn more money by becoming the phonograph of the publishers than by doing honest work.
The fact that the police are corrupt is really a blessing to society. Were the Parkhursts to have their way, life would be an intolerable burden. The police are paid for overlooking violations of stupid and tyrannical legislation: this is doubtless an evil, but the rigid enforcement of that legislation would be a greater evil. The tyranny and ignorance of the legislators are now tempered by the venality and weakness of the executive officers, the citizen being the gainer. Vice ought not to pay tithes; legitimate pursuits ought not to bribe the police into performing their duties; but it is better to part with less than with more. As long as there are restrictions which the people are anxious to evade and dodge, bribes will be offered and accepted. Abolish all restrictions, not only upon legitimate pursuits, but upon vice, and there will be no need and no willingness to pay blackmail. The Parkhurst crusade is a crusade against human nature. You must choose between a system of honest officials and free gambling, drinking, and prostitution, and a system of corrupt officials and “regulated” gambling, drinking, and prostitution. The cure for police corruption is not Parkhurstism, but liberty.
M. D. Conway, in writing in the “Open Court” of Omar Khayyam’s poetry and philosophy, says: “His greatness is not simply in his genius, but in its freedom. In this he surpasses the poets of our own time, who either accept Mrs. Grundy for a Muse, or else are crippled by their struggles under her vengeance. Half the poetic genius of our century has been, I believe, suppressed by legal or social censorship, or by their intimidation. Shakspere was great not merely by reason of his intellect, but the stage was then tree; and Goethe was great largely because he was in a position to decree literary laws instead of accepting them from inferiors. Perfect intellectual and moral freedom would surely give us Shaksperes and Goethes again. Omar Khayyam’s poetry, after eight centuries, is alive as if written today. Time is powerless over genius when developed by perfect freedom to its full fruitage.” A plea for perfect freedom from Mr. Conway is doubly welcome, since he is not at all thorough-going in his individualism. He would excuse a good many outrageous interferences on the part of the State and a good many stupidities. I am glad to learn by implication that he is opposed to the Comstock laws and all other restrictions upon literature, the stage, and art.
The proposal to insert in the Swiss Constitution a paragraph affirming the right of every male citizen to employment, has recently been rejected by an overwhelming majority. The Socialists had secured the required number of signatures, and the question was “referred” to the people. The bourgeois press looks upon the defeat of the State Socialist proposal as proof of the “sanity” of the Swiss people. Unfortunately it is not so. A people that maintain a system of high protection and otherwise restrict the liberty of the individual do not repudiate the alleged right to employment on libertarian and sane grounds. The result is probably due to demagogic appeals to petty owners of property that their taxes and burdens would be increased by the enforcement of the right to employment. Not that this is false, but the politicians put this plea forward only against measures in the interest of the victims of present injustice and never against measures favoring the monopolists. Liberty disbelieves in the right to employment in the State Socialist sense, but it does not allow itself to be betrayed into the blunder of hailing everything with enthusiasm that seems a libertarian victory without inquiring whether it is really what it seems to be. The semi-individualists, by their failure to discriminate, often play into the hands of Tories and plutocrats.
The income tax has evidently come to stay in American government economy. It is very popular with those who have small incomes, and no political party would venture to offend these classes, since they represent the overwhelming majority of the people. The economists agree in regarding the income tax as a just and even ideal measure, but that is because they start out with radically false and vicious principles of political organization. Under freedom, respective cost of protection and insurance would determine the amount paid by individuals, not the value of the property. But under present conditions of monopoly and plutocracy tempered by spoliation, the favor of the income tax with politicians is a sign of progress. We are at least sure of getting rid of the sickening cant of the Danas and spread-eagle orators about the absence of classes and cheerful payment of taxes in this country. An income tax in this country is a recognition of the fact that industrial freedom and equality of opportunity no longer exist here even in the imperfect state in which they once did exist. It is excellent “propaganda by deed,” — propaganda of discontent by deed of legislators forced to yield to popular feeling. Dana shrieks that the income tax will sow the seed of violence and revolution, and he may be right. But he is stupid in thinking that if the politicians refired to impose an income tax, there would be less danger of an explosion.
“In abolishing rent and interest, the last vestiges of old-time slavery, the Revolution abolishes at one stroke the sword of the executioner, the seal of the magistrate, the club of the policeman, the gunge of the exciseman, the erasing-knife of the department clerk, all those insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel.” — Proudhon.
The appearance in the editorial column of articles over other signatures than the editor’s initial indicates that the editor approves their central purpose and general tenor, though he does not hold himself responsible for every phrase or word. But the appearance in other parts of the paper of articles by the same or other writers by no means indicates that he disapproves them in any respect, such disposition of them being governed largely by motives of convenience.
Lessons of the Carnot Incident.
Every newspaper has naturally felt called upon to extract some sort of lesson or moral from the Carnot assassination, and it is worth while to comment on the most characteristic suggestions of the enemy, since they doubtless furnish an indication of the policy likely to be pursued toward the dynamiteurs in the future.
The most common proposal is, of course, “suppression,” — stern measures, relentless persecution, swift punishment, etc. Some go so far as to suggest the revival of savage methods, — torture, the taking of hostages from among “the Anarchists,” to insure good behavior, and so on. With the exception of the hostages proposal, these recommendations are of the perfunctory, stereotyped, and inevitable kind. The editor who must say something and who knows that he is destitute of any ideas on the subject, finds in the convenient words “suppression,” “extermination,” and the like, a substitute for thought. There is none too ignorant among newspaper writers to fail to see that an expression of indignation and horror, followed by a demand for exemplary punishment, is the proper thing in the case of an “Anarchist outrage.” But the hostages idea is not without originality, and the governmentalists ought to consider it. One drawback, however, may be pointed out here. What would prevent the taking of hostages by the dynamiteurs to insure the safety of those taken from their ranks by the bourgeois? For every “Anarchist” taken, a bishop or financier or diplomat might be taken.
A suggestion likely to meet with much favor is made by the Chicago “Tribune,” which has become impressed with the wisdom of Russian statesmanship. It recommends the adoption of the provisions of the Russian code with regard to revolutionary activity. Propaganda by deed, it declares, cannot be successfully combated except by suppressing all theoretical propaganda of “Anarchism.” The advocacy of revolutionary ideas must be made a crime, if the supply of practical revolutionists is to be stopped. This seems to be logically tenable, but there are two serious objections to it. In the first place, Russia’s experience abundantly shows that neither theoretical nor practical revolution can be prevented by the mere suppression of the freedom of speech and the press, and in freer countries the policy would fail still more signally and utterly. Less freedom in France or in these States would result in more violence, not less. Secondly, the “Tribune” has overlooked the fact that the consistent application of its remedy would make party politics impossible and deprive the politicians of their occupation. Under party government the business of the “outs” is to revile, denounce, ridicule, and abuse the “ins.” What would Republican papers do if they could not hold up to public scorn and contempt the wickedness and incapacity of the Democratic administration? Now, under the Russian code, a dog in office is to be respected and treated with courtesy and consideration; no doubt in the goodness or profound wisdom of the government can be expressed. Will Republicans undertake to carry out these rules while the Democrats are in power? In other words, party or parliamentary government is impossible under such laws as the “Tribune” favors. Surely it is absurd to suppose that respect for government is compatible with daily reiteration of the charge that Cleveland and his secretaries and the Democratic Congressmen are tools of the sugar trust, knaves, hypocrites, and idiots.
Very remarkable indeed are the lessons drawn by the New York “Sun” and “Evening Post.” The latter, after making the strange admission that the dynamiteurs are inspired by high motives, and are possessed with the idea that it is their mission to reform society, goes on to outline the successful mode of protecting society:
As the world now stands, we hold it to be the solemn duty of all writers, preachers, professors, who are engaged in the work of reform to refrain from denunciations of the existing society and social arrangements. Reform is possible without this, by simply acting on the lines of human nature. The common practice among Christian and other Socialists and Utopians of abusing nearly everybody who succeeds in life as an enemy of the human race, and the existing constitution of society as an engine of fraud and oppression, has undoubtedly done much to produce the “militant Anarchist,” and give a sort of moral justification to his attacks on life and property.
The “thinker” who first gave out that all laboring, and indeed all poor men, were the victims of “injustice,” was the first man to sow the seeds of the frightful insanity with which we are now called on to contend. The injustice of one man can be righted by law or opinion, but the injustice to which all well-to-do people owe their comforts, naturally seems to a half-crazy ignoramus to require sterner and more sweeping measures. Probably thousands of weak brains in both Europe and America are waiting today to have their murderous passions lighted up by a word or two in favor of “social evolution” by some light-headed professor or half-baked minister who has been overcome by the spectacle of human misery.
The doctrine that no man should be content, that all should try to rise, has been converted into a proposition that all can rise, and that if anybody does not rise, it is because somebody is keeping him down. Herein lies the source of all our woes. Anybody who goes about spreading this view is really an accessory before the fact to all Anarchist crimes.
The “Post’s” ideas are heartily applauded by the “Sun.” No more exposure of evil, no more denunciation of wrong and injustice, cry these two champions of law and order; contentment, resignation, submission, should be inculcated by teachers and preachers. It is not clear whether they intend to convey that there is no truth in the assertion that society is founded on injustice and fraud, or whether they mean that, admitting the accusations to be true, it is the duty of all reformers to refrain from proclaiming the truth. Being organs of plutocracy, the presumption is that they imply that there is really nothing rotten in present society, and that the reformers have ignorantly charged it with responsibility for misery. But if so, what has the dynamite question to do with the duty to tell the truth, to refrain from lying and making false charges? Dynamite or no dynamite, it is right to insist on intelligent teaching and preaching. But let this pass. What I am concerned with now is to point out that neither the “Sun” nor the “Post” could act upon the aforesaid principle. Will the “Sun” refrain from denouncing Congress for passing a tariff bill with an income tax? To call congressmen cowards, traitors, and demagogues is to do “much to produce the militant Anarchist.” Will the “Post” forbear to denounce protection and Tammany government? What it says about the corruption, criminality, and stupidity of our rulers gives “a sort of moral justification” to attacks on life and property and seems to “a half crazy ignoramus to require sterner and more sweeping measures.” The idea is really too childish. To preach contentment and pass evil over in silence is an impossibility in these days. Even the organs of the brotherhood of thieves could not do it for any length of time. In spite of themselves they would quarrel and expose each other’s stupidity and corruption. The world is growing more critical, not less, as the “Post” itself tells Senator Lodge, and a propaganda of contentment and resignation would be met with shouts of derision and contempt.
The last suggestion worth mentioning is that of a professor of Columbia College, who would treat men professing “Anarchist” doctrines as insane and confine them in an asylum. That the dynamiteurs are insane, “morally insane,” this professor has no doubt, although he regards them as sufficiently sane to be condemned to death for their deeds. The amusing feature of this gentleman’s scheme is the assumption that “deeds” can be prevented by arresting as insane the people who profess “Anarchical” ideas. As if it is impossible to refrain from “professing” and keep on “doing!” The dear professor is a stout champion of free speech; he shrinks from the idea of “suppressing” “Anarchist” literature or speech; that would be tyrannical and liable to abuse. But it is not in violation of American traditions, he says, to declare all those who advocate revolution insane and render them powerless by putting them under restraint. Speech and the press remain free, perfectly free; only those who write or talk revolution go to the insane asylum, because they are insane. They are insane because they believe in revolution, and they believe in revolution because they are insane! Confine them, but guard the freedom of speech! À propos, isn’t this professor insane? Can a sane man reason in such a way? The dynamiteurs might find it advisable to treat such reasoners as insane and confine them, after the new treatment is adopted.
Evidently the newspaper writers are too ignorant to deal rationally with the problem of the dynamiteurs. Again I urge them to consider my suggestion: to abolish the death penalty in political cases. The revolutionists are not sneaks and cowards; they are manly, brave, and generous. If propaganda by deed did not involve the risk of their own lives, they would never attempt the life of anyone in power. They kill because they know that they will be killed. Take away the danger, and their courage and generosity will prompt them to abandon the use of force. The bourgeois are too frantic and dull to comprehend this truth; they will try everything but this remedy, and will fail miserably. Y.
The Great Strike.
So unprincipled and corrupt is the American press that it is utterly incapable of rising to the comprehension of the motives of “sympathetic” strikers. The intellectual prostitutes who write the newspaper editorials cannot understand why a workman who has no personal grievance against his own employer should strike in order to aid another workman in another trade, and hence their venomous and shameless treatment of the American Railway Union men, who struck, not because they wanted something for themselves, but because they expected to compel Pullman to arbitrate with his striking employees. Shallow and callous lackeys cannot forgive an act of sympathy and nobility, because their own littleness and degradation is brought into stronger relief thereby. There is such a thing as the solidarity of labor, and it is a healthy and encouraging sign that workmen recognize the need of mutual support and coöperation in their conflict with monopoly and its official and unofficial servants. Labor has to fight government as well as capital, “law and order” as well as plutocracy. It cannot make the slightest movement against monopoly without colliding with some sort of “authority,” Federal, State, or municipal. The brotherhood of thieves has many friends, and it is protected under various pretexts. As long as labor was law-abiding and apologetic and servile, as long as it valued the approval of the plutocratic press, its strikes were tolerated. But now a strike is regarded (and very properly) as a war against “law and order,” and the press, finding that its sympathy is readily dispensed with, fights labor with every weapon that malice, spite, and brutality can suggest.
Was the railroad strike prudent, wise? Certainly not. Failure is disastrous to labor organizations, and they should not resort to strikes except where success is reasonably certain. In this case success was far from certain at the very start. The strike must collapse, but the strikers and their sympathizers will have acquired some additional knowledge of the essential nature of the beast, government, which plainly has no other purpose at present than to protect monopoly and put down all opposition to it. It is to be hoped that the workmen will not concern themselves with the politicians’ quibble over the Federal encroachment upon “State rights.” The question whether national or State troops shall shoot down people is not of great interest. It is true that the Federal government is apt to be more reckless and unscrupulous in dealing with outraged workmen than local governments, as is shown by the preposterous claim that all trains to which a mail car is attached or a mail bag entrusted are mail trains within the intent of the law; but after all, so far as the principles involved are concerned, there is little difference between the two aggressors.
Although the strikers have destroyed railroad property and crippled the service, it is by no means these violent acts which have brought down on them the torrents of denunciation. The “Sun” would have the leaders of the strike indicted on the charge of individual secession and punish them as traitors. But what renders them guilty of treason? Manifestly not the destruction of some property or the mere violation of a law, for in that case every criminal is guilty of treason and secession. The “Post” frankly says that the government has been stung into activity by the attempt of the boycotters to set up an imperium in imperio. It is the power of the great unions to paralyze industry and ignore the government that has alarmed the political burglars. Government perceives danger in the boycott and in passive resistance, and it desires to destroy labor’s faith in these methods. The press also realizes the possibilities of the boycott and the helplessness of the State against it, and what would become of monopoly and privilege under such a. state of things? “Property” must be protected, and “property” would be in danger if bobs could order hundreds of thousands of men to strike and bring business to a standstill. No, the State can have no rival, say the plutocrats, and the trades unions, with the sympathetic strike and boycott as weapons, are becoming too formidable.
As a matter of fact, however, as long as the trades unions have no clear general aims and deal with results instead of causes, the existing system is safe. Labor must learn to recognize its chief foe, — government, and to fight it, not incidentally and blindly, but deliberately and systematically. It must possess a better understanding of the labor problem, and a more perfect acquaintance with the machinery of exploitation. It is essential to know what to fight as well as how to fight. Y.
Auberon Herbert on Dynamite.
The pseudo-individualists and the semi-individualists, the apologists of plutocracy and the stern moralists, should read Mr. Herbert’s broad, philosophical, and judicious observations on the dynamite problem and form an idea of what is the proper attitude for libertarians in the premises. What a pity it is that Herbert Spencer cannot again rise to the philosophic height and calm and fairness of the position of Mr. Herbert, and that he has lost that insight and sympathy which dictated his admirable utterances on the excesses of the French Revolution in his “Study of Sociology”! Today, in referring to the dynamiteurs, Mr. Spencer utters sentiments that would appeal to the narrowest and dullest philistine. Auberon Herbert’s clear and persuasive argumentation cannot fail to have a liberalizing effect on many minds.
To Mr. Herbert’s main proposition no exception can be taken. But certain incidental affirmations of his may be shown to be erroneous and to require qualification. For instance, in attempting to disabuse “those reformers by dynamite who imagine that they are on the side of liberty,” Mr. Herbert reasons in a way which logically involves the condemnation of force under all circumstances and leads straight to the doctrine of non-resistance. But surely Mr. Herbert does not hold that any resistance to aggression is inconsistent with liberty, — that only non-resistants are true and consistent Anarchists. Mr. Herbert is not a Tolstoi Anarchist; he knows that there is nothing in common between the principle of equal freedom, or non-interference with the non-invasive, and the principle of non-resistance to aggression. As if liberty could have anything to do with dynamite! Mr. Herbert exclaims. Why, of course it could! Is it a violation of liberty to punish an aggression? And if it is consistent with liberty to hang or decapitate or “electrocute” a murderer, why is it not consistent to blow him up? What is true of an unofficial governor, — a murderer, — is equally true of the official governors, — the kings and dictators and presidents. Those who consider them aggressors may, consistently with liberty, punish them as such. But not everything that is consistent with liberty is wise or profitable; hence, although the official governors are aggressors, as a rale, it is suicidal to attempt to punish them by dynamite or any other form of violence. The cause of liberty, the progress of liberty, is not to be furthered by such means, and this is the final and sufficient reason for deprecating force as a method of social reform where better methods are possible. Among such better methods are education, criticism, spinals to reason, and passive resistance to aggression. Mr. Herbert must see, in the light of these considerations, which he will not dispute, that some of the dynamiteurs might really be on the side of liberty. If they are not, the fact is not proved simply by their partiality for dynamite. It so happens that the dynamiteurs are all Archistic Communists who would restrict our liberty even more than the present Archistic bourgeois do. Still, a dynamiteur might be a consistent Anarchist. The question of method is chiefly a question of policy and expediency.
It is inaccurate to say that dynamite is the perfection of government, government concentrated and intensified. Everything depends on what the dynamite is intended for. Mr. Herbert asks: “How, indeed, is it possible to govern more effectively, or in more abbreviated form, than to say: ‘Do this — or don’t do this — unless you desire that a pound of dynamite should be placed tomorrow evening in your ground-flour study’?” But it is possible to say this without governing at all. To force a man to do something which he should be free to omit to do, or to forcibly prevent a man from doing something which he should be free to do, is to govern. But suppose a burglar is about to rob you, and you tell him not to do it unless he is willing to have a taste of dynamite: is that government? Certainly not. Now the State is a burglar, and dynamiteurs who should use dynamite as a method of forcing it to abandon burglary would not be trying to govern, but to protect themselves from government.
The foregoing will suggest the qualification needed by the statement that force must necessarily fail as a weapon against government. It will fail only where better weapons are neglected: where force is the only weapon, where the choice is between force and entire inactivity, force may and should be used for the purpose of acquiring the liberty of using the other and better weapons.
With reference to the actual conditions in France, it is true that the dynamiteurs are not working in the interest of liberty, and that for these interests dynamite is not the proper weapon. It is not because of the propaganda by deed, but in spite of it, that the French evince greater liberality and tolerance towards new ideas. No sensible revolutionist has ever claimed more for propaganda by deed than that it prepares the soil for propaganda by word, but there is danger that all opportunity for the latter will be altogether destroyed, instead of enlarged, by the former. Y.
A Lesson on Civil Government
In Words of One Syllable.
I am one of the sort that they say throw bombs. I do not use the word here, for it is too long; you know, all my words are to be short. But we do not all throw bombs. Most of those who throw them think that no man ought to have goods of his own, but all men should join to own all goods. They would take the goods from those who have them by force, if need be. I do not think so. I think that those who would not let a man keep his own goods have no right to use our name, though, as things now are, all men call them by it. Those who think like me do not throw bombs. We talk sense and try to make men see that it is sense. I hope you see it. Stephen T. Byington.
The Logic of Freethought.
Congressman Morse, of Massachusetts, has introduced a bill in the House, providing for a constitutional amendment, recognizing “God as the governor of the universe, and Jesus Christ as lieutenant governor.” Where the Holy Ghost comes in, is not yet specified; it is to be assumed that a place will be found for him lower down on the ticket.
This bill has aroused the ire of the Spiritualists and Freethinkers in general, but why, still remains a mystery. Since the idea of government is derived from the idea of God, it is but appropriate that the latter should receive official recognition from the former, especially as he does not get as much as he used to from other sources. By all means, put God in the Constitution. Yes, and keep him there. The Roman Catholics seem to have more sense than our worthy Freethinkers, for the “Civilta Cattolica,” of Rome, says: “We want no God,” declared the men of 1789, and they put liberty in the place of the Creator. The motto, ‘No God, no master,’ is but a natural consequence of this.
“It is a ridiculous and yet a pitiful sight, this Liberalism, blanched with fear, straining every nerve in the defence of society. What are your lives worth now, gentlemen? Perhaps you will now begin to see that it is impossible to govern a race which, under the pretence of giving it greater liberty, has been alienated from God, and whose conscience has been deadened. . . .
“But we will not reprove you. We only wish to point out that legalized Apostasy must necessarily produce social Anarchy’” (“Literary Digest,” March 15, 1894).
It would be pathetic, if it were not so amusing, to see these twin superstitions bolstering each other up like two drunken men, in the hope that the staggering of one will counteract the reeling of the other. F. D. T.
George’s Latest Absurdities.
Henry George has discovered that monetary conditions have nothing to do with business depression. Speaking in Chicago on the 18th of March, he said:
“There are many who offer as the reason for business depression such explanations as that of too much tariff or too little tariff, or of some difficulty in the adjustment of financial relations, monetary regulations. But when we consider how wide is the area over which these business depressions show themselves, and the times in which they come, we will see at once that they must come from some deeper cause. Without change in the tariff, without change in monetary regulations, business depressions come and go, and they exist in all parts of the world, among all kinds of tariffs and many differences in monetary regulations.”
Of course, there is some excuse for Henry George, but anyone who knows anything about the history of finance is aware that many experiments in monetary regulation have been tried in the United States, while the system of land tenure has hardly been altered at all. The “many differences in monetary regulations,” in various countries, are not nearly as great or as important as the differences in systems of land tenure. So, applying Mr. George’s logic, we see that business depressions cannot possibly be caused by our land system; yet nearly all the rest of his lecture is devoted to proving that private ownership of land is the sole cause of all our economic ills.
The rest of the speech contains many similar absurdities, over which it is not worth while to waste time and space. More notice has been given to this arch-plagiarist than he deserves. The only claim he has upon our notice is derived from the fact that many people still consider him a leader, although the most clear-headed Single Taxers no longer recognize him as one of their number, since he advocates at least two taxes, — one on land values, and one on the issue of State bank notes. F. D. T.
Even the plutocratic papers speak of the orders issued by the Federal courts in connection with the great railroad strike as “dragnet” and “omnibus” injunctions. An order restraining men from “inducing” or “persuading” others to strike can have no other effect than to convince people that judges will shrink from no outrageous twists and distortions of laws in the service of capital. As a result of the sweeping injunctions, every strike speedily assumes the character of a revolt against law and order. Thus does tyranny dig its own grave. To call strikes treason will not make strikes unpopular, but treason popular.
It is possible to arbitrate with strikers who demand higher wages, shorter hours, or official recognition, says the New York “Evening Post,” but with boycotters there can be no compromise, no half-way meeting, no arbitration. The man who boycotts one thing today may boycott another thing tomorrow, and finally insist on deciding what goods shall be handled and what not. This is true, but what of it? The boycott is a powerful thing, but it cannot be used for invasive purposes. By means of the boycott a body of men may impose their will on others, but it is not criminal to impose one’s will on another: the whole question is how you impose your will. If no force is used, no offence is committed, although the boycotter may be a most unreasonable man and may make most outrageous demands. All that he threatens to do is to deprive you of his own trade or friendship or both, and this threat he has a right to execute. It is because the boycott is so powerful that the plutocrats bate to see its growing popularity.
Cleveland’s second reply to Altgeld’s protest against the sending of Federal troops into Illinois is neither logical nor grammatical. “While I am still persuaded,” says Cleveland, “that I have neither transcended my authority or duty [sic! “I have transcended neither my authority nor my duty,” is the correct expression, Mr. President], it seems to me that in this hour of danger and public distress, discussion may well give way to active effort on the part of all in authority to restore obedience to law and to protect life and property.” Now, if Altgeld is right in his contention, Cleveland has himself disobeyed and violated the highest law of the land; yet he has the coolness to talk about all in authority enforcing obedience to law! He virtually says: “You accuse me of an outrageous act of usurpation and law-breaking; well, suppose I am guilty; but we cannot discuss the matter now. There are other law-breakers requiring our attention. Let us put them down, and then we will inquire into my legal right to interfere in the matter.” But if the President may violate the law in time of public distress, why may not others? A protest against usurpation and lawlessness on his part, the President calls “abstract discussion”! And the “law and order” papers all applaud this “patriotic” utterance!
Nothing but commendation can be given to Judge Gaynor’s single-handed fight with the police. Of course his efforts are doomed to total failure, not merely because the “rascals are too many” and powerful for him, but because of a deeper and more fundamental fact, which seems to be completely overlooked by Judge Gaynor. He is reported to have expressed himself to the effect that arbitrary police interference is one of the greatest dangers which this country has had to face, but such a view is very superficial. There are doubtless minor causes which tend to make the police of large cities tyrannical and insolent; still, the chief cause is to be found in the present system of legalized robbery and monopoly. As servants of the plutocracy, the police imitate their masters in their treatment of the poor and working classes. The police are hired to protect the property of the rich, and they come to regard every work-man as an actual or potential enemy of their patrons. The employment of the militia and police in the suppression of strikes, public meetings, and other demonstrations of the oppressed, is largely responsible for the contempt of liberty and hatred of the poor which the police everywhere manifest. As the conflicts between capital and labor grow more violent, the police become more reckless, brutal, and defiant. Judge Gaynor is quarrelling with a law of adaptation. The police instinctively act upon the truth that regard for personal liberty is inconsistent with a state of industrial slavery and exploitation.
“The method of the strike is essentially wrong,” says Henry George, “both in principle and in policy.” A strike is a refusal to accept or continue in employment on certain terms deemed unsatisfactory by the offeree. What is there wrong about this method of asserting one’s freedom? Let those who imagine that George is an individualist explain his proposition. It is true that strikers resort to violence and prevent others from accepting the employment they decline, but this is no necessary element of a strike. It is the violence, not the strike, that is wrong in principle and in policy.
Mr. Bilgram is learning considerable wisdom, while having no end of fun, from experience with reformers of the various paternalist schools. A few weeks ago, the Humboldt Publishing Company (which also publishes the “Twentieth Century,” now a State Socialist organ) published a new book of Mr. Bilgram’s, entitled “A Study of the Money Question,” in which Mr. Bilgram’s views on currency, banking, and interest, well known to readers of Liberty, are set forth in a somewhat conservative and disguised manner. No man who has any acquaintance with scientific finance can, however, fail to perceive the radical character of Mr. Bilgram’s propositions. But the contributors and philosophers of the “Twentieth Century,” whose ideas on finance are as hazy and nebulous as those of the ordinary Greenbacker, did not grasp Mr. Bilgram’s meaning and point of view, and have been writing ridiculous little notices of the book, accusing the author of capitalistic proclivities, gold-worship, and what not. The critics are unanimous in opposition to gold monometallism and in censuring Mr. Bilgram for adhering to this exploded delusion. Not one of them understands the real objections to a gold basis, and they innocently suppose that in advocating a gold standard of value, Mr. Bilgram commits himself to a gold basis.
A new work on money by a new writer is announced, — “The Natural Law of Money,” by William Brough. The criticisms of the press indicate that the work is valuable and progressive. The “Yale Review” says of it: “It will be welcomed as a text-book, successful where Jevons fails. The author illustrates the evolution of money and credit by reference to the monetary history of this country, the salient features of which he points out The prevailing idea of the author is his opposition to any legal-tender law. He pleads for free as opposed to mandatory money. In applying this to our own condition, he presents in strong colors the arguments for a bank-note currency as against a government paper currency The broad standpoint the author occupies in discussing the currency problems, and the emphasis he places on credit and its extension, — that is, on the close connection between the money and the banking problem, give the book a peculiar value. Everything is centred about the distinction between an artificial and a natural monetary system.” Very amusing is the review of the New York “Critic,” a purely literary paper edited by a literary woman whose ignorance upon all scientific questions is simply appalling. Says the innocent reviewer: “This is a curious book. The author has some good ideas, which he has learned from other men, but he has also some very queer ideas, which, apparently, he has not learned from anybody. His hobby is the abolition of all laws providing a legal tender He would have the government coin both gold and silver, leaving each metal to circulate at its market value. . . . The proposition is not worth criticizing, but it is of some interest as showing to what aberrations the human intellect is liable.” In modern society bakers do not criticize shoemakers, and tailors refrain from reviewing watchmakers. The only people who glory in their ignorance and make themselves ridiculous are the professional critics. Who will accept the guidance of the “Critic” in such matters as finance? In ignorance it is equalled by few and surpassed by none.
A Scientific Seance.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the lecturer, “we will now hold a scientific seance. The superstitious methods of the earlier days of spiritism are gone. We no longer use a cabinet, nor a dark room, nor even dimmed lights, nor the mellowing influence of hushed songs. Spiritism has become a science, an exact science, and now ranks with astronomy and mathematics as a part of the indisputable and formulated acquirements of the human mind.
“I sit here, you will observe, in a chair, — an ordinary chair. There is no concealed machinery of any kind, no curtains, no trap doors, nothing of the sort.
“I am now in a trance. When I am in a trance there is no physical difference observable in me. I breathe as usual, my pulse is not accelerated or retarded. The pupils do not fail to respond to the usual stimuli.
“The evidence that I am in a trance is that I am totally unconscious of what is now going on. If you should stick a pin into me up to the head I should feel no pain. I might indeed cry out, might perhaps strike out; but these manifestations of apparent pain would really be quite unconscious on my part. It would be but the unconscious reaction, reflex action, as science calls it, of the husk which we name the body.
“I am now in a trance. My voice, you will observe, does not change. In the earlier days of spiritism the spirits thought it best that the control should influence to some extent the voice of the meejum. It was done with the view of arousing interest in what was then a new discovery. But now that spiritism has become a science, scientific methods are required in preference to the former, more dramatic, manifestations.
“As I remarked, I am in a trance, and am inspired by the soul of my control, Ebenezer Whittlesey, formerly pastor of the church at Wigansford, Connecticut
“My own soul meanwhile is in China, and is inspiring the body of a Chinese meejum and giving him information as to what is occurring here in New York.
“The fact that my soul has left my body cannot be determined by physical tests. The soul is without weight. If you should weigh me now and again when the soul has reentered the body, there would be no difference in weight. That is bow the existence of the soul is proved scientifically, for if there were any difference in weight there could not be any soul, for the soul is imponderable.
“In every detail of spiritism a similar scientific accuracy has been reached. There are also, as most of you know, several other esoteric parts of the complete human nature: the astral body and other imponderables, the existence of which is demonstrated in the same way. My astral body at present is exploring the vast galleries left in the cooling lava in the interior of the earth as it solidified from its molten condition.”
“How wonderful!” gasped the audience.
“But, as I remarked, I am in a trance, — repent, my brethren, and flee from the wrath to come. All you wives who have disobeyed the divine command: ‘Wives, obey your husbands,’ unless you repent, and humble yourselves before the righteous wrath of the great Judge, will surely burn forever in the lake of fire and melted brimstone, which shall lave and lap your tortured limbs, ever kept alive and conscious by His mercy and for His glory. I trust none of you will take offence at any remarks that I may make while under the influence of my control, whose ideas are possibly absurdly antiquated. My astral body is now returning and is bringing with it a spirit from the ‘autres vast’ which, like all other parts of the universe, are inhabited by such beings.
“They are coming in the bodies of two commercial travellers on a New Haven express, which is just pulling into the Grand Central. Ah! I am, I fancy, controlled for the moment by the spirit of the locomotive: whoo-oo-oo-oo!!! I thought so. You are, of course, aware that what used to be called lifeless matter has been shown by science to be instinct with life. In fact, science demonstrates that all objects have souls. You will observe that, although I am totally unconscious of my actions during a momentary trance such as has just occurred, I am often informed after the trance is over by the ether esoteric parts of me what my actions have been during the trance. In fact, that is the way that the existence of the trance state is scientifically demonstrated. I now feel the disturbance of the magnetic aura that surrounds the bodies of each of us, — a red aura my own is, and, when in my trance state, I can see the colors of the auras of all of you, scarlet and blue and purple and eau de Nil, — ah I yes, my aura is much agitated, it is the astral body returning with its spirit guest.
“Friends and fellow citizens! I feel very tired with my excursion to the centre of the earth, and my body here will feel equally tired when it recovers from the trance in which it now is. I regret to interrupt such interesting proceedings, especially as I have brought a modern-minded friend with me, the spirit of Tyndall, in fact, who has confirmed, and would like to assure you that he has confirmed, his statements that the distressing apprehension of being engulfed in the molten centre of the earth, the lake of fire, as they call it, is without foundation.
“However, this interesting communication must be postponed until some other evening, as my body, as I hinted a moment ago, when it is no longer supported by the control of other spirits and of myself, its astral companion, will find itself quite fagged out.
“Good evening, gentlemen and ladies. There will be no materialization this evening. My controls decline to materialize. Sometimes they do, you know, and in that case I become all sorts of people, without changing my appearance or voice, of course, but the change is none the less real, — as real, in fact, as the change in the substance of the sacramental bread, which we now understand to be a scientific fact. But not this evening. Some other evening. Good evening.”
* * *
How much did we take in, Juliet?
John Beverley Robinson.
Anarchist Letter-Writing Corps.
The Secretary wants every reader of Liberty to send in his name for enrolment. Those who do so thereby pledge themselves to write, when possible, a letter every fortnight, on Anarchism or kindred subjects, to the “target” assigned in Liberty for that fortnight. All, whether members or not, are slaked to lose no opportunity of informing the secretary of suitable targets. Address, Stephen T. Byington, East Hardwick, Vt.
Suggestion No. 7. — When you observe any success in the work of the corps, either in getting letters published or in opening anybody’s eyes, let me know. If possible, send clippings of marked papers.
Target, Section A. — The “Morning Journal,” New York City, publishes letters on social problems and topics of the day. On June 22 it published one signed J. F. Gregory, saying, “The remedy is not tinkering by legislatures, but ‘hands off,’ and we shall work out the best way possible.”
Section B. — Rev. Myron W. Reed, Denver, Col., has resigned because rich members of his church objected to his radical sermons on the social question. He is a Single Taxer and will soon begin lecturing. Show him that the Single Tax is not, the whole of reform. Stephen T. Byington.
“The garden of the laws is full of ironical plants, of unexpected Mowers and by no means its slightest charm is this subversion of the natural order, whereby appear at the end of stems and branches fruit just the opposite of that which is promised by the essence of the tree or bush. The apple-tree bears figs, and the cherry-tree medlars: plants yield sweet potatoes, and hollyhocks salsify. It is delicious.” Séverine.
The Beauties of Government.
The readers of Liberty are urgently invited to contribute to this department. It is open to any statement of facts which exhibit the State in any phase of its fourfold capacity of fool, meddler, knave, and tyrant. Either original accounts based upon the writer’s own knowledge, or apparently reliable accounts clipped front recent publications, are welcome.
Justice Gaynor’s Fight With the Police.
[New York Sun.]
Ever since Judge W. J. Gaynor went on the bench one of his most earnest endeavors apparently has been to convince policemen and citizens in cases that came before him, where there was opportunity, that the police have no such thing as arbitrary power. Time and again he has declared that a policeman has no more right to make an arrest than a citizen, and that a citizen has just as much right to make an arrest as a policeman. Judge Gaynor has tried to point out that a policeman has no right, for example, arbitrarily to make a man “move on,” no right to arrest any one for lounging or for so-called disorderly conduct, and some of the Judge’s friends who know him most intimately say that from the sentiments he has expressed in private conversation, they are inclined to think that he regards the assumption of arbitrary power by the police, common enough in every large city, but especially flagrant in Brooklyn, as one of the most alarming and dangerous things in the life of the Republic. He often says that no such police interference exists in the country districts.
“There is no doubt,” said one of the Judge’s friends last week, “that the so-called police power has run mad, and Judge Gaynor is doing a most commendable work in checking it at every opportunity, and preserving, so far as it comes within his province to do so, that most priceless boon, more of a myth than anything else in some of our large cities, individual liberty.”
Judge Gaynor, with a strong respect for the traditions of the bench and the proprieties surrounding his office, refuses absolutely in these days to be interviewed, especially on matters that concern judicial action or interpretation. A “Sun” reporter asked him last week if he would not define the broad subject of a policeman’s power and say something about their assumption of autocratic power, in view of several recent decisions he had made. He refused to say anything, but added that his decisions were matters of record. He said the Penal Code defined the authority of the police, and that he could not give or authorize an interview on the subject.
Judge Gaynor, in a recent decision, went into this subject and brought out the fact that a citizen may arrest another in these cases:
1. A private person may arrest another for a crime committed or attempted in his presence.
2. When the person has committed a felony, although not in his presence. — Penal Code, Section 183.
Section 177 of the Penal Code says a policeman has only the same rights as the citizen, namely, to arrest for a crime committed in his presence, and adds a third provision applying to peace officers only:
3. When a felony has in fact been committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person to be arrested to have committed it.
The sole distinction between a policeman and a private person in making arrests is that in case where a felony has been committed, not in their presence, and they arrest a person on “reasonable grounds” for believing the person guilty, the citizen may be sued for false arrest in case of innocence, but the policeman may not. This exception in favor of the police in such cases has no application, however, to misdemeanors or to the policeman’s ordinary duty and his daily contact with his fellow man.
It is said to be Judge Gaynor’s belief that the police authorities are sadly negligent in their duties by not giving instructions to the policemen as to what their exact power is. No definite instruction is said to be given to them, and by degrees they acquire and assume power and obtrude themselves in the private affairs of citizens. It is known that in England a policeman clearly understands his duties and powers. The citizens understand them, also. An English “bobby” would be in danger of his life if he attempted to do some of the acts which the Brooklyn policemen, whose acts have come before Judge Gaynor for review, have done. No English policeman ever arrests a man for being “sassy” or “giving him impudence,” or for not moving on, or for so-called disorderly conduct, which seems to mean anything. No criminal offence is so named. He sees a crime committed or attempted before he makes an arrest, and he knows that if he acts unjustly and without due warrant of law he takes his life in his own hands. The English are especially sensitive on the matter of individual liberty, but the police instructions and regulations of American cities, especially of Brooklyn, are said to be silent on such topics. Not even in Russia do the police assume such powers as they do in this country.
On the very first day that Judge Gaynor ascended the bench he had an illustration of the undue exercise of authority by a policeman, and he rebuked it from the bench. It was in Long Island City. A mandamus was asked for to settle a Republican primary election dispute, and the case hinged on the regularity of the credentials of an inspector. A policeman testified that he was in the room at the time of the dispute, and at once put the inspector “out of the room.”
“By what right did you do that?” asked Judge Gaynor.
“I thought I’d take chances on it,” said the police-man.
“If the Police Commissioner of this place knows his duty, you would have a very slim chance of remaining a policeman,” replied Judge Gaynor.
There is no law against lounging in the public streets, yet the arrests and imprisonments in Brooklyn on this charge in a few years recently would more than fill the county jail if they were all put together. It is no crime to stand about the streets. That is one of the things a street is for, and Judge Gaynor recently said in a case that was brought before him that any citizen had a right to lounge, loiter, or take leisure in the streets if he wanted to do so. In a recent controversy in Brooklyn between a brewer with a large plant and his workingmen a police captain went so far as to order certain men not even to come into his precinct. They were not only not to watch who went in and out of the brewery and to try to persuade some men not to go to work there, and others not to buy the product of the brewery, but they were forbidden even to walk the streets there. The captain would prefer charges of disorderly conduct against them. Now, although there is no such crime set down as “disorderly conduct,” men almost by the legion have been sent to jail for this alleged offence. “Disorderly conduct” is a most common charge in Brooklyn police courts. If a policeman sees something not to his taste he calls it disorderly conduct, and arrests the persons offending him.
One of the best known cases of police interference that came before Judge Gaynor recently was the arrest of Phil J. Dwyer at the Gravesend racetrack at the instigation of Peter De Lacey. There was no crime committed or charged, and Judge Gaynor used this strong language in discharging him:
“Racing horses for stakes may be bad, but unlawful arrests are worse. The arrest and detention of this defendant was unwarranted. It was an exercise of arbitrary power, and history teaches that we have more to fear from arbitrary power than from all species of gambling combined.”
Recently the health authorities of Brooklyn attempted to imprison persons in their houses in order to compel them to submit to vaccination. Two expressmen were actually kept in a stable as prisoners. They were brought before Judge Gaynor on habeas corpus proceedings and made free. In disposing of this case, Judge Gaynor remarked that there was “more danger to this country from the exercise of arbitrary power than from all contagious diseases combined.”
In passing upon a habeas corpus proceeding on June 19 for the discharge of a prisoner convicted by a police justice, Judge Gaynor laid down the law applicable to police justices as well as to policemen. He said: “The written complaint against the defendant was by a police officer. It charges the defendant with selling a lottery ticket on a specified day, but concludes as follows: ‘Deponent further says that he makes this complaint upon information and belief as a police officer of Brooklyn.’ A police officer, or any other person, may not cause the arrest of any one on a mere allegation of information and belief. Human liberty never was so cheap as that under our law, or the system from which we derived the main body of our law. The commission of a crime must be shown by facts positively stated before a magistrate has jurisdiction to issue a warrant of arrest. This is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights (R. S., part 1, chapter 4, section 11), which provides that the right of the people to be secure in their persons and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures ought not to be violated, and no warrants can issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation.
“No one who knows the history of this guarantee to individual liberty, and the struggles of the people, for it against despotic power, and out of which it came, can see it infringed without a feeling of resentment. It is important that crime should be punished, but far more important that arbitrary power should not be tolerated.”
One thing that seems to be established clearly is that a policeman has no right to club a prisoner to make him tractable. A policeman may club a man, and a citizen may do the same, only when there is danger to his life or limb. He may not club him to make him go along without difficulty, and there are judges who say that legally a man may kill a policeman if necessary to prevent injury from a policeman’s club or at a policeman’s hands when under arrest and when he is not threatening bodily harm to the policeman. A well known police inspector, when a captain in New York, is said to have thrashed frequently the most notorious bunco steerer in the country, when be found the bunco man in his precinct. According to this interpretation, “Hungry Joe” would have been justified in killing the captain, if necessary, to prevent the thrashing.
It is often a fiction in the poorer parts of town that a man’s house is his castle. Many newspaper stories have been printed of “slumming parties” invading east-side tenements at night, going often into sleeping rooms and waking the occupants up. Policemen have often exhibited to sightseers a dozen persons sleeping in one room or in some filthy cellar, and they have laughed at the protests of the inmates. Sometimes they have used mocking and profane language toward them. Pitt once said that a man’s home might be “so humble that the winds would blow through it and the rain enter it, but the King could not.” Pitt never saw a modern New York policeman in an east-side tenement district, and those who live there in squalor or in poverty never heard of Pitt.
Those who hold to Judge Gaynor’s views say the police have no right to invade a house for raids, which are common enough in large cities. The only way a raid can be accomplished legally is by means of a search-warrant. Theirs policeman may break down doors, if necessary to accomplish his purpose.
There is one occasion, however, where the police may assume arbitrary power. It is in case of “overwhelming necessity.” If a big conflagration should be sweeping through New York or Brooklyn, they would have a right to blow up buildings. If a pestilence were raging, they could rope off certain streets. If rioting went on, they might drive out people in the immediate vicinity. If a building was about to fall, they could force tenants out into the street. But “overwhelming necessity” never exists in the every-day life of the people, and, therefore, according to Judge Gaynor’s view, arbitrary power is never justified on ordinary occasions.
One place where policemen have no right to go, unless there is a row, is to the polls or a political meeting. Those who believe in a strict construction of policemen’s duties say that their presence there is an “affront to every manly citizen.”
It may be said, therefore, that all citizens are police-men and that policemen are no more than citizens, and have no more power, except in the one matter of immunity in making an arrest for felony. It isn’t convenient or agreeable for citizens to do their own arresting, so they club together, hire special persons to do it for them, and put brass buttons on them and clubs in their hands. The police are on the streets to do the arresting which the citizens would have to do themselves if the police were not there. The club and the buttons, however, give them no warrant for arbitrary action. All the authority they get is delegated to them by the people, who prefer that a special grade of men shall do the disagreeable work of arresting persons who ought to be arrested.
Married — Divorced — Married.
[St. Louis Globe Democrat.]
Lexington, Ky., June 17. — A prominent attorney who has just returned from a trip through Elliott county, investigating land titles for a Louisville syndicate, related the story of an incident which is now causing gossip in Elliott county.
It seems that James Wilson, a well-to-do farmer of Elliott county, wooed and married pretty Mary Pence Some ten years ago. For a time their life was a gay one, but soon domestic discord prevailed. Matters reached such a stage that by mutual consent the couple agreed to obtain a divorce. Wilson was to apply for the decree and his wife was to make no defence. This, it was believed, would avoid publicity, and both would secure the desired freedom. An attorney was employed several months ago by Wilson with instructions to secure the divorce. During the time caused by the law’s delay in granting the divorce the wife and husband met, and they were finally reconciled, and again determined to live together.
So complete was their new happiness and so joyous their second honeymoon that neither husband nor wife thought of the proceeding which had been filed for divorce. The lawyer, in the meantime, had recorded the divorce, and in the rush of business forgot to inform the husband of the granting of the decree. For a month Mr. and Mrs. Wilson lived together after the divorce was granted, in utter ignorance of the fact that they were not man and wife. The people gossiped, but nothing reached the ears of the couple.
Last week the Elliott county grand jury met and indicted both Mr. and Mrs. Wilson for living together. The first intimation they had of their divorce having been granted was the appearance of the sheriff of Elliott county with the indictments and bench warrants for their arrest.
Mr. and Mrs. Wilson went before a magistrate and gave bale to appear in court. Immediately after giving bond they went before a minister and were again married. They hope that when their case is called the charges will be dismissed when their attorney makes the statement of the delusion they labored under.
A Policeman Demands Satisfaction.
[New York World.]
Frederick Schoenhut, twenty-four years old, of No. 434 Graham avenue, Brooklyn, is a driver for H. Lieberknecht & Co., paper-box manufacturers at Nos. 65 and 87 Crosby street. He tried to drive his wagon into Broadway at Twenty-first street yesterday, at 10.80 a. m. They are repairing the street there, and Policeman John C. Clark, of the Broadway squad, told him to get out, as he was blocking the street.
“I can’t help it,” said Schoenhut; “I have got some goods to deliver in the block and I can’t carry them there.”
He leaned from his wagon to talk to the policeman, and a crowd gathered on the sidewalk.
“Don’t give me any slack,” said Clark, aiming a blow with his fist at the driver. He caught him in the stomach and Schoenhut fell back, white and gasping, on the seat. Several bystanders cried “Shame!” and demanded that the policeman take him to a hospital.
Clark started to drive Schoenhut to the New York Hospital in the wagon, and a bystander handed a card to the half-conscious driver. At the hospital dispensary Attendant Bowing wished Schoenhut to be examined privately by Dr. Judd, but Policeman Clark insisted upon being present. “He’s my prisoner,” he said.
“He is not; he’s our case now,” remarked the attendant. They wrangled a while, and finally Schoenhut said he felt better and didn’t need an examination. Clark saw the bystander’s card in Schoenhut’s hand. He grabbed it and tore it into bits, which be threw into the cuspidor. Schoenhut picked out the pieces while the policeman’s back was turned.
Clark then marched the driver to Jefferson Market court, where he made a charge of blocking the street. The young man told his story to Justice Ryan, and showed the torn bits of card. Pieced together on the Justice’s desk, they read:
“Howell E. Clark, 1458 Broadway.”
Justice Ryan decided to discharge the driver.
“What satisfaction is that to me” growled the officer.
The Justice called Schoenhut back and told him to get Ms. Clark end any other witnesses and make a complaint against this officer at police headquarters.
“You want satisfaction!” he said, addressing the officer. “You’ll get it before you finish.”
Schoenhut said he would bring the case before the Commissioners.
[Will the policeman go to jail? Probably not. There are not many Gaynors among our judges.]
Husband and Wife Are One.
[Press Dispatch.]
Council Bluffs, Ia., June 16. — The case of Mr. and Mrs. Metzer, on trial here on a charge of conspiracy to defraud Dr. Wilhelm, has been ended by the court’s decision on a unique point of law raised by the defence. One person, of course, cannot be guilty of conspiracy. The defence argued that Mr. and Mrs. Metzer are husband and wife, and held in law to be one person, consequently it is impossible for them to commit conspiracy. The court sustained the defence, and the prisoners were discharged.
[But if husband and wife are one person, can either be guilty of assaulting or imprisoning the other? When a husband murders his wife, he must, under the ruling, be guilty of suicide! But how can a living person be guilty of suicide?]
Moral Crusades Checked.
[New York Sun.]
The story published in the “Sun” of the Fassett Committee’s failure to investigate the Police Department in 1890 after “Mr. and Mrs. Webb” were found registered at an uptown hotel and the police discovered that “Mr. Webb” was a member of the committee, and that the “Mrs. Webb” of the occasion was not his wife, brought a veteran politician to the front with a story of the lapse of two other attempts to investigate New York’s Police Department.
There are many men on the police force today who remember an occasion when the Assembly appointed a committee to investigate their department, and how the hayseed legislators marched down to the city and then marched ingloriously back. Those were the days of the St. Nicholas Hotel, which, once a famous hostelry, is now only a memory.
The day before that famous investigation was to begin, one of the most prominent members of the committee put up at the St. Nicholas Hotel. The next morning this legislator was met in the office of the hotel by a nice young man, who addressed him cheerily with “Good morning, Mr. So and So.”
“You are mistaken, air. I am Assemblyman Blank.”
“Well, well,” commented the young man, “that is really too bad. Your name certainly should be So and So, since you occupied the same apartment with Mrs. So and So last night.”
Mrs. So and So was a married woman from Assemblyman Blank’s town. The young man was a Central Office detective. No investigation.
The next attempted attack on the Police Department was in 1884, when the wicked Gibbs Senate Committee was nosing about among the city departments. There were plenty of men ready to supply evidence of every sort against everybody in those days, and it was one of these — a prominent official in a certain department — who tried to get Gibbs to investigate the Police Department, the special reason being that he wanted to hit one of the police commissioners. This official kept importuning Gibbs to investigate the Police Department and offered to furnish evidence. The nature of this evidence was revealed to Chairman Gibbs later when a subordinate of the certain department mentioned called on Gibbs and said that he had been ordered by his supervisor to take a woman to a small hotel in which the police commissioner was said to be interested and then to testify before the Senate committee as to the disorderly character of the house.
Mr. Gibbe’s visitor said that he had done as he was ordered for fear of losing his place, but he begged that he be not called, as be was a married man, and his family would be ruined if he were compelled to testify.
As has been stated, it was a time when everybody was volunteering to testify against everybody else, and the very next night came the witness and the opportunity that Chairman Gibbs was looking for. The official who was trying to have the Police Department investigated had, a short time before, been murderously assaulted, but the matter was hushed up, and the name of the assailant was never breathed. On the night in question a man called on Chairman Gibbs, and said:
“I hear you are going to investigate a certain department.”
“We may,” returned Gibbs.
“Well, if you do, I want to testify,” continued his visitor.
“What do you know about the department?”
“I know something about Commissioner Dash. You remember that he was assaulted recently?”
“Yes.”
“I’m the man who assaulted him.”
There was more talk, the man explaining why he had attempted the life of the commissioner. He agreed to be on hand at the next session of the committee. He was there. So was the poor subordinate, who did not want to testify, and so was the commissioner who wanted the police investigated. The latter went up to Chairman Gibbs and asked: “Well, are you ready to investigate the Police Department?”
“Yes,” responded Gibbs. “We’ll swear your man, but as soon as we get through with him we are going to put that man over in the corner on the stand,” indicating the man who said he had tried to take the life of the commissioner.
The commissioner looked at the man, turned pale, said to Gibbs, “You needn’t examine my man,” and hastily left the room.
The Salaries Go On.
[New York Sun.]
The Board of Idiots who control the London schools will, at the present rate of progress, finish with their circular regarding religious instruction about the middle of the next century. More than three thousand teachers, composing the Teachers’ Association, prayed to be relieved from implanting the prescribed doctrine of “the separate existence of three persons in the Deity, or the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice.” The board decided not to recognize the Teachers’ Association, but to act on each application separately.
Arrested on Comstock’s Complaint.
[New York Recorder.]
Richard Weedon, a bookseller at 22 Centre street, was arrested on a warrant honed by Police Justice Taintor, at the Tombs Police Court, on complaint of Anthony Comstock, charging him with dealing in indecent books and literature. After his arrest, his shop was searched and eleven vile books and four pictures were found. Weedon was taken before Justice Taintor and held in $500 bail for trial. Mr. Comstock said Weedon was formerly engaged in the same businesi at 32 Myrtle avenue, Brooklyn, and that his place was a headquarters for the supply of dealers in contraband literature.
To Be Refused Admission.
[Press Dispatch.]
Washington, June 8. — Superintendent Stump, of the Bureau of Immigration, has forwarded to the proper officers at the several ports full descriptions of 217 Anarchists expelled from France, height, weight, color of eyes and hair, etc. All persons entering the United States answering the descriptions and found to be of the proscribed class will be deported.
The Limit of Criticism.
[New York Evening Post.]
In condemning a Munich paper to pay a fine of $25 for an unfavorable criticism of a new portrait, the original of which is well known there, the judge said that a critic had a right only to judge a picture from an artistic point of view and not to draw any moral inferences.
China’s Example.
[New York Voice.]
Thousands of artisans, repairing the Imperial building at Pekin, China, struck for higher wages, and the Emperor ordered them to be arrested on the charge of treason.
Mutual Bank Propaganda.
To the Editor of Liberty:
I enclose herewith the prospectus of an association which I have been trying to organize for the last eighteen months. This organization is eventually to embrace the whole United States. The General Clearing House Association, as stated in the prospectus, is to print and furnish to the local Mutual Credit Associations the blank certificates of credit, just as the comptroller’s department in Washington furnishes the blank bills to the national banks. The General Clearing House Association will unite all the local associations, practically making them one organization, and guaranteeing the paper-money of each.
By this method every city and town would have its local association to furnish credit in this form, rendering book credits less and less necessary, and finally causing their disappearance. This form of credit I define as secured credit, while book credits are unsecured credit. Now it follows that, if parties who have security acceptable to the Mutual Credit Association of their city can obtain certificates of credit at one-half of one per cent., they will naturally prefer to borrow the certificates and buy for cash rather than run book accounts and, of course, pay credit prices. This is the incentive that will finally overcome all obstacles and defeat all opposition. It is the only effort towards a new order of society the money-power will not be able to checkmate. It will be established in spite of government.
The history of this new movement is as follows: After the suspension of the “Auditor,” which became necessary in consequence of lack of support, and because the Post Office Department denied me second-class rates, I concluded that it was necessary to develop some new plan to get the ideas before the people, and that, to start up again, it would be better to go further West and to a smaller city than Chicago: Accordingly I came to this State, and after spending six months in Lake City and failing to accomplish anything there, I came to St. Paul. I spent six months in that city, making a very thorough canvass with my two pamphlets, retaining the cards of all purchasers. I then came to this city and did the same here. I sold about a thousand copies in each city and gave away many more. I then wrote out the prospectus, had it printed, and canvassed for subscribers to the capital stock, in order to start the first association. I got forty-five subscribers, and we held several meetings, but, realizing that meetings for the purpose of discussing organization were still premature, I got together a few of the most advanced thinkers and we called ourselves the Financial Club, the purpose of which is the discussion of the money question. But I could not get speakers of any prominence; as temporary secretary I addressed letters to bank presidents and other prominent men, asking them to speak at our meetings; but they all very politely declined. So, for want of speakers, we had to abandon our effort in that direction. The press, both in St. Paul and here, has uniformly treated me and this movement with respectful consideration; and while the papers have not ventured to discuss it with any thoroughness, I have never been refused publication of articles I have written. The Minneapolis “Times” has published eight long articles.
The plan I propose to carry out with regard to the first associations is as follows: As soon as four or five hundred subscribers to the capital stock of the first association are obtained, I shall call a meeting to organize, incorporate, elect officers, and call in the stock. The association will then start a weekly paper as the organ of the movement, and send out organizers into five or six other cities. As soon as there are five or six organizations completed, a meeting of the members of these associations will be called to organize the General Clearing House Association. As soon as that is done; the latter organization will at once proceed to print the blanks for the certificates of credit, furnish them to each association, and prescribe the rules for admission of future associations. I propose that the General Clearing House Association shall insure against loss all property pledged as security, whether by fire or otherwise, and also against depreciation of certificates of credit issued by any association that has been admitted to membership.
About five months ago, realizing that my two pamphlets do not cover this question sufficiently and that there was an imperative demand for a complete treatise on this new philosophy of money, I set to work to write such a book and have now nearly completed the task.
As soon as this new book is published, I shall take up the work of securing subscribers to the stock of the first association and continue the work to which my life is devoted, — the annihilation of the money power.
Alfred B. Westrup.
Minneapolis, Minn.
“A Study of the Money Question.”
Mr. Hugo Bilgram has written for the Twentieth Century Library an essay with the above title, and the managers of that paper have submitted to many of its correspondents copies for review. The readers of Liberty, being well acquainted with Mr. Bilgram’s views, would, I am sure, enjoy reading the criticisms thus evoked.
Receiving a copy of Mr. Bilgram’s pamphlet, and feeling sure that most of the contributors would fail to grasp the object of the essay as well as misconstrue its terms and ideas, I wrote a short review, striving, not to make the ideas clearer (that would be impossible), but to direct the attention of the readers to these ideas as distinguished from those of other schools. I sought to show how important was his conception of money, — “any medium of exchange devised to overcome the difficulties attending a pure system of barter,” — and especially how Mr. Bilgram differed from the “gold bug” while allowing gold to remain a “value denominator.” The hard-money advocate would base all issue upon gold, notwithstanding the fact that the amount of gold is so inadequate to represent the value demanded to effect exchange that the most stupendous dishonesty must be practised to meet the demand. The soft-money advocate would reject “the dollar,” making the issue of all money a government function, and its value established by law. “A dollar” would represent the fiat of government. Mr. Bilgram says, “A creation of value by law can be conceived only by those who hold value to be an intangible property of wealth which may even be tacked by law to an otherwise worthless piece of paper. But when value is conceived as a concrete economic quantity, such as an ox, a bushel of wheat, a pound of silver, or an ounce of gold, the absurdity of the theory is at once evident.” Thus he disposes of the theory “which treats of the value of money as a quantity independent of the value of the substance of which money is made.” The only possible connection Mr. Bilgram has with the “soft-money” man is his lingering faith in government, and he is just as little a “hard-money” advocate, for he believes in the “monetization of wealth represented by credit,” which “should be free and not burdened with any further expenses or impediments (than necessary to furnish adequate security and a properly apportioned insurance rate), which would have the effect of interfering with the operation of the law of supply and demand.” Mr. Bilgram, looking upon money as simply a tool of trade, would seek conditions whereby every trader might possess as near as possible an equivalent for his wealth. This would destroy interest as usury by destroying the monopoly of money and, through that, the monopolistic rents and profits. Strange that his critics could not see this.
While granting that Mr. Bilgram’s “Rational Monetary System” may be a vast improvement upon any system of government regulation up to date, I am impressed with the idea that his system, like the “negative government” of Mr. Herbert Spencer, is inconsistent with the true idea of government, which is simply the will of certain politicians. Mr. Bilgram, in his desire to score a point for government, speaks of “our past experience with what was practically free banking.” In this respect be places himself in line with those Socialists who are continually harping upon “our past experience with what was practically free competion.” He has a right to the belief that “a national control and guarantee of the issue of credit money is amply justified.” As he admits that the “right to use as a medium of exchange whatever they may agree upon should be conceded to those who have merchandise to exchange,” I take it that his government regulation is simply to make “an assurance of the responsibility of the issuer” more general, and not for the purpose of denying the right of individuals to compete with government by establishing free banking associations.
I cannot account it fair for Mr. Bilgram to say that “those who consider that it is not proper for the government to assume this agency on conditions that would be dictated by competition were the issue of money free to all, should also consider that it is an act of despotism to suppress that freedom on any other conditions.” No advocate of free banking and mutual credit denies or can deny the right of government to assume any agency it chooses “on conditions that would be dictated by competition.” Free competition does not exist, because government denies the right of individuals to compete. If conditions were reversed, and government were denied the right, free competition would remain, as now, an absurdity.
I congratulate Mr. Bilgram upon the amusement afforded him by the attacks of his critics in the “Twentieth Century” and take this method of conveying to him the gist of the review I sent to that paper for publication.
A. L. Ballou.
Lecky on the Press.
In his “England in the Sixteenth Century,” Lecky, the historian, makes the following acute observations on the power and influence of the modern newspaper press:
Few things to a reflecting mind are more curious than the extraordinary weight which is attached to the anonymous expression of political opinion. Partly by the illusion of the imagination, which magnifies the hidden representative of a great corporation, partly by the weight of emphatic assertion, a plural pronoun, conspicuous type, and continued repetition, unknown men, who would probably be unable to induce any constituency to return them to Parliament, are able, without exciting any surprise or sense of incongruity, to assume the language of the accredited representatives of the nation, and to rebuke, patronize, or insult its leading men with a tone of authority which would not be tolerated from the foremost statesmen of their time. It was the theory of the more sanguine among the early free-traders that under the system of unrestricted competition all things would rank according to their real merits. In that case the power and popularity of a newspaper would depend mainly upon the accuracy and the amount of its information, the force of its arguments, the fidelity with which it represented the dominant opinion of the nation. But anyone who will impartially examine the newspapers that have acquired the greatest circulation and influence in Europe and America may easily convince himself of the falseness of this theory. A knack of clever writing, great enterprise in bringing together the kind of information which amuses or interests the public, tact in catching and following the first symptoms of change of opinions, a skilful pandering to popular prejudice; malevolent gossip, sensational falsehood, coarse descriptions, vindictive attacks on individuals, nations, or classes, are the elements of which many great newspaper ascendencies have been mainly built. Newspaper writing is one of the most open of all professions, but some of the qualities that are most successful in it do not give the smallest presumption either of moral worth or of political competence or integrity.
It is a strange thing, though custom has made it very familiar, that so large a part of the formation and representation of political opinion should be a commercial speculation. Many papers have no doubt been set up solely to advocate particular causes and interests, and have discharged their task with admirable disinterestedness and integrity. But these are not usually the papers which have acquired the widest popularity and success. A newspaper, as such, is and must be a commercial speculation, with interests in many respects coincident, in some respects directly clashing, with the true interests of the nation. Considered commercially, its popularity is the condition and the measure of its success, and it is a matter of perfect indifference from what source that popularity is derived. It must write down to the level of its readers. Its business is not to improve them, but to please them. If a vicious style, if coarse, vulgar, or immoral descriptions, if personal slander or class attacks are widely popular, it is the commercial interest of the newspaper to gratify the taste, and by gratifying, it immeasurably increases it. Day after day, week after week, the impression is deepened, the taste is strengthened. No such powerful instrument as a corrupt press has ever been discovered for vulgarizing the national mind, for lowering the moral sense, for deepening, stimulating, and perpetuating class hatreds or national animosities. Most modern wars may ultimately be traced to national antipathies which have been largely created by newspaper invective and by the gross partiality of newspaper representations. As the writers have no part in the dangers, while, by the increased circulation of their papers, they reap a large harvest from the excitement of war, they have a direct interest in producing it. Wherever there is some vicious spot, some old class hatred, some lingering provincial antipathy, a newspaper will arise to represent and inflame it. In countries where class animosities are deep and savage, or where the form of government is still unsettled and contested, it is extremely difficult to reconcile an unshackled press with national stability and security. The most plausible argument of the opponents of national education is the fact that in many countries it is tolerably certain that one of the chief forms of reading of the poor will consist of newspapers written for the express purpose of playing upon their most odious passions.
Individual Sovereignty.
[Horace L. Traubel in The Conservator.]
Some of my numerous correspondents are exercised with the idea that the “Conservator” leans to the side of crime, to the service of evil, to the liberality that inevitably tones off its colors into license.
I have protested for equal freedom. Equal freedom sweeps off, as by one hand, all the objections of authority. In a world surrendered to this principle, men would be happy and justice would be done.
Equal freedom dispossesses the robber. It never takes from him from whom should not be taken. It sets the value of honor up and reduces spoliation to its proper level.
I believe in individual initiative. Yet I am told chat individualism is old-fashioned and out of date. How can that be true as long as the individual remains? And when the individual disappears, what becomes of your gospels of collectivism?
Everything flows from the individual. He is the reservoir. From him all streams are supplied. Back to him all streams pay tribute.
Nor must we forget that we owe to the individual the guarantees of democracy. The conditions must further the most extended privilege. Yet no privilege must be given save that which all may share.
Put not your trust in princes who offer a cure of souls. Finally they will rob you of all you have. The natural leader will not seek to merge you in himself. He will aid you to open your own eyes, to use your own arms. The professional leader will impose his law upon you. He will thrust you right and left and up and down for his own purposes. He compels the principle you would mutually serve to play lackey to his personal power.
Denominations afflict the spirit. They pare down spontaneity and discourage rebellion. The men who have the denominational temperament give the institution priority over the principle which was its only excuse for being.
Why should not the individual keep the reins in his own hands? If there is to be authority, let him choose it. If leaders are required, let him decide hour and person. When the occasion for leadership is past, let the leader retire or be dismissed. Do not give to his pleasure your eternal welfare.
When he would operate you rather than coöperate with you, teach him, even with whip if need be, that you are master of yourself, and that if he forces you to contend for self-mastery, all power that he compels you to exercise against him is justified.
Fill yourself with a great fund. Give of that fund copiously, as heaven may rain upon a field, as the sun pours its light. Until you have, you cannot bestow.
The policeman will meet you at every corner and tell you to be a good citizen, — that is, to be what all other men are, not what you should be out of high respect for your own nature.
You will be warned to hide your virtues and your sins in the mass, in the great crowd. To step forth beyond the shame of majorities, beyond the beggary of vicarious seizures and sacrifices, to suffer and enjoy, to know and see, to stumble and stand erect, by your own right, renders you liable to aspersion.
You are finally saved by what you possess in yourself, not by what others possess for you, or, possessing, are willing to grant you on loan at interest.
But the desiderata are men and women to whom courage and spontaneity are every-day habits of life, who do not qualify, who do not apologize, who love to get to roots and to see a principle in full play, rather than to finger and toy with the leafage of the tree or with the fringe of the garment.
And we call for enthusiasm. Enthusiasm gives life color. It enriches what it touches. Belief and enthusiasm follow each other. Boreal and tropic, they make the perfect sphere. . . .
The brotherhood of man means little to some who are loudest in its acclaim. There are spiritual autocrats who do what they can to keep alive distinctions of wealth and race.
How much are you interested in the individual? How extensive is the territory you would give him? Would you limit his life to a few stray chances after you have yourself fenced in about all the desirable opportunity that exists?
Do you aspire to lead the Church, or to be one to whom it is sufficient to know that it is more honorable to share than to dominate in service? Would you go into politics to run the State or to see that the State is well administered?
How much privacy would you leave the soul? How far would you tread beyond the sacred threshold of personality, where inviolacy draws its line of fire?
Would you endeavor to make man a creature of dogmas and laws, of constitutions and articles of faith, or would you arouse in him his latent energies, and aid to see him fulfilled in self-grace and self-poise?
Would you give him charity or equipment? Would you maim him and then lend him your arm, or would you prefer to nourish him to giant self-power, so that your tenders of help would grow superfluous and be effaced?
Do you get away from the individual? Do you escape him? How but by destroying him? And in destroying him you destroy the society about whose safety you profess to be concerned.
Crown the individual, and he will bring to the social board the fruit of a kingdom. Beggar that individual, and he will stand at your feast an eternal spectre and reproach.
You speak of coöperation. The big individual is the best coöperator. He brings a giant force to the pull. He meets event with deed, and to him all time is day-break.
The real democrat disdains interferences and interruptions. He approaches laws direct, not by intercession. Priests in pulpits and professors in universities may become obstructions to the vision. I would look the gods face to face, not by sufferance of classes who claim a special right to carry my message and swear to my credentials.
He recommends himself who shows most insight. The mariner who drops a line deepest in the sea, the telescopic vision that farthest pierces space, the rapid intuition that most subtly and infallibly fathoms the mystery of being, holds in fee the authority of my credit.
But formal knowledge piled heaven-high, and books of learned men, and merely verbal paraphernalia encyclopedic in their range, may have no exchange relations with good sense and spiritual insight.
Culture often miscarries. It piles its knowledge of fragments and details and fails to see the law by which the pile stands. It builds its mountain and misses the mountain’s secret. It does not for one moment suspect that it has worked that it might at day’s-end mount the hill it has built and see the promised land.
There are evil possibilities in culture which must not go unchallenged and unchecked. They throw discredit upon the human. They undertake to do their work apart from large social interests. The great streams pass by, and the scholar fears to embark.
Social benefit does not find its origin in laboratories and libraries. The average professor, like the average priest, is subsidized, if not by his position, then by unconscious inclinations which defer the human call to artistic beauty or technical skill.
With Tolstoi, with Howells, I agree that it is calamitous that the artist and poet, the singer and author, must run money off the nib of his pen or the fluke of his brush.
The time will come when spiritual gift will cease to partnership money and goods. Men will write and sing what they must. They will stand unabashed in the presence of the material and proclaim the divine law.
Now nearly everybody at some point doffs his hat to respectability. Scholars particularly are cowards. Passion becomes to them vulgar. Passion sets them in the crowd. If you would be credible, gorge yourself with showy knowledge and the gilt-edge of verbal polish, leaving to the nondescript the weapons and satisfactions of revolution and sacrifice.
Institutionalists encourage this spirit. When they start they are pure and free. As they journey they lessen their spiritual emphasis, and make more of the equipage in which they travel. Finally, it is not the traveller, but the mode and style of travel, that fixes the standard of its life.
This is worse than pestilence. The process by which it is brought about is very insidious. Men are ruined before they suspect that there is peril.
There is everywhere a lack of faith in human nature. People talk of brotherhood and yet spend half their lives in studying the ways and means of ostracism and caste. They profess an abstract solidarity, and yet button their coats at the first salutation of poverty or sin.
Democracy is preserved in liberty. The Church and the State, all formal societies, tend to destroy individuality. We are forced by them into a mould. To be free we must hold them in perpetual servitude. I would chain and whip an institution to my purpose without remorse as long as it was useful, and when it had forfeited all mobility I would bleed and bury it, kindly, but without regret.
We are too meek and lowly. Earth is cursed with charity and aches for justice. At every door is the hand extended. The stranger is not invited in. He is fed where he stands and counselled to pass, on.
Our social philanthropies are vagrancies. They despoil that they may shame us. They build high walls which cannot be scaled and then withdraw the ladder or only let it down for elect applicants.
All social philosophy belongs to self.strength. Any act which beggars another offends truth. Any act which is not in the direction of the extinguishment of dependency is traitorous to social health. The structure is weakened at the foundations. Effort which does not aim at and culminate in individual independence and power, whatever its motive, is base and destructive.
The asides in this great drama are the pitiful sermons of priests and philanthropists who apologize in palliatives for present evils and who drink at no fountain of brave and absolute conviction. They are the mere accidents and ephemera of the play. They enter and cross the stage, but are not essential to the plot.
Charity is an outrage against the individual. As such it stands condemned. Charity takes from the veins of personality its most precious blood. The gallows, the guillotine, the garrote, here witness their spiritual counterparts.
Justice speaks in defence of the individual. It fends him. It makes whole that which previously was only a part. It builds muscle and mind, it fits soul and body for long journeys and the ineffable victories of personality.
Charity is a mole. Justice soars to the heavens, and is not dazzled by the sun. Charity lives in holes its brief and shadowed second; justice measures itself with all space and time.
Merely ethical or theological appeals to good motives, if they are not actually a bar against, only inappreciably aid in progress toward the straightening out of social difficulties. What we need are men who see and discuss radical principles. There is the most definite and exacting application necessary. I find that scholars apologize and supplicate where they should assert and defy. . . .
There are classes who assume a function and authority which does not naturally belong to them. In medicine, the professional doctor; in law, the professional lawyer; in art, in literature, in theology, in ethics, the professional, class-proud leader; in each, that man, or those many men, in whom pride of profession rises above and makes little of that final human poise and service which arbitrates between what is ephemeral and what is of infinite moment.
I would preach to every man rebellion. Hold preciously to yourself the final decision. Reverence authority that you elect, and refuse authority which others attempt to impose upon you. Do not love the atmosphere of courts and churches, of formal culture and polite and urbane emasculation. Do not play sheep to another’s shepherd. Violate no other soul, and hold your own soul defiant to the foot of the robber. . . .
Go your own way. From all the parlors and cloisters will come cries of warning. Go your own way. Gather flower and grain. Be these your gift to the social treasury. You can contribute generously when you are big in yourself. To borrow that you may give puts a lien on your future. All the debts must be paid. Out of your personal private riches you can give and give, and never reduce your store. But if you will put yourself in bond that you may play philanthropist, borrower, lender, and receiver are deceived and defeated.
Be you yourself, in yourself, whole. Do the acts of justice. Let mutual respect epitaph charity. Let men take their natural place in self-sufficient poise. Let priests and professional economists retire. Take up the golden thread yourself. It runs through all history and it leads the way of all revelation.
[Admirable as Mr. Traubel’s plea is, it is open to one serious criticism. It is Emersonian rather than Spencerian. It fails to introduce essential distinctions and treats things totally different in their nature as if they were similar or identical. Thoroughly sound in what he says, Mr. Traubel invites a suspicion of unsoundness by what he omits to say. In contending for individual liberty or sovereignty, we are confronted with two kinds of obstacles or conservative factors, and it is of the first importance to keep them distinct. There is, first, the forcible interference with rightful liberty, the tyranny of the political machine called government. Anarchists and consistent individualists, as such, are fighting this kind of compulsion and tyranny, and this kind only. They want the political machine to refrain from aggression and they work to secure equal freedom in the sphere of politics. But there is another kind of tyranny, — the tyranny of custom and opinion and leadership. Against this Anarchists and individualists do not, as such, carry on any warfare. These tyrants do not use force, they impose their fiat by moral means only, and justice is silent here. As philosophers, as thinking and progressive men, we are bound to resist this kind of tyranny and assert the supremacy of the individual. But it is possible to be a consistent Anarchist or individualist without being emancipated from the superstitions enforced by religions and social sanctions purely. Freedom from government by force is one thing; freedom from superstition and folly is a totally different thing. The early protestants against coercion did not clearly distinguish between these two kinds of tyranny, but today the distinction is recognized to be scientific as well as practical. The movement for equal freedom, — Anarchism, — has not, necessarily, anything to do with the movement for independence of creeds and leaders and customs that are not backed by force, that flourish on the soil of weakness, ignorance, and servility. Anarchism, it is true, will free men from political tyranny and create conditions under which it will be possible for them to emancipate themselves from the slavery of superstition, passion, vice, and folly. But Anarchism does not directly fight folly or vice.]
The Appeal and the Response.
The New York “Sun,” erratic, plutocratic, and treacherous, has been appealing in a pathetic manner to the trades unions of the country to repudiate the railroad strike and Pullman boycott, to point with alarm to the lawless interference with the sacred United States mails, and to protest their devotion to law and order. In one of these touching editorial appeals it said:
“The issue on which members of trades unions are invited to join blindly in the Debs insurrection is put, unconsciously, we imagine, with striking distinctness by Grand Master Workman Sovereign, of the Knights of Labor. The chief of the Knights looks upon this crazy and bloody uprising against law and order as a ‘battle practically for self-protection and for the future life of every workingman’s body in this country.’
“Are the labor organizations generally willing to admit that Sovereign is right? Do they conceive the principle of labor organization as hinging upon the successful overthrow of law and order and of the common privileges of every citizen, regarded as a citizen of the United States and not as a member of a labor organization? Do they agree with Sovereign that the interests of organized labor are today incompatible with the general interest?
“If trade unionism is thus hostile to the normal privileges of society, to the simplest right to which any citizen of the United States can lay claim, the right which the American government formally demands for one of its citizens of every foreign nation, the right to be permitted freely to pass, why, then trade union is the enemy, square and undisguised, of the community at large.”
The trades unions of the country have not remained silent. Dana can find their answer to his appeal in the news columns of his own paper. I fancy the answer does not please him. The New York Central Labor Union, representing organized labor of the metropolis, met on Sunday, July 8, and adopted resolutions, as follows:
“Whereas, The Pullman Car Company, supported by the general managers of the various railroads of the West, have attempted to reduce the wages of their heretofore half-paid employees, and
“Whereas, The American Railway Union, having resolved to support the Pullman employees in their just resistance to a more degrading condition than they have heretofore experienced, and
“Whereas, The strike of the Pullman employees, followed by the sympathetic action of the American Railway Union, has resulted in a general stoppage of Western mail, freight, and passenger railway service, and
“Whereas, the officials of the American Railway Union have guaranteed that all trains except those with Pullman cars attached would be run without protest, and
“Whereas, The United States Judges and officials, instead of ordering the railroads to run the mail trains with or without Pullman cars, have joined forces with the General Railway Managers in their support of the monster Pullman, therefore be it
“Resolved, That we hold the Pullman Company employees justified in their resistance to any further reduction in their starvation wages by the soulless corporation known as the Pullman Company;
Resolved, That we commend the justifiable sympathetic strike of the American Railway Union to the almost helpless Pullman strikers;
Resolved, That in our opinion, had it not been for the determined action of the General Managers and their allies, the United States Judges and officials, in supporting the Pullman Company, this general trouble would not have lasted twenty-four hours;
“Resolved, That in our opinion the guarantee of the officials of the American Railway Union to run all trains without Pullman cars attached demonstrates that their sympathetic strike was only to support the striking Pullman employees;
“Resolved, That the United States Judges and officials (our servants), in assuming the peculiar, if not suspicious, attitude they have in this series of complications, have proved themselves thoroughly incompetent, if not worse, and should be impeached at once;
“Resolved, That if the United States officials arrest Eugene Debs as being responsible for this trouble, it is the duty of every workingman in the United States to stop work at once and remain idle until he is released.”
District Assembly 49, of the Knights of Labor, adopted resolutions, of which the following is part:
“Whereas, We review with extreme alarm and regret the indecent and malignant haste with which the State militia and Federal troops have been ordered to assist the railroad kings to coerce their striking employees into submission, and knowing from past experience that the whole capitalistic press, together with the judiciary, police, deputy sheriffs, militia, and Federal troops will be used in the interest of the capitalistic class, who have also the aid of that great reserve army of the unemployed to fall back upon; therefore be it
“Resolved, That District Assembly 49 emphatically denounces the action of Attorney General Olney and the rest of the capitalistic crew In ordering the destruction of human life to save a few dollars per year for Pullman et al.
Typographical Union No. 8 put itself on record, thus:
“Resolved that Typographical Union No. 6 heartily sympathizes with the Pullman strikers and with the sympathetic strike of the American Railway Union, and urges President Debs to stand firm until the Pullman Company agrees to arbitrate.”
The Central Labor Federation had this to say:
“Resolved, That the Central Labor Federation of New York, in session assembled July 8, 1894, extends to the American Railway Union and other unions involved in this gigantic struggle, our earnest and heart-felt sympathy and coöperation;
“Resolved, That we cannot find language strong enough to denounce the President of the United States and his advisers for his high-banded and unwarranted interference in behalf of capital in the right of organized labor to enforce their peaceful demand for justice and right.
In Boston and elsewhere similar resolutions have been adopted by labor bodies. What does Dana think? Organized labor is “manifestly the enemy of the community at large.” But is Dana sure that unorganized labor is with him and his brotherhood of thieves? No, no, Dana, neither your venom nor your sophistry will have any effect. Your cause is becoming unpopular. Your “law and order” will be defied, trampled under foot, cursed, and swept away. Your lies are treated with contempt and your accusations are laughed at. The people will not submit to the system of violence, robbery, and fraud you call “law and order.”
The Stage of Industrial Despotism.
[Correspondence London Speaker.]
Across the Atlantic, the military type has gone out, the industrial has come in. The soldier is extinct, the merchant flourishes. A manifest advance, provided always that the manufacturing, trading, and commercial democracy has discovered, and is willing to obey, sound economic laws! It must not be the hell of the poor even to secure a paradise for the rich.
To get rid of the Bourbons was an excellent thing. But the French Revolution halted halfway. It crowned the edifice by endowing the middle class; and it surrendered basely to Napoleon. The French have had to endure nearly a hundred years of confusion before laying the ghost of that modern Tamer-lane whose conquests are deservedly satirized as ‘Mongolian.’ How long will it take the Americans to understand that a Napoleon of Peace, though he call himself modestly Jay Gould or Vanderbilt, is just as much an embodied treason against their free institutions as the Napoleon of War was a treason against the principles of 1789? They have never seen a military despotism triumph.
But an industrial despotism has grown up silently, the methods and tactics of which are in deadly opposition to American progress. Not only so; if the system known as monopoly ever comes to have full sway, it will employ the forms of freedom to entrench itself behind the Constitution it is pulling down into ruin — much as the barbarians in Rome built their robber castles with the stones of the temples and palaces for which they saw no other use. To escape from the old military régime was the first step on the path of freedom. To escape from the monopolist is the second.
The power of the sword is no longer paramount in the United States, but the power of the purse increases every day. Upon the political revolution must follow the social revolution — there, as in all other countries of the civilized world, unless reaction, in its meanest form, is to triumph, and the course of history to be reversed. But America stands in the van. It has at once the more patent and the more definite problem, for riches cannot disguise themselves in the States under the robes of kings and nobles — and they are the more unlovely because the less adorned. The contest between Democracy and Plutocracy is the trial of America. In that arena the combatants stand, as Carlyle would have said, at death-grips. One of them must go to the ground.
The Ethics of Dynamite.
[Auberon Herbert In the Contemporary Review.]
Perhaps I ought at once, for the benefit of some of my friends who are inclined a little incautiously to glorify this word “governing” without thinking of all that is contained in it, to translate the term, which is so often on our lips, into what I hold to be its true meaning: forcing your own will and pleasure, whatever they may be, if you happen to be the stronger, on other persons. Now, many worthy people are apt to look on dynamite as the arch-enemy of the government; but, remembering this definition, remembering that undeniably the great purpose of government is the compulsion of A by B and C to do what he does not want to do, it is plain that such a view fails to distinguish essence from accident, and to appreciate the most characteristic qualities that inhere in this new political agent. Dynamite is not opposed to government; it is, on the contrary, government in its most intensified and concentrated form. Whatever are the sins of every-day governmentalism, however brutal in their working some of the great force machines with which we love to administer each other may tend to be, however reckless we may be as regards each other’s rights in our efforts to place the yoke of our own opinions upon the neck of others, dynamite “administers” with a far ruder, rougher hand than even the worst of the continental bureaucracies. Indeed, whenever the continental governments are reproached by some of us liberty-folk for taking possession in so peremptory a manner of the bodies and minds of the people and converting them into administration material, they may not unreasonably remark — if they happen to be in a philosophic mood — that the same reproaches should be addressed, with even greater pertinency, to their enemy, the dynamiter, who dynamites us all with the happiest impartiality on the off-chance of impressing somebody or other with some portion of his own rather mixed views. Indeed, a touch of what is almost comic is introduced into the lurid matter by the fact that the views of the dynamiter, to which we are so unpleasantly sacrificed, are, as his best friend must admit, as yet very imperfectly arranged in his own consciousness. Although I am somewhat deficient in sympathy with most governments, yet I must confess that it is a little hard either for them or for us, the public, to be dynamited for not having already embraced theories which are still, intellectually speaking, in a half-born, unshaped condition, — such as, for example, let us say, the gospel of Anarchistic Communism. Foreign governments have, however, as I think, an unavowed reason of their own for not loving the dynamiter, independent of any philosophical objections they may feel to the intellectual incoherences on his part. Conscience makes cowards of us all. Deep down in their consciousness lurks a dim perception of the truth that between him and them exists an unrecognized blood-relationship, that the thing of which they have such horror is something more than a satire, an exaggeration, a caricature of themselves, that, if the truth is to be fairly acknowledged, it is their very own child, both the product of and the reaction against the methods of “governing” men and women, which they have employed with so unsparing a hand. Poor old Saturn, as he nods upon his seat, begins to feel that things are not quite so comfortable today as they were yesterday, that his family are not altogether at one with him, and that his own power has been suddenly brought face to face with a new power, which possibly may prove the stronger of the two. Our good rulers are right to have their misgivings. We live in an age of active evolution, and the art of government is evolving like everything else around us. Dynamite is its latest and least comfortable development. It is a purer essence of government, more concentrated and intensified, than has ever yet been employed. It is government in a nutshell, government stripped, as some of us aver, of all its dearly-beloved fictions, ballot-boxes, political parties, House of Commons oratory, and all the rest of it. How, indeed, is it possible to govern more effectively, or in more abbreviated form, than to say: “Do this — or don’t do this — unless you desire that a pound of dynamite should be placed tomorrow evening in your ground-floor study.” It is the perfection, the ne plus ultra, of government. Indeed, if we poor liberty-folk, we voluntaryists, who are at such intellectual discount just at present, and at whom none is too mean to fling his stone, if we, who detest the root idea at the bottom of all governing, — the compelling of people to do what they don’t want to do, the compelling of them to accept the views and become the tools of other persons, — wished to find an object-lesson to set before those governments of today which have not yet learnt to doubt about their property in human material, where could we find anything more impressive than the dynamiter, with his tin canister and his supply of horse-shoe nails? “Here is your own child. This is what your doctrine of deified force, this is what your contempt of human rights, this is what your property in men and women leads to.”
There are some reformers by dynamite who imagine that they are on the side of liberty. Poor liberty! As if liberty, that moves by the path of moral evolution, that moves so slowly, just because she cannot be created out of hand by those forms and systems which are established today and swept aside tomorrow, liberty, that depends upon inward processes in the consciousness of men, upon the gradual recognition by every person in every other person of his inherent inalienable right to be himself and lead the self-chosen life — as if liberty, in this one true sense, could have anything to do with a tin canister filled with blacksmith’s nails and flung into the midst of a body of old and middle-aged gentlemen industriously playing at the nineteenth-century game of inventing rewards and devising restrictions for their fellow-men, or of peaceful citizens sipping their coffee! Friends of liberty! No. Even the most clear-headed of the believers in St. Dynamite understand as little of liberty as they understand of themselves. Inventors of improved and expedited processes of government perhaps they may be; or avengers they may be, as fungi are avengers, when we establish the conditions that favor decay; or, as disease may be, when we recklessly depart from the conditions that maintain health; but don’t let them dream of themselves as friends of liberty. To be a friend of liberty is one thing; to be a half-automatic reaction from a bad system is another thing. It was necessary, it was written in the Sibylline books, it was predestined of long ago, that they should presently appear upon the world’s stage; it was inherent in the order of things that the offence should come; and — we may add, as of old — woe to them through whom the offence cometh! How could you build up these lawless, irresponsible, all-grasping governments, and not expect to see some dark shadows, some grotesque imitations, some terrible caricatures, begotten of them? How could you deify force in one form before the eyes of all men and not expect, sooner or later, to see other deification set up at its side? And now that at last in the fulness of time the thing, which was to be, is amongst us, that the rival force-deity has appeared and is fighting for his throne, it is hard to restrain a somewhat bitter smile as Europe looks on in utter bewilderment at what is to it a very ugly as well as a very unaccountable phenomenon.
In truth, the new deity is not in the least unaccountable. He is only too easy to account for. Both his moral and his physical genesis lie at the door of the European governments. To almost all of them we may in turn say: “Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandies.” In their different degrees they are nearly all of them alike; for long years they have ploughed and sown and harrowed the soil; and lo! the crop is here. If any government thought that it could indefinitely go on turning men and women into administration material, fastening its grip closer and closer on their property, their lives and their beliefs, until the chief purpose of human existence became, — half unconsciously, perhaps, — in the eyes of these governmentalists, to supply a State revenue out of blood and sweat, whilst, fed and nourished by this State revenue, the grandeur of the governments was ever growing and growing, with officials magnified into creatures of a semi-divine order, and a splendid and highly exciting game carried on by means of all this annexed property, and all these annexed lives, against other governments, equally engaged in playing the same splendid and exciting game, — if they thought that this life of the gods ruling at their ease in the empyrean would flow on forever in a happy and unbroken stream, that nations, made of living men and women, might be turned wholesale into low forms of government property, without some strange phenomena, without some startling products and reactions breaking through the calm of the surface, we can only say of them that, true as ever to the bureaucratic tradition, they were not in contact with the realities of flesh and blood, — that they were, in an old phrase of Mr. Gladstone, “living up in a balloon.” Two things were sure to arise, and they have arisen. In the moral world some men would begin to look at these gigantic structures of power, to ask questions about them, to finger them, and to probe deep to see on what moral foundations they rested; whilst in the world of daily life some men, less patient than their fellows, would be maddened by the close, painful grinding of the wheels of the great machines, left wholly to the control of officials, and would become the right stuff for the wildest counsels to work in. . . .
Almost every European government is a legalized manufactory of dynamiters. Vexation piled upon vexation, restriction upon restriction, burden upon burden, the dynamiter is slowly hammered out every where on the official anvil. The more patient submit, but the stronger and more rebellious characters are maddened, and any weapon is considered right, as the weapon of the weaker against the stronger. It matters little that a great deal of what is done is done in the alleged interest of the people themselves. I myself have seen in England a clever, industrious workman driven to the edge of revolt by the persecuting character of our education, laws, and changed from a man ready to fight within the law to one who was almost ready to fight outside it. There are men, not bad parents, who have passed from town to town to avoid this persecution; there are families who have broken up their homes and lived as they could, in their detestation of it. It is time that we laid aside this odious weapon of compulsion. More and more bitter will be the fruit of it as the years go on. Compulsion everywhere is a brutalizing weapon. The English, with their faults — and there are plenty of them — are, I think, the most tender-hearted people anywhere on the earth. That tender-heartedness, both to each other and to animals, arises, as I believe, mainly from their past free life. They have never as yet been officialized; they have never as yet been turned into government material. Recently we have been reversing our traditions; but it is not yet too late to step back from the mire and the slough which lie in front of us. As yet we have only soiled our ankles where other nations have waded deep. We inherit splendid traditions of voluntaryism, which hardly any other nation has inherited; and it is to voluntaryism, the inspiring genius of the English character, that we must look in the future, as we did in the past, for escape from all difficulties. If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. Force is the very weakest and most treacherous of all human implements. The history of force is the history of the continuous crumbling away of every institution that has rested upon it. . . . If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings, — as in one country they propose to do, — in our House of Commons scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and, I think, now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their great-coats in the vestibules, — if we are, in a word, to trust to machinery, to harden our hearts, and simply to meet force with force, always irritating, always clumsy, and in the end fruitless, then I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time. We may be quite sure that force-users will be force-begetters. The passions of men will rise higher and higher; and the authorized and unauthorized governments — the government of the majority and of written laws, the government of the minority and of dynamite — will enter upon their desperate struggle, of which no living man can read the end. In one way, and only one way, can the dynamiter be permanently disarmed — by abandoning in almost all directions our force-machinery, and accustoming the people to believe in the blessed weapons of reason, persuasion, and voluntary service. We have morally made the dynamiter; we must new morally unmake him.
The Representative’s Privilege.
A congressman from California is reported to have said: “The only difference between my constituents and myself is that I am in a position where I can take bribes, and they are not.”
Liberty’s Typography.
The typographical reform adopted by Liberty consists in the abolition of the process known among printers as “justification.” Under this new system, when the compositor, as he approaches the end of the line, finds that there is not sufficient room for an additional word or syllable, instead of filling the line by increasing the size of the spaces between the words, fills it with little blocks of metal known as quads, without disturbing the original spacing. In consequence of this, the reading matter does not present as straight an edge at its right side as at its left.
Æsthetically the new method is an improvement, because all inequality between the spaces in any given line and in the spacing of two lines in juxtaposition is eliminated. The spaces between the words remain equal in all parts of the column, the result being pleasing to the eye and serving to facilitate the task of reading. Commercially the new method is advantageous because it is much cheaper, nearly thirty per cent. being saved on the composition, and because it simplifies the work of composition and enables unskilled labor to take the place of skilled. The new method is available for book work and requires no capital for its adoption.
Don’t keep Liberty to yourself, share it with others!
Liberty’s Library
Leonard E. Read: Accent On The Right: To Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), who sought for truth rather than outcome and never witnessed the fruits his labor bore. Obedience to conscience was his first rule; we witness the results.
Leonard E. Read: Anything That’s Peaceful: Many favor peace but not many favor the things that make for peace. — Thomas à Kempis
Leonard E. Read: Awake for Freedom’s Sake: Finally, share with others. Forget about “reforming” them! The more we share, the more we learn. This is in the interest of self and freedom!
Leonard E. Read: Castles in the Air: If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. — Henry David Thoreau
Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State: Political philosophy is dominated by a myth, the myth of the necessity of the state. The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. In this provocative book, Gerard Casey argues that social order can be spontaneously generated, that such spontaneous order is the norm in human society and that deviations from the ordered norms can be dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the state.
Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers: Murray Rothbard: Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) was an economist, historian, philosopher, and legal theoretician. His work was unified by a passionate and resolute commitment to a libertarianism that may be characterized as ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and which implied a belief that even the legal system may be provided privately without the need for a coercive collective authority. Hence, anarcho-capitalists envisage a society where the traditional role of government is wholly subsumed by private, profit-making enterprises and all social relationships are ultimately founded upon consent.
