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“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.
The Boston “Labor Leader” calls Pullman the Anarchist-in-chief of America. Editor Foster knows better. Pullman is simply one of the many monopolists who have grown rich and powerful under Archism. He is accused of arrogance, and is told that he has duties towards his employees and the public. Such talk is scarcely helpful to labor. Mr. Foster understands first principles; why is not this understanding shown in his comments on the strike?
No man has been more shamefully and stupidly misrepresented by the lying newspapers than Governor Altgeld. The reason why these green-goods agencies are so bitter against Altgeld is probably in his complete indifference to their alleged opinions. He despises them, and is proud of their blame. Liberty is glad to know that, notwithstanding the newspaper conspiracy, the Democratic State Convention of Illinois endorsed Governor Altgeld’s administration and recognized his integrity and high-mindedness. This indicates that the people of Illinois are with the Governor. No wonder the newspapers are furious.
Two of Liberty’s friends have categorically denied the statement recently made in a note that the creeds of the four million church-going voters prohibit them from drinking intoxicants. They assert that there is nothing in the creeds warranting the assumption that drinking is sinful and call upon Liberty to withdraw its implied charge of insincerity or hypocricy against them. If my friends are right, some of the Prohibitionist preachers and champions have been guilty of misrepresentation and false claims. Liberty is ready to apologize to the voting church-goers for its share of the injustice to their creeds.
When the Senate passed resolutions endorsing Cleveland’s interference in the railroad strike, the newspapers’ enthusiasm knew no bounds. “The Senate is sound!” they shouted; “the Senate is loyal, patriotic, courageous, and American!” Are these newspapers really idiotic, or do they treat their readers as idiots? What element of surprise was there in the Senate’s sympathy with Cleveland? Could the millionaires, speculators, spoilsmen, and corruptionists collectively known as the Senate have been expected to side with the strikers? Patriotism, we all know, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. After the sugar scandal, the charges of bribery, the tariff exhibition, and the disgust of the country, including the plutocratic press, with the incompetent and dishonest Senate, it must have been a welcome opportunity to that discredited body to recover lost ground by cheap patriotism and hypocritical Americanism. Congratulations upon Pullman’s loyalty are now in order.
A prominent New York clergyman denounces the boycott as a “foreign word, Anarchistic and un-Christian.” Yes, the boycott is Anarchistic, — that is, non-invasive and legitimate; but why is it un-Christian? Is the shooting by the government troops Christian? If it is un-Christian to resist evil in any way, then the boycott, though a fairer weapon than any other, is nevertheless un-Christian, since it is a form of resistance. But our modern clergymen are not so sentimental as to favor non-resistance. Of all the champions of “law and order” they are the most relentless, cold-blooded, and brutal. As for the religious editors, the majority of them have neither feelings nor ideas deserving to be described as Christian. They are as vicious and ignorant as the editors of the newspapers, whom indeed they merely copy and follow. It is not the business of truly religious editors to rush to the aid of law and order, property, or government. There are others to take care of that. They ought to apply the essential principles of their religion to the struggles of the day, and call for generosity, sympathy, and forbearance. If they do not, there is no reason for their existence.
The pseudo-individualist “Liberty Review” advances an original theory in explanation of American lynchings. At the root of the trouble, it seems, is the labor question, “as the negro is, of necessity, a free laborer, while the white men have become slaves of the unions, and responsive to the lash of slave-drivers, humorously called labor leaders. As a result of freedom, the negro is becoming a property owner and a successful rival for employment in the labor market. The crime which is the alleged cause of the lynching is, in nine cases out of ten, that he has become well-off, while the white slave is wasting his time and starving, because his master, the union, will not let him work except on terms arranged for him by others.” To such a length of absurdity does hatred of labor organizations carry an advocate of landlordism, privilege, and robbery! The same organ speaks as follows about strikes and labor agitation: “A few more strikes got up in the interest of foreign shipowners, manufacturers, and merchants will open the eyes of the most blind among the dupes of these paid die-organizers of British industry, these subsidized plotters against the welfare of British commerce, these mercenaries who are engaged in a foul conspiracy to destroy the conditions of our national prosperity and to bring upon our heads utter and irretrievable ruin.” Such intemperate and silly sod malicious attacks hurt no one but the class whose apologists are compelled to defy common sense and common knowledge. But the true individualist who is called upon to criticize labor and disapprove its course must always guard against the natural misconception which holds liberty and individualism responsible for the violent nonsense and the sophistry of the sham individualist who is the cause of the general distrust of libertarian principles.
A silly congressman has introduced a bill “to suppress Anarchy,” and a stupid congress may pass it. The bill first defines Anarchy, as follows: “Any person or persons appointed, designated, or employed by any society or organization existing in this country or in any foreign country which provides in writing or by verbal agreement, understanding or countenance, for the taking of human life unlawfully, or for the unlawful destruction of a building or buildings or other property where the loss of human life is the probable result of such destruction of property, shall be deemed an Anarchist.” According to this jargon, any number of persons employed or designated in the specified way will be deemed “an Anarchist,” one Anarchist. Doubtless there is some wicked design behind this strange merging of many into one; what can it be? Having defined Anarchy, the bill goes on to declare that any such person “who shall attempt the life of any person holding office, elective or appointive, or employed under the Constitution and laws of the United States, or who shall attempt the destruction of any building or buildings or other property where the loss of the life of any such United States official or employee would be the probable result of such a destruction of buildings or other property, shall upon trial and conviction of such offence in any circuit or district court of the United States of the district where such offence was attempted, be sentenced to death by hanging, which sentence shall be executed by the marshal of the district in accordance with the sentence of the judge before whom the case was tried.” Under this bill, a man who is not acting under orders from an organization is not an “Anarchist,” whatever his acts may be. The punishment is therefore to be inflicted, not for acts, but for membership in organizations of a certain kind. Is there any sense in this distinction? The wise legislator evidently thought that every revolutionist must be a member of a secret society.
“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.
Some Woman-Suffrage Arguments.
In discussing the question of woman suffrage before a club, Edward King, the labor leader and Positivist, assumed a very unphilosophical and illogical attitude. He recognized the fact that the majority of the woman suffragists seek the voting power for purposes of coercion and tyranny, and he admitted that the immediate result of woman suffrage would be a serious curtailment of liberty. But, he asked, if the women are reactionary on social questions, who is to blame, and how can they become liberal and enlightened except by experience in political life? It is futile to raise the question of blame. Such social conditions and historical bequests are not the result of the wickedness or blindness of any body of men. Humanity has made some progress since the opening of history, and it is absurd to say that we are to blame for not having done better. The rational question is how to avoid errors and blunders in the future. Now, it is not true that there is no way in which women can obtain political wisdom except by a long apprenticeship in politics. The few who will be so impressed with the responsibilities of voting as to take the trouble of informing themselves before taking sides, are the very persons who require no stimulus at all, who already fully appreciate the need of knowledge. The majority of women will vote ignorantly, recklessly, as the majority of men do. There is nothing standing in the way of women’s political education that the ballot will remove. Such obstacles as there are — economic mainly — will remain. Apart from these hindrances, women can both learn and apply their knowledge in a thousand ways. The contention that women will not and ought not to stir until they are allowed to vote, is silly. It compels the inference that women are capricious and petulant and childish. Let women do all they can in the ways open to them, and if they can successfully maintain that the ballot will enable them to do better or more work along the right lines, all opposition will vanish.
Mr. King further argued that woman suffrage would operate to restrict, not the liberty of mankind, but the libertinism of men and the immorality of women. Such a distinction might be expected from the average woman-suffragist, but Mr. King ought to be less superficial. Grant that the restrictions will be aimed at libertinism, does it follow that they will not infringe upon liberty? Is the use of force against libertinism justifiable and wise? The distinction between liberty and libertinism is arbitrary and begs the very question at issue between coercionists and libertarians. Libertarians insist on freedom for vice as well as on freedom for virtue, and they do so not because they abhor vice less, but because thy hate tyranny and force more, because they know that a force-cure for vice is worse than the disease. Nobody proposes to reform “good” people by force; it is the vicious and bad that are to be taken to task and forced to reform. Men are beginning to see that liberty is the only right and effectual means of dealing with vice, while women are several centuries behind on this question of political hygiene and therapeutics. Surely Mr. King must perceive the fallacy of his argument.
Addressing the same club, Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, a leading woman-suffragist, contended that woman suffrage could not result in coercive and restrictive legislation. Her argument was the à priori one, excellent and profound where really applicable, that anything which is in the direction of enfranchisement, emancipation, and liberation cannot possibly produce the effect of diminishing the amount of liberty in society. The trouble with this argument is that the minor premise is calmly, perhaps unconsciously, assumed, without the slightest attempt at proof. The minor premise is that the extension of the suffrage to women is in the line of emancipation, — a proposition which is stoutly denied. The word enfranchisement, loosely used, is responsible to some extent for the confusion of thought, but the chief source of the misapprehension is the assumption that among the rights of man is the right to vote. But, scientifically speaking, men’s rights are simply men’s legitimate freedoms, and the freedom to vote — that is, to bind or govern others — is not at all a corollary from the principle of equal freedom. To confer the privilege of voting upon women is not to enlarge their proper freedom, but to invest them with the power of coercion and government. This may increase their freedom, but it does not increase or even strengthen the amount of freedom generally enjoyed. A vote is a weapon, appliance, instrument, and everything depends on the way in which it is used and the conditions under which it is used. Under compulsory government, every vote that is not for repeal is a vote for tyranny. And as for the work of repeal, voting is not the only means available. There are other and better means. Y.
Anarchism and Christianity.
In determining the relations between Anarchism and Christianity and questioning as to their antagonism or compatibility, we must first make it clear what we mean by Christianity.
Nowadays Christianity may mean almost anything. Plenty of Christians, who call themselves such, and are admitted to be such by almost all other varieties of Christians, do not hesitate to deny the divinity of Christ. Some there are who call themselves Christians while denying even his human existence, regarding the alleged historical character as an abstraction merely. With this kind of Christianity, of course, anything is compatible.
The real Christianity, though, is a different matter: it is a religion, and it is the religion which Mr. Byington, in his recent excellent article, confesses he knows nothing about, — the Catholic religion. This is at least the most conspicuous representative of the Christian religion in Europe and the Americas. Now, the basis of this religion, as of all other religions, is authority.
The victims, or devotees, or upholders, or whatever you prefer to call them, of any religion must begin by admitting the superiority of certain persons and yielding obedience to them. Christianity, as a religion, must be opposed to Atheism, the denial of all religion, and not merely to other varieties of religion.
The question is, whether Anarchism is compatible with religion at large or not, for, in denying its compatibility with Christianity as a religion, its compatibility with all religion is denied.
The essential point in the Catholic Church is the admission by the believer that certain men, by an alleged historical chain of physical contact with their predecessors in office, have the power to do much damage to the layman who violates their commands. As in all other religions, it is a supernatural power which is feared: in fact, religion may be accurately defined as fear of the supernatural.
The first effective rally from this fear, and defiance of this authority, was the Protestant Reformation. Judge for yourself; think for yourself: these were its precepts.
True enough, it had no sooner said so than it took it all back and vowed it never meant anything of the sort; but the stopper was out, and the smoke has ever since been ascending from the bottle, and while we talk it is beginning to assume a giant’s shape, — the shape of Humanity, never to be compressed into the bottle again.
Ever since Luther pulled the cork, the denial of authority has continued and extended. The only really living authority, the only power which men fear, not knowing its worthlessness, is an alleged morality which the State is supposed to support. This last authority is now denied by Anarchism, which is the natural culmination of Protestantism and or Democracy, the political spouse of Protestantism.
All that Mr. Byington says of Protestant Christianity’s compatibility with Anarchism may be perfectly true, because Protestantism itself is the negation of religious authority. To show this is, therefore, rather to fortify my opinion that Anarchism tended toward Atheism than to oppose it. Protestant Christianity itself is on the highroad to Atheism, for, by its own criteria, if a man, by his private judgment, find the Bible incredible, he is not to be expected to accept it.
Protestant Christianity is a changing thing; it represents always the spirit of the age; and the spirit of the age, Mr. Byington no doubt is right in saying, is in its fundamental feelings favorable to Anarchism, without knowing that it is so.
The moral maxims that are set forth by Mr. Byington in another article, “A Lesson on Civil Government,” are no doubt supposed by him to be essentially Christian. “It is wrong to kill a man, or to shut him up,” and so on, “if he does no such thing to you.”
The axiomatic Christian moral precept is to do the will of God, and of his representative, the king or the president, as the case may be; to kill those whom these bid us kill, to rob those whom they bid us rob; that is the essence of Christianity. Not right to hurt a man who does not hurt you! Pure heterodoxy in the old-fashioned Christian’s eyes. Not ten minutes ago a pillar of the Church was telling me that if he had his way, I, whom he condescends to favor with his personal esteem, as he explained, should nevertheless be imprisoned for life, or until I should retract my “horrible” opinions. The Golden Rule? I questioned. Faugh! pooh! pish! the Golden Rule, forsooth, quoth he, and I knew he was a genuine Christian.
Mr. Byington is in a transition stage from the frank brutality of real Christianity, by the natural ascent of modern humanitarianism which calls itself Christianity, but is not.
John Beverley Robinson.
The Strike and the Editors.
The great railroad strike has furnished the sentimental editors with material for another campaign in favor of inconsequential and illogical reforms, and the brutal and sophistical editors with an assortment of dangerous and misleading half-truths. Several important questions were raised by the strike, — such as the propriety of sympathetic strikes, the legitimacy of the boycott, Federal encroachment, violent and aggressive methods in labor troubles, and a number of others. The sentimental editors, those who have not sold their souls to the plutocracy, express sympathy with the strikers, while regretting their use of illegal means, and mildly suggest such measures of relief as arbitration, government regulation of railway labor, or public control of natural monopolies. The positions taken by these editors are creditable to their hearts, but they do not commend themselves to the mind. Well-meaning suggestions are not to be despised in these days of conflict and drawing of the lines, but one is compelled to point out the weakness and lameness of the conclusions drawn by those who are incapable of analysis and scientific reasoning. To denounce Pullman for refusing to submit to arbitration, to blame the railroad managers for their contemptuous treatment of the strikers, is well, perhaps, but it leads to nothing and contributes nothing to the solution of the problem. The brutal sophists, on the other hand, make a parade of impartial and thorough dealing with the situation, and, by evading and suppressing and shuffling facts, arrive at conclusions whose fallaciousness is not obvious to the ordinary reader. In half-truths and plausible interpretations there is greater danger than in blind and unqualified condemnation. Here is, for instance, a review of the facts of the strike from the alleged standpoint of “first principles” by that sophist and hypocrite, the “Sun”:
The workmen employed by George M. Pullman had a perfect right to refuse the wages offered, and to quit work in a body if they deemed it expedient. But they had no right, by the exercise of any kind of pressure, to force Pullman to run his works at a loss. Pullman has solemnly declared that the last car contracts carried out by him involved a loss, and that he is unable to transact business any longer on that basis. From his point of view, therefore, there is nothing to arbitrate; for no freeman will submit to the decision of an arbitrator that he shall do business at a loss. This is a free country — as free for Pullman as it is for his employees. We are not yet ready for any sort of tyranny here; neither for the man on horseback nor for Socialistic despotism.
The workingmen composing the American Railway Union had a perfect right to sympathize with the Pullman strikers, although, as we have seen, the latter had no real grievance. But the A. R. U. had no right to carry the expression of its sympathy beyond certain lawful limits. They had a right to request, in contempt of all general convenience, the officials of the railways running out of Chicago not to haul Pullman cars. Those officials had an equal right to refuse the request, and, indeed, were bound to do so by their duty to earn dividends for their stockholders, and to subserve the interests of interstate commerce. They have pointed out that, if Pullman care are detached, mail trains can only be run at a loss; and such a loss neither the A. R. U. nor the United States government has any right to inflict. The railways have contracted to carry the mails, but the contract gives the railway officials exclusive control of the method in which trains shall be made up. Self-interest can be trusted to cause the officials to make up the trains in such a way as to answer the needs of the travelling public. Those needs would not be answered by a refusal to haul Pullman cars.
The demand of the A. R. U., that it should dictate the make-up of trains, having been rejected, the workingmen composing that association had a right to quit work upon the railways running out of Chicago, and to seek employment elsewhere, or live upon their savings, if they deemed it expedient to do so. But there their rights stopped short. They have no right to deprive the railways of the use of their own property and to impede the performance of their functions. They have no right to deter other American citizens from accepting the posts vacated by the strikers. Yet these unrightful and unlawful acts have notoriously been done. The new men employed by the railways in the place of the strikers have been subjected to violence or threatened with it; tracks have been obstructed; switches demolished; watch towers destroyed, and cars derailed, overturned, and burnt.
Now it is necessary to inquire where the flaw is in this argument. It apparently commends itself to sober sense and rational judgment. It seems clear, conclusive, logical, while the arguments of the sentimentalists are vague, inconclusive, and flabby. As far as it goes, the “Sun” must be admitted to be perfectly right. Yet there must be a fallacy somewhere in or be bind the argument, for, if not, the verdict must be against the strikers in every case where violence is need; and as most strikes are accompanied by violence, it must follow that most strikers are so wrong and vicious as to forfeit all claim to consideration. This is precisely what the “Sun” is endeavoring to enforce, hence it is necessary to challenge and refute its apparently sound argument.
The vice or fallacy in the “Sun’s” reasoning is found in the implied assumption that the strikers fight under entirely fair conditions and have no other and greater grievances than those serving as the immediate cause of the strike. The “Sun’s” account of the trouble purposely begins with the declination of Pullman’s wage schedule by his employees; no other antecedents of the trouble are as much as hinted at, as if it were wholly immaterial whether or not there are such antecedents. But it is very material; the verdict really depends upon that point. If everything else were fair, just, and equitable at Pullman; if equality of opportunities existed there and equal liberty prevailed, then it would be proper to treat the wages disagreement as the first act of the drama. But equality of opportunities and freedom never prevailed in Pullman’s jurisdiction, any more than they prevail elsewhere, and the wage dispute was not the sole source of the trouble. The Pullman employees are victims of the system of monopoly, privilege, and legal injustice from which all labor is suffering, and they entered the fight handicapped, burdened, and exhausted. Pullman was not merely their employer, but their exploiter and slave-driver, the State’s injustice having invested him with the power to exploit and oppress. It was by violence, organized force and fraud, that labor was reduced to the necessity of accepting the Pullman terms, and this great general grievance was deeply felt (unfortunately it was but very imperfectly understood) by the employees when the struggle was forced upon them by the minor special grievance. To tell them to use none but legitimate weapons is, under the circumstances, impudent mockery. It is beyond human nature to refrain from violence when it is perfectly well known that so-called orderly strikes are predestined to total failure.
But two wrongs don’t make a right, it may be objected. Granted that the workmen are robbed and oppressed by the beneficiaries of the present monopoly system, how does this fact justify their coercion of non-union men, their destruction of property, and other aggressions? Do these aggressions contribute to the solution of the larger problems and the removal of the deeper grievances? No; no such contention is made, nor is it claimed that the aggressions of the State and its allies justify retaliation. What is claimed and emphasized is that, when the workmen do retaliate and force down the oppressors’ throats a dose of their own medicine, it is not the business of lovers of justice and equity to denounce them. The use of force by the victims of plutocracy may not be wise or just in all cases, but it is natural, inevitable, and our business is simply to point out the logic of events and pass on to the examination of the root of the evil. We are opposed to all aggression, but for labor’s aggressions there are many excuses. To those who shriek that labor is criminal, we say that capital is far more criminal; to those who sophistically talk about labor’s overstepping the bounds of legitimate warfare, we say that it does not lie in monopoly’s mouth to make such a charge, for its original and graver offences are the cause of labor’s transgressions. Monopoly’s tears excite no sympathy, labor’s violence arouses no indignation. Monopoly cannot expect to retain a monopoly of the weapon of force forever. Labor is slow, but it is gradually learning the tricks of monopoly and will master the whole science before long. Let those who preach peace, order, and fairness to labor see to it that monopoly does not render these things impossible by a régime of violence, fraud, and crime. Let those who favor orderly strikes create conditions under which orderly strikers could hope to succeed. Deprive capital of its unfair ad vantages; give labor opportunity; insist on a fair field. Labor’s violence is the violence of despair and hopelessness. Such violence cannot be prevented, it cannot be reasonably condemned. Unless steps are taken in the direction of equity, there will be more violence. If force is continued to be used by the authorities, and sophistry by the editors, nothing will save them from the wrath of outraged victims, not even the efforts of the radical reformers, who realize the futility and danger of so-called revolutions. Y.
Inopportunism.
Often, while admitting the strength of the Anarchists’ central propositions, Opportunists, or, as they might better be called, Inopportunists, argue that we cannot hope for a complete realization of our plans at once, and must be content to take one step at a time. Sometimes these men will even quote from Herbert Spencer that “It is not to be expected, however, that any very marked effects are to be produced by the clearest demonstration of this truth, — even by a demonstration beyond all question.” Had they read the rest of the paragraph, they would have discovered that the whole of the book from which they quote was written to combat the very position they seek to strengthen by reference to it.
It may be very well to take one step at a time. No Anarchist is unwilling to do this, no matter how insignificant a step may seem, provided that step be on the road to freedom. But not one step will we move in the opposite direction, for we believe with John Morley that “a small and temporary improvement may really be the worst enemy of a great and permanent improvement The small reform, if it be not made with reference to some large progressive principle, and with a view to further extension of its scope, makes it all the more difficult to return to the right line and direction when improvement is again demanded.” Now this is just what the Opportunist does not understand. He is after anything for a change, and tells us, “You fellows never want to do anything practical,” because we refuse to howl for government control of railways, telegraphs, etc. His position is not that of the man who claims that these industries will be a source of profit after rent and interest are abolished, since they are by their very nature monopolies, and so must be operated by the community, though he often believes this; but he hopes to derive some immediate benefit from the nationalization of them.
As a Socialist, the Opportunist knows well enough that our economic ills are due to the creation of surplus value, and that as long as rent and interest remain unmolested, nothing can be of any but the most trifling importance. He knows also that, today at any rate, no matter what he may hope for in the future, politicians are strictly dishonest, mere hirelings of capital and “matter workmen” of the brotherhood of thieves. What can he expect from handing over “natural monopolies” to the mercy of such an outfit? The business will assuredly be mismanaged, and the loss made up by taxes which must in the ultimate be paid by labor, while any advantage that may possibly be derived will just as surely be reaped by the landlord and money-lender. Even supposing that the postal system is all that the State Socialists claim for it, they cannot show that it has affected surplus value in the slightest, except as affording an opportunity for fat contracts to railroad corporations. For what more may we hope from similar “reforms”?
Spencer shows us what the result of such extension of State functions must be. He sums up his case in these words: “So that, inevitably, each further growth of the instrumentalities which control, or administer, or inspect, or in any way direct social forces, increases the impediment to further modification, both positively, by strengthening that which has to be modified, and negatively, by weakening the remainder; until at length the rigidity becomes so great that change is impossible and the type becomes fixed.”
Let it further be noted that that which is thus strengthened is not the ideal of the State Socialist, but the head centre of the present iniquitous system. Thus the Opportunist and all his ilk are not only hindering the Anarchists from the attainment of their ends, but are handicapping State Socialists and other reformers in a similar manner.
These “steps forward” can do no possible good to labor, and only result in strengthening the present State, the arch enemy of all reform, and so we fight them to the last. F. D. T.
The Grand Army’s Indiscretion.
The Grand Army can now see some of the results of its disrespect for President Cleveland. In refusing to march under a banner bearing his image, in denouncing him, and in burning members of his cabinet in effigy, they brought his high office into contempt.
They should not merely have looked at Cleveland, but at the Presidency of the United States. By making little of the one, you discredit the other. By bringing the Presidency into disrepute, the Grand Army show an amazing lack of understanding regarding the theory they represented when they fought. This confirms the growing belief that they did not know what they were fighting for.
Now, when three governors are opposing Federal authority, and thousands of working-men are resisting it, we see the effect of their bad example.
The G. A. R. must be careful, or they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If the opposition to the Federal government continues to grow, it will not be able to pay them half a million dollars a day in pensions. C.
It is useless for Editor Hudspeth, of the “Western Laborer,” to try to comprehend Liberty’s objections to woman suffrage. Liberty’s arguments are addressed to those who are at home in scientific politics, not to half-baked reformers who confound equal freedom with Populist absurdity.
It is proper to warn the plutocrats and their hirelings in Europe and America that they are going too far. Their attempt to suppress all freedom of speech and of the press, their reckless disregard of the elementary principles of political freedom that have been dear even to the bourgeois, will not be tolerated. Go slow, keep cool, gentlemen. Don’t invite disaster.
The excited politicians in France are over-doing it. Their little reaction is not causing anybody any sleepless nights. They will be thanked by the dynamiteurs for the friends which they are rapidly making for the method of violence. The anti-press laws will, of course, be ignored and laughed at, while the mere attempt to suppress the freedom of speech must discredit the so-called Republican government with all liberal elements of society.
Judge Cooley, of Michigan, is a great authority on constitutional law, and his opinion of Cleveland’s course in the recent strike is interesting. In his letter of endorsement he said: “I am specially gratified that a great and valuable lesson in constitutional construction has been settled for all time with remarkably little bloodshed.” The constitutional question is that involved in Federal invasion of a State without the consent or sanction of the Governor, and we are told that it has been settled for all time by Cleveland. How? By a masterly argument and analysis? No,’ by violence, by little bloodshed. Now we know how great constitutional questions are settled. Debs should not lose courage. The newspapers and judges and officials are now against him simply because he was weaker than Cleveland; had he been stronger, law and order would have been on his side, and he would have settled the great constitutional question. Judge Cooley is probably unaware of the fact that he is guilty of encouraging and inciting to violence. He indirectly glorifies dynamite. Nothing, he implies, is needed to settle any great legal question except force. He who succeeds is the master and law-giver.
Mr. Fisher misconceives Liberty’s object in referring to General Walker’s attitude on the currency problem. I do not cite him, or any other economist, because I consider his “authority” more potent than Mr. Fisher’s alleged arguments, but because it is Mr. Fisher’s bad habit to sneer at “mutual bankists,” and others who entertain views different from his, as cranks and quacks and ignoramuses. Liberty can take care of any argumentative weapon Mr. Fisher has at his disposal, but when he indulges in indiscriminate accusations of ignorance, the only way to silence him is to show him that those who are at the head of his own school are out of sympathy and patience with the exploded notions and crude little dogmas that the small fry among the economists still seriously promulgate as the self-evident truths of science. It is perfectly true that General Walker may be in error on other points than that referred to by Liberty, but his errors are not the errors of a quack or crank. Mr. Fisher’s observation that the evil felt from the appreciation of gold is not owing to restriction of currency, but only to the consequent unsettlement of values, is question-begging. The appreciation of gold unsettles values, which is evil, but the attempt to do the world’s business on a gold basis is productive of other and greater evils than the unsettlement of values. General Walker distinctly declares that the demand for money is not and cannot be satisfied under monometallism (more correctly, under a gold basis, for a standard of value and a basis of currency are two distinct things), and it is obvious that a money famine cripples production and exchange, crushes the small business men, and keeps labor in subjection. These are graver evils than the unsettlement of values, and it is chiefly as a remedy for them that mutual banking is advocated.
Federal interference in the railroad strike is said by many to constitute an argument for government control or ownership of railways. If labor is intelligent, it will find in such interference an argument for free and competitive mails instead. The “United States mails” are words inspiring awe, and obstruction of a mail train, which plutocratic judges construe to mean any train to which a mail car is attached, brings the strikers within the jurisdiction of the Federal government. But private mails would be no more sacred than private apples or hogs or rails.
The “Western Laborer” tells its readers that Liberty devoted the entire editorial page of one of its issues to prove that the “Laborer’s” argument that competition is the cause of monopoly was a “feeble effort.” This is untrue. Liberty devoted two columns, — about one-half its editorial space in the issue in question, — not to the “Laborer’s” argument on competition, but (1) to its statements about the postal service, (2) to its philosophy about evidence of successful settlement of questions, (3) to the relation between monopoly and competition, and (4) to the true secret of monopoly. Why not adhere to facts, Mr. Hudspeth?
The proposition to make Pullman pay a proportional part of the assessment rendered necessary by the Illinois law providing for the payment of damages to the victims of riots and disturbances, is denounced by a newspaper as one involving the principle of “order for sale.” Order for sale! Well, and why not, pray? Is order too sacred an article to be bought and sold in the market? Bread is more essential to life than order, yet it is “for sale.” It is certainly better to buy order than to have it forced on one at a monopoly price, as at present. But order for sale means Anarchy.
The London “Standard” quotes, apropos of the latest “Anarchist outrage,” the aphorism of Macauley, that “it may become necessary to sacrifice liberty in order to save civilization.” Bills abolishing trial by jury, free speech, and other manifestations of liberty are favored as steps necessary for the preservation of civilization. It is curious how words take the place of ideas with some people who pretend to be sober and profound. The Macauley aphorism is without meaning. What is civilization but a synonym of liberty? Electric cars, telephones, and sensational newspapers are not civilization; moreover, they are not threatened by anybody. Nor is government civilization, since every thinking person knows that at best government is represented to be an organization for the defence of civilization. Fortunately governments will not be allowed to sacrifice liberty in order to save themselves or anything else; after liberty is gone, there is nothing worth saving, and the dynamiteur will have the sympathy of many who are now indifferent to him.
The New York “Sun’s” hatred of Cleveland has overcome its devotion to the interests of the brotherhood of thieves, and dictated an admission that is dangerous in the extreme. The plutocratic mouthpieces have loudly protested that Governor Altgeld’s constitutional objections to Cleveland’s course in the railroad strike are mere ignorant quibbles, and that Cleveland merely performed a plain and imperative duty. But now read carefully this Machiavellian utterance of the “Sun,” which (to use its own language) “stood shoulder to shoulder” with Cleveland during the crisis and gave him “the best, the most unreserved and most uncriticizing aid and approval”: “If it had been customary to look immediately to the general Government for protection against such disorders as Debs’s, the country would naturally have passed through moments of the most painful anxiety. . . . . Happily, though, in the two years since 1892, Mr. Cleveland had experienced a radical change of impulse or of mind. United States troops were sent to Chicago with an impetuosity betokening the zeal of the convert hot to right himself with an outraged people and to atone for the errors of the past. There was no preliminary communication, we believe, with the Governor of Illinois, to make sure of the power or impotence of that State to cope with the difficulty; but Federal troops were sent to Chicago with unprecedented haste, and the President had declared himself for the unshaken rule of law, for the preservation of order, and for the suppression of insurrection, and against all that he had smiled at two years before, with a suddenness which set more than one good expert straining in search of law for its justification.” [Italics mine.] Here we have intimations that Governor Altgeld was entirely right, and that Cleveland’s interference was really an act of usurpation. And because this is the case, he needed uncriticizing support from the beneficiaries of monopoly. Great is “law and order”!
Not Against Free Banking.
To the Editor of Liberty:
Mr. A. L. Balboa criticism of “A Study of the Money Question” is the first one of those that came to my notice indicating that the critic has understood the drift of my suggestions. It is very discouraging to find that scores of critics have failed to follow the line of reasoning, and my only comfort is that “’gainst ignorance gods even fight in vain.”
Permit me to make one remark in regard to Mr. Ballou’s contribution.
The rebuke contained in the fourth paragraph is due to a faulty composition on my part. The sentence criticized was not intended to apply against the advocates of free banking, as the context appears to indicate, but was directed against those who, while pretending to defend liberty, are opposed to any extension of the national banking system, tending towards what would practically be free banking with an official supervision of the requisite securities, by denouncing any proposition of this kind as an act of paternalism, as an attempt to turn the government into a pawn-shop.
Hugo Bilgram.
Discussion, Sham and True.
[Free Life]
Mr. Fawcus raises the question why some of the governments in the old world, which were governments of discussion, failed, and then goes on: “It is that they were in no instances purely government by discussion. It is true that they discussed first, but after they had discussed and come to a conclusion by voting, they coerced. There is this mistake, that the latter part vitiates the former. If people are after discussion to vote and use force, they will not discuss and reason honestly, but so as to get votes and power. The two proceedings, discussing, reasoning, and persuading, and then voting and using force, are inconsistent and incompatible. If the appeal be to reason, it cannot at the same time be to brute force. Let us now take the next great step in progress, and in the moral advancement of humanity, and make the appeal entirely to reason, conviction, and persuasion. Let us be ruled by intellect and virtue, like free men, not slaves by the lash. The whip is for the tyrant, the MAD who, in the words of the old Greeks, orders you about, and takes your wives and daughters and property from you as he pleases; this is the man to whom force should be used, not to the man who goes his own way and is leaving other people alone. How strange it seems that we should have been so long in seeing this self-evident truth. It is the ruffian and the thief to whom we are justified in using force, because he is the aggressor. To our fellow man in all other cases we have no right to use any other force than that of reason and persuasion. Then let us aim by setting up this government by discussion pure and simple and in reality, and we shall inaugurate a new and brighter era than that even of the Greek and Italian republics, an era when the intellect and virtue of man will conquer new realms in literature, art, and science, which shall eclipse all the glories of the past, when the keeping of the peace and the punishment of crime will be seen to be a very inferior occupation, a mere humble adjunct of government by discussion, and will be delegated to a different class of men, and kept quite distinct from the higher function. We have already arrived at this point individually; we none of us think of using any weapon but reason and persuasion with our neighbor unless he is a criminal and aggressor upon us or on our property. We have only to carry this thoroughly out and be ashamed to combine to do that which we should be ashamed to do individually. Our present institution called government would then be converted into a simple Liberty and Property Defence League. A true government by discussion would arise and take the place of the present sham discussion, voting, and coercing, than which nothing can be more absurd, inconsistent, and contradictory. Why trouble to discuss and reason with a man whom you are going to kick if you cannot convince? No, no, the thing is indefensible; our claim is for self-rule, not the rule of others, a government purely by discussion, reason, persuasion, conviction, to which a willing obedience may be paid. We only need protection from the ruffian and the thief, not from ourselves.”
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 asked to lose no opportunity of informing the secretary of suitable targets. Address, Stephen T. Byington, East Hardwick, Vt.
Suggestion No. 8. — Don’t be discouraged when shots at some target produce no effect; and don’t always assume that there is no effect when you don’t see it.
Target, section A. — Hiram Maine, Marion, Ind., had a letter in “The Voice” of July 12, against the proposition that the woman suffrage question be settled by a majority vote of women. He says, “Legislative enactments cannot create human rights. Nature has done this; and the only just function of our laws is to secure us in the exercise of natural rights. The laws of the land frequently conflict with natural rights, and are thus far wicked — simply acts of conquest of the strong over the weak Neither can a majority of the women have a moral right to determine whether the minority may vote or not vote. . . . If one woman in the State wants a voice in making the laws which shall govern herself, her property, and her children, no number of men or women have any moral right to deny her.”
Section B. — St. Clair McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn (N. Y.) “Eagle,” spoke at Roseland Park, July 4, on “The Sale of Law,” as illustrated by the sugar schedule and the Tammany police. He said toward the end: “The effect is to create Anarchy and to multiply Anarchists. When administration becomes a criminal, rebellion becomes righteousness. When rulers become robbers, the band of allegiance is broken. If these evils were not redressible, if these effects were not terminable, capital as a corrupter and government as a blackmailing mechanism, should do servedly perish from the earth. Better the impartial nihilism of the chaos of all law than its conversion into contemporary results, if those results were universal and lasting.”
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.
What Could We Do Without the Police?
[Harper’s Weekly.]
The investigation [of the New York Police Department, by the legislative committe] has, with evidence sufficient at least to justify moral conviction, established the fact that any one who wishes to enter the police force, no matter what his qualifications, has to purchase his place by the payment of at least $300. The policeman so appointed, therefore, knows that in order to obtain his position he has had to bribe somebody among his superiors, and that this somebody has not only accepted, but exacted, the bribe. The police-man naturally concludes that getting money by accepting, and even by exacting, bribes is looked upon by his superiors, at least those among them to whom his $800 have gone, not as a punishable offence, but as a matter of business. The policeman further concludes that this view of the matter prevailing among his superiors will afford him protection if he does the same thing within the sphere of his power and opportunities, and be will be justified in thinking that he is even expected to do this, in order, in the brat place, to recover the sum with which he bought his way into the force. Thus the policeman, however pure originally his pinciples and intentions may have been, is from the very start seduced to do corrupt things.
In the same manner the evidence produces the moral conviction that promotion in the force has to be regularly paid for, the charge for a police captaincy being about $10,000 — several times the amount of a year’s salary. The moral effect of this transaction upon the police captain need hardly be described. When he meets certain of his superiors he knows that the bribe-money he had to pay for his place went straight into their pockets, and that they not only cannot afford to call him to account for doing similar things, but naturally expect him, and have substantially authorized him, by first emptying his pockets, to fill them in a similar way by taking advantage of his opportunities.
Thus the police force, in all its grades, is systematically introduced into corrupt practices by the very manner in which each man gets his place. These men see with their own eyes how, in order to make this initial bribery possible, the civil service law is most shamelessly overridden, how personation of candidates and all sorts of fraudulent devices are resorted to, not only without any opposition from the chiefs, but with their known connivance, and even at their instigation. But they see more. They see in all the branches of the municipal service which they have occasion for observing systematic arrangements for making money at the public expense, they see the whole city government in the absolute control of an irresponsible organization of men “on the make,” they see the chiefs of that organization rapidly getting rich in mysterious ways, and they find themselves employed in coöperating in the most daring election frauds to keep that organization in power. Thus the police, which should be the organ of the authorities in maintaining public peace and security and in enforcing the laws, is not only introduced in corrupt practices at the start, but it is constantly and systematically educated in contempt of law in general, and in the criminal perversion of its power and opportunities for selfish ends.
Worse than the demoralization of the police itself is the effect this demoralization produces upon the moral condition of the community. What has shocked many of our good people most severely in the course of the present investigation is the exposure of the protection afforded by the police captains to disorderly houses their precincts in consideration of certain regular payments, thus making the protection of vice appear as a regular source of revenue to the same officers who are appointed to aid in the suppression of vice. Under the existing system the more haunts of vice a police captain has in his precinct the greater will be his revenue. Police captains therefore notoriously desire to be put over those precincts in which such haunts are most abundant, and they consider themselves slighted and wronged in their fortunes when they are exiled to districts which are exceptionally clean. It is not surprising, therefore, that under such a system some of them should find it in their interest not only not to suppress existing disorderly houses, gambling hells, and the like, but to encourage the establishnient of new ones where none had existed before — in other words, not to root out, but to propagate vice and crime in the community merely to increase their income from them. Suggestions of such a tendency have already appeared in the investigation, and stronger proofs may come. And this applies not only to disorderly houses, but to other kinds of crime, as the testimony about the police protection afforded to the “green-goods business” has amply shown.
To Pay $5,000 for Being More Attractive.
[Detroit News.]
A remarkable case has been on trial in Judge Hosmer’s court room the past week. One of the parties to it is Blankhart, a mild, elderly German, with a humble mien, a somewhat pathetic and helpless look, stooped with labor, but apparently an amiable and hard working honest man. Yet he has been held up in the court as a monster of brutality, who has for years abused his wife and children and kept them all half starved in order to indulge his appetite for drink.
The defendant is Adolph Hinch, a short, round, sturdy figure of 40 years, ruddy countenance, with quick, smart-looking eyes and a face that looks neither like a villain’s nor a gay bird’s who would wreck the peace of families. Yet, according to the documents and the testimony, no serpent ever raised such havoc in a dove’s nest as he has done within the last four years. Mrs. Blankhart, the other party chiefly concerned in the suit, is a large, pleasant faced German housewife, who is separated from her husband and accused of a shameful conspiracy with Hinch against Blankhart. The witnesses were mainly substantial, plain German neighbors and relatives, who seemed to want to tell the truth. The case as set forth is something as follows:
In 1872 John Blankhart married his wife, Elizabeth. All went well according to him until one fatal night live years ago she met Blankhart’s evil genius, Adolph Hinch. It was at a dance at Arbeiter Hall. As usual at dances, according to the poet, all went as merry as a marriage bell. But as time went on the merry marriage bell got badly cracked; there was only jangling and discord. Adolph, he declares, like the camel that once got his nose into his tent, pushed himself in until he tilled up the whole apartment and left not even a corner for Blankhart. Blankhart hardly knew exactly when this occurred; it was done so gradually and suspiciously. First, at Mrs. Blankhart’s invitation, Much came to board and has never gone away. He began to take charge of affairs; to be the boss of the house; to order the wife about and even to boss the children. Blankhart frequently told him he didn’t want him around the premises, but Hinch paid no more attention than if he had been the bead of the family and Blankhart the boarder. In fact, he had ordered Blankhart to leave the house. Hinch and Mrs. Blankhart, says the complaining husband, often went to diferent places and did not return until late in the morning. By 1892 things got pretty bad, and Blankhart evidently began to suspect that something was wrong.
As he told a friend, “I can’t prove anything, but even a blind man can see.” In July he was sitting in the front yard to keep cool when his wife came out and ordered him to go in. Instead of obeying her he began to argue with her and tried to persuade her that he was really doing no particular harm out there. Whatever effect it may have had upon his wife, Hinch was not convinced. He came out with the hose, turned the water on Blankhart and drove him into his neighbor’s yard. Again, as Blankhart was sleeping on his lounge of a Sunday afternoon, while Hinch and his wife were present, some one filled his mouth with red pepper. This burned him after the manner of red pepper, even to torturing him with the pain on lips and mouth, but what made him still hotter was the laughter of his wife as he woke sputtering and choking. He began reproving her for allowing such tricks to be played upon her husband. Hinch, according to Blankhart, must have been much offended at Blankhart’s lecturing his wife for a little offence like that, for he came up behind him and dealt him a blow which felled him to the floor. Blankhart then ran upstairs into a room into which Hinch locked him and he was obliged to jump out of the window, in order to regain his liberty. About this time, too, he declares, that his wife began refusing to cook his meals and mend his clothes, but always cooked and darned promptly for Hinch. Hinch likewise mortified and injured him in even worse ways than this.
His wife induced Blankhart to mortgage their home on Arndt street for the purpose of raising money to go into the grocery business; that with the money she rented a house and store on Moran street from Hinch; has been engaged in the grocery business, with Hinch as manager, and without consulting Blankhart, Hinch taking the money and Blankhart kept from knowing whether it was paying or not. Blankhart was finally forced to take his meals away from home, and when he complained Hinch laughed at him. Hinch has gone riding with her and took her to a Put-in Bay excursion, leaving the children at home. His wife finally refused to get his meals at all, but told him he couldn’t go anywhere else to sleep, because nobody would have him in their house at night.
In December, 1892, his wife filed a bill to procure a divorce, alleging extreme cruelty.
In her bill she accuses him of leaving her and his family in August, 1892, and living apart from her; that soon after the marriage he began using intoxicating liquors, and for 20 years while intoxicated has been in the habit of quarreling with her and abusing her; throwing dishes at her, calling her vile names; striking at her with a chisel because she refused to give him more money for drink; seized her by the hair and pulled her about the room; at another time throwing his basket of dinner she had prepared through the window; got an axe and tried to chop down the door of the room when she and others of the family had succeeded in locking him in; and fearing he would break out of the room, a policeman was sent for and came to the house, which quieted him down and he was not arrested; that he is a strong, healthy man, able to earn good wages, and owns a place on Arndt street which is worth about $2,000 with a $900 mortgage on it.
Blankhart denies all these accusations, admitting only that once on going home and seeing Hinch and his wife in suspicious circumstances he went out and got an axe in order to frighten them, whereupon they sent for a policeman who arrested him, but subsequently, on learning from Mrs. Blankhart’s brother how Mrs. Blankhart was in the habit of treating her husband, the policeman released him. Blankhart also declares that Hinch put a lock on Mrs. Blankhart’s bedroom door and defied Blankhart to enter.
Blankhart also accuses Hinch of being an infidel and an Anarchist and of having tried to teach Atheism and Anarchy to Blankhart’s children. Mr. Springer, Blankhart’s attorney, undertook to show that Hinch had been in the habit of reading articles from “Der Arnie Teufel” mocking at religion and marriage, but it was ruled out.
An attempt was made to have Mrs. Blankhart testify, but on objection the court ruled her out.
The case went to the jury last night, after the neighbors, relatives and friends of the contestants had been sworn, even the children taking part in the trial.
Judge Hosmer yesterday instructed the jury as follows:
“In the theory of the law, the Jew and the gentile, the Theist and the Atheist, have the same standing before the law, and because one may be an Atheist and the other may be a believer, you are not to regard the testimony of one as of more value than the testimony of another. Every person has a right to his own honest, conscientious conviction.
“So, too, with reference to Anarchy; a man may be an Anarchist, a man may preach Anarchy, provided he attempts only to preach Anarchy by a legal and constitutional method. He may uphold before the people the benefits of Anarchy, provided he does not seek to reach Anarchy by a revolution. The moment that he preaches a revolution, that moment he will be guilty of treason and that moment he may be condemned. But if he seeks to reach Anarchy only by a constitutional method, by a calling together of the people in a rightful manner, as pointed out by our constitution, it is as lawful to preach that as to preach any form of government. And so, gentlemen of the jury, until some one has committed an overt act, or until some one has preached a resort to arms, or to force, or to an overthrow of the government, I think he has as much right to his opinion as we have to ours.”
This morning a verdict for $5,000 damages against Hinch was returned.
Blasphemy as a Crime and Nuisance.
[Lucifer.]
To some of our readers it may seem late to notice the prosecution of Editor C. C. Moore, of the “Blue Grass Blade,” Lexington, Ky., for the crime (4) of “blasphemy.” The following is a copy of the indictment as we find it reproduced in the “Independent Pulpit,” of Waco, Texas:
“Fayette Circuit Court.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky vs. C. C. Moore. Blasphemy.
The grand jury of Fayette county, in the name and by the authority of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, accuse C. C. Moore of the offence of blasphemy, committed as follows: The said C. C. Moore, in the county aforesaid, being then and there the owner, controller, proprietor, and editor of a certain newspaper in the city of Lexington, known as the “Blue Grass Blade,” did, in the issue of said paper of Sunday, March 18, 1894, unlawfully, wickedly, and maliciously and blasphemously publish of and concerning the Christian religion, and concerning Jesus Christ and God and the Holy Scriptures, scandalous, false, malicious, wicked, and blasphemous words, as follows, to wit: — “When I say Jesus Christ was a man exactly like I am, and had a human father and mother exactly like I had, some of the pious call it blasphemy. When they say that Jesus Christ was born as the result of a Breckenridge-Pollard hyphenation between God and a Jew woman, I call it blasphemy, so you see there is a stand-off,” thereby meaning that pious and religious persons stated and believed that the birth of Jesus Christ was the result of an unholy and illicit alliance and connection between Almighty God and Mary, the mother of Christ, and intending thereby to treat with offensive levity and ridicule the scriptural account of the divine conception and birth, and to bring contempt and ridicule against Almighty God and his divine purpose and wisdom in causing the birth of Christ for the redemption of the world, and the salvation of sinners, to the contempt of the Christian religion and the laws of this State, to the evil example of all others in like manner offending, and against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
C. J. Bronston, Commonwealth’s Attorney. Witness, Rev. E. L Southgate.”
Another indictment was obtained at the same time against Mr. Moore, on a charge of “nuisance,” the nuisance being the same publication complained of as being blasphemous.
“A Dose of Jersey Justice.”
[Houton Transcript]
Atlantic City, N. J., June 28. — Mrs. Justus R. Rice, the evangelist, while preaching on the street last evening, was arrested and taken before Recorder Goulden, charged with disorderly conduct. Before the beginning of the hearing she asked for time to secure witnesses, but the Recorder met her request with the reply: “I’ll give you a dose of Jersey justice,” and then he sentenced her to thirty days in the county jail and to pay a fine of $50. As soon as the verdict became known, her husband, who is known as the cowboy preacher, mounted a handcar in the railroad yard and harangued a crowd of fully two thousand citizens. The crowd was entirely in sympathy with him, and threats of tearing down the city lock-up were heard on all sides, while there were hisses for the police and city officials. The police force was called out to hold the crowd in check. The matter was finally laid before Attorney Clarence Cole, who declared the woman’s arrest and trial illegal and proceeded to draw up the papers necessary for her release.
Ignorance in the “New Navy.”
[Press Dispatch.]
Washington, May 16. — Among the serious charges that Secretary Herbert is investigating on the coast defence ship Monterey at San Francisco is one relating to the virtual ruining of the hydraulic turrets which contain the big 12-inch rifles of that ship’s battery. It is understood that on the recent sea cruise of the ship during the practice firing of the guns it was thought by the officer in charge that the hydraulic mechanism for taking up the recoil needed modification. This apparatus consists of a perforated plunger working in a heavy cylinder through which water is forced. The machinists of the ship were ordered to take out the plungers and reduce their diameter “between a quarter and a half inch.” This sweeping instruction was followed, a quarter of an inch being removed, and the plungers were replaced. When the guns were fired again the water naturally rushed past the plungers with very little resistance, and every pipe and joint connected with the apparatus burst, flooding the turrets and necessitating repairs which will consume several weeks. It was considered remarkable that the turret and gun mounting was not totally demolished by the recoil of the monster weapon. Ordnance officers in Washington declare that the apparatus was probably all right at the outset and not more than one-thirty-second of an inch should have been removed in any event.
Politics at War with Honesty.
[New York World.]
More discouraging than anything else in the whole business of the armor frauds is the evidence that nobody connected with the manufacture of the plates had the slightest idea that honesty was of any importance. How to make poor work peas for good, and how to help each other in the deception, were the two animating principles. Prof. Alger’s emphatic statements show that this absence of the commonest Integrity extended all through the works. The moralist must confess to something like “a goneneas” when he sees that the rascality of politics and that utter disregard of conscience which one expects in our bosses and politicians extend downward among what we have called “the honest laboring man.” Honesty of purpose and conscientious execution of work were once prime desiderata among craftsmen. But wherever politics has impinged on labor it has brought its blight with it.
Punished for Improvements.
[J. W. S. Cellie, in London Financial Reformer.]
A few days days ago we were at Messrs. Lever Bros. “Sunlight Soap” works. They have built a large factory a few miles from Liverpool, but on the Cheshire aide of the river. In addition to the factory there are large numbers of well-built and most artistic cottages for their workers. In building their works they have done much to benefit the place, but they are fined by the local authorities as though they had done an evil in place of good to the district. The are taxed on all the improvements they have made: the greater the improvement the heavier the taxation. The Board of Trade compelled them to build the chimney of the works 150 feet high; the local board asked them, since the neighborhood would probably become a residential one, to make it 200 feet. They did this at a considerable extra cost, and had to pay rates on this extra cost expended to please the local authorities. Between their works and Birkenhead them are many acres of unoccupied land; this land pays no taxation.
How’s This for Red Tape?
[Brooklyn Eagle.]
To the Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle:
Will you not kindly publish the enclosed scrap and make an effort to have the beautiful trees saved for which our city has so long been famous? We had a man at work on our trees to-day. A policeman came along and told him that he would have to get a permit to take the caterpillars off of the trees. We intend to save our trees if possible, permit or no permit. Have we to be bothered with the farce of a permit in such a case? You are all powerful. Will you not help to deliver us from the plague now?
August Fiske.
The State Needs Soldiers.
[London Star.]
To the Editor:
I have been nearly four years a Post Office messenger, and this is what I find — that because a lad may be 5 ft. 3½ in. instead of 5 ft. 4 in. he cannot pass. What difference can it make to the service, a boy being a quarter or a half an inch shorter than the standard? Then, again, we have to pass a medical examination at the age of 18, one six months afterwards, and yet another two years after that. Numbers of lade — in fact the majority — are rejected as unfit and yet the same lads in many cases have gone immediately and passed, what one would think a far stricter medical examination, for the Army, Navy, and Royal Marines. The truth is that the authorities wish to drive the youths into the Army, &c., so as to make room for discharged soldiers and Army Reserve men. They know or should know that we have wasted the beat four years of our lives in the Postal service, years in which we could have learned a useful trade. As it is, we are fit for nothing outside the Post Office service but to enlist into the Army. This is not what the decent sons of respectable parents always desire, and I am afraid that many a lad will curse the day he was foolish enough to enter the Poet Office service. Until about a year ago, the appointment of sorter was open to messengers and postmen only. Now it is an open competition. Why should this be, when the Post Office have not enough for their own servants?
Uncle Sam’s Business Trick.
[Dundee Home Advocate.]
The new postal regulation prohibiting the use of all mutilated stamps is another illustration of the stupidity and petty tyranny of our lawmakers. In a fifty cent square of stamps, some of the perforation is quite sure to be so wretchedly imperfect that to separate them without “setting on the grass” is next to impossible. If we must lose a penny or two every time we tear a corner, we demand that Uncle Sam get a scissors grinder to put his perforating machine in repair.
Government Property Sacred.
[London Truth.]
When the Himalaya last arrived at Portsmouth, a warrant officer on board produced to a custom house officer a parcel which he had brought home for a comrade to post in England. The parcel was tied up with a piece of government sail-maker’s twine. The custom-house officer remarked: “That’s government property, it cannot be landed,” and, taking out a knife, he cut the string. This story is, I think, worthy of a conspicuous place in the annals of red-tape. Supposing, however, that the custom house officer faithfully carried out the letter of his instructions before passing the parcel, I should like to know what has become of the string — said to have been between two and three feet in length? Has it been returned into store? Is anybody to be prosecuted for attempting to make away with it? And will the customs officer be punished for damaging “government property” by cutting the string when he might have untied the knot?
Only the Officials May Read Them.
[New York Critic.]
Zola has stirred up the good people of Boston this week by a rumor that the Custom House had refused to admit one of his novels. It seems that there is a law against the passing of obscene works through the government office, and when this report led to a gathering of the opinions of prominent people of Boston, difference was found to exist. At the Public Library, however, there was but one voice: the trustees allow very few of Zola’s books to be circulated, while those supposed to be the most immoral are marked with the stars that forbid their use without the permission of the Board of Trustees.
Cost of a State Monopoly.
[London Liberty Review.]
A Treasury return, issued on the 10th inst., shows that the total receipts of the Post Office Telegraph Service in the year 1898 amounted to £2,526,812, the total expenditure having been £166,882 more than that amount. The total balance of expenditure over receipts since the transfer of the Telegraph Service to the State is £509,708.
The Penalty and the Crime.
[Boston Transcript]
Three years ago a boy was sent to Sing Sing for 6½ years for having stolen $1.50. Now it turns out that he was innocent, the real culprit having confessed, and a petition for the boy’s pardon has been started.
Strikers Compelled to Work.
[Press Dispatch.]
Lisbon, June 22 — A strong force of military and police surrounded the camp of the six thousand bakers who struck against the municipal requirement that the master baker deposit 8000 reis ($8) as a guarantee that they will sell bread of a certain weight, and made prisoners of them all. The strikers will be compelled to go to work under military supervision.
The Press Subsidized by the State.
[J. Geevz Fisher.]
The Postal Department of the British Government rests upon a tyrannical power assumed as a right by the State to punish all others who may carry letters for hire. This power is supposed to have originated in the desire of the rulers to prevent communications passing without their knowledge between their opponents. But in modern times it is sought to justify its maintenance upon the ground that the carriage of letters cannot be efficiently performed otherwise than by an agency embracing the whole country, and excluded from the influence of competition. There are the most overwhelming arguments against this hypothesis, and it would probably never have been invented had it not been that the older reason for the monopoly had come to be somewhat out of date and discreditable. Be this as it may, most will agree that the great function of letter-carrying, which forms the bulk of the operations of the department, ought to be conducted on a fair and business-like basis.
In arranging the scale of postage, if equity or commercial principles prevailed, the cost of collecting, sorting, conveying, and distributing each kind of postal packet ought to be taken into consideration, and the charges levied ought to approximate as nearly as possible to some definite and invariable proportion of the average cost. It is possible and, in fact, highly probable, that the so-called profit upon the operations of the government post office is attended by a loss to the nation at large. All taxes yield revenue to the government exchequer; but every financier regards certain possible or actual taxes as injurious to the nation. Some consider protective duties detrimental, others believe direct taxation hurtful in general or in special cases, and all discriminate as to the schemes they recommend, thus showing that certain taxes or certain proportions of revenue raised are less desirable than others, and hence relatively harmful. The postal revenue, being a tax upon knowledge and commerce, is prima facie condemned. To justify taxes upon knowledge would require very cogent argument. No attempt is made by the defenders of the monopoly to deal with this point. The service, therefore, ought not to be so conducted as to yield any tangible gain to the State, unless the prima facie condemnation can be shown to be unsustained. However this be, each section of the working should be carried on at an equable profit, and no section should be worked at a loss. Even if it be not admitted that the postal revenue is an evil, still equity and expediency both demand that the charge should be uniformly proportionate to the cost, and that no one class of matter should bear an exorbitant profit in order to yield a tax revenue, while others are simultaneously exonerated or subsidized.
There is no valid reason why a book should be carried cheaper than a letter, or a newspaper cheaper than either. The existing monopoly of the post office does not “protect” it from competition in the carriage of other packets than letters (held to include circular letters). Any packet can be carried by private enterprise, provided it does not contain a letter or a circular letter. But this is no reason why the department should go out of its way to carry non-monopoly matter at an avowed loss. It is a most unsafe system to regulate operations which ought to be commercial upon far-fetched inquiries as to whether come branches of the trade are supposably so much more desirable in the public interest as to deserve a bounty or an artificial stimulus. The distribution of books and newspapers is a trade which, in other respects, is governed by the ordinary principles of supply and demand. It can as well afford to pay its freights as the distribution of bread, boots, or coals. But, in order to subsidize and stimulate these “intellectual” trades, the department carries their packets (as it is alleged by the officials) at a loss, and a heavier impost is placed upon all other kinds of business and upon the commerce of epistolary correspondence. In addition to this the maintenance of the charge for letters in excess of that for books, and especially for newspapers, is a tax which presses more heavily upon the poor than upon the rich. It will hardly be disputed that the correspondence of the poor contains a greater proportion of letters, as compared with “books,” etc., than does that of the rich. The well-to-do much more frequently subscribe for papers through post, and are much more largely “honored” with circulars, reports, etc. In importance to the public, letters must surely rank higher, on the average, than books and papers. Those whose writings are reproduced through the press can make more of themselves and their interests than those who communicate solely in manuscript, and only upon their own affairs. In a form of government by talking and voting, these self-magnifiers, by their clamor and influence, can, secure the partiality of the legislature. Ifs a still greater degree, ephemeral literature, by its political partisanship, gains favors from Parliament, which so largely lives in its pages, and so little anywhere else.
The distribution of books and papers by publishers and news agents is not in want of this aid. The public ought not to countenance this spurious fourth estate, aggrandizing itself by bounties sweated out of the letter-writers of every class. But, if every argument in favor of cheap distribution of newspapers were valid, it would not show that the cost should be obtained by a pernicious interference with the equity of postal traffic. It were better that the public should see newspaper bounties in their true colors. The management of the posts should be in accordance with pure commerce, in which the cost in the long run determines the selling price; and if the judgment of the public, or those who manage to get power to act in its behalf, were to require that literature and education should be assisted from the revenue in some other ways beyond those of “free” libraries and “free” schools, let them have their bona fide grants, instead of this sneaking subterfuge of nominally paying for the carriage of their packets, while, in fact, they are subsidized. There is, however, even now no pretence of a valid reason why journals published at intervals not exceeding seven days should be carried by the post office at a greater loss than other publications; nor why an increase in the size of a literary or other supplement to a registered “newspaper” should necessitate an inflation of what is technically called the news matter, so that, to be carried more cheaply, the weight must actually be increased!
Interest Is Just.
To the Editor of Liberty:
In reference to Mr. Bilgram’s rejoinder in Liberty of May 19, it is to be noted that be asserts that the law does not allow checks to circulate as currency. Whatever the law may be, it is notorious that checks do circulate and that each check issued is in circulation for a longer or shorter period. The difference between a bank note and a trader’s acceptance is that the bank note may return upon the issuer for liquidation in an hour and that, so long as it is out, the banker must hold himself prepared to meet it and must maintain a relatively large mass of wealth held aloof from productive application, just in the same portable form in which it is by the note promised to be producible on demand, in which respect it precisely resembles the check of a current account creditor, while a trader’s bill protects him against an application for the relinquishment of the borrowed wealth until it reaches maturity, thus enabling him to enjoy the undisturbed productive possession of its equivalent wealth during the currency (observe this use of the word) of the bill. As the banker is evidently at a disadvantage by the exchange of his demand notes for the time bill he is justly entitled to a recompense and, what is more, he will have it or will decline the transaction. He is also justified in making the loan gratuitously or in getting as much as he can for it. The as-much-as-he-can is the current rate of interest. If a private person gives his valid check for an accommodation bill, he can get just as much interest as the banker, and frequently he gets considerably more, owing to the weakness of the borrower’s credit. Checks actually do circulate. There is no conspicuous hindrance to their circulating as currency except such as ought in prudence to attach to notes. Free and wholly unrestricted issue of all sorts of paper by all sorts of people to the utmost extent to which they could get it into circulation would certainly have as one of its results the development of a greater caution in accepting promises from those calling themselves bankers, and the elaboration of a system of voluntary audits and mutual guarantee of each other’s notes by many of these bankers. Mr. Bilgram supposes a plan for paying an insurance to cover the insecurity of individual credit and then using this assured credit instead of borrowing at interest. This is another example of ignoring the fundamental difference between demand or convertible credit and deferred or temporarily inconvertible credit. He who would trade upon the currency of his private checks would but court disaster. Give me time, says the needy. He does not ask nor care to have the hazardous: and treacherous detention in circulation of a quantity of his demand paper. To be benefitted he must be at liberty to invest, and investment is impossible, or rather, it is very precarious, behind convertibility.
Mr. Bilgram appears to take no notice of the argument that the rate of interest upon loans would probably be no greater and no less under a system of barter in the complete absence of money as it is in presence of money. Interest is the hire of commodities separated from their owner and entrusted to another person. The time of separation is a privation to the one party (in marginal cases, which rule all cases) and a benefit to the other party. The loan of a loaf, a sewing machine, a typewriter, a farm, deprives the lender and benefits the borrower. The benefit may be given gratuitously, but in business it will not be accorded without an equivalent determined by competition and the survival of the fittest rate.
As for the Editor’s remarks and the lengthy quotation from General F. A. Walker, reinforced by quotations from Mr. Giffen, it must suffice to say that argument must ever remain more potent than authority. The evils felt from the appreciation of gold and the fall in prices is not owing to restriction or deficiency of currency, but only to the consequent unsettlement of values. This is a fearful injury, but no method of evading it has been discovered or propounded. Mutual bankism would not make the production of gold any cheaper, and it is inconceivable that it could admit of a material diminution of the gold stock of the world and enable commerce to live more completely than at present from hand to mouth in gold production and consumption. If prices fell 90 per cent., then one dollar or one pound sterling would do ten times as much monetary work as at present. The evils wrought by such an unsettlement would be fearful, but they would be merely temporary, and when they had exhausted themselves it would be impossible to discover any actual evidence of insufficiency of the currency, — as it is today. Inflated or superabundant money must be cheap and low in value. Its monetary potency is thus diminished, so that if gold were to fall 90 per cent. in value, the inflation, when it had spent itself and done much mischief as well as some good, would leave commerce as liable to panic and depression as ever. With all humility, it must suffice to draw attention to the point that, if General Walker be (as Liberty supposes) in error in advocating bimetallism, he may also (unperceived by Liberty) have fallen into an error of reasoning or observation in the previous deductions or assumptions which induce him to feel a hankering for some method of manipulating the monetary system. He alludes to a “continually falling market.” There can be no perpetual fall of prices. Falling markets are bad for some people, rising markets are bad for others, and, possibly, steady markets are lamented by some. But at least it must surely be evident that fluctuations of prices are not to be circumvented by mutual banking or any other contrivance open to the wit of Socialists or Anarchists — of governments or of free markets.
J. Geevz Fisher.
Rejoinder.
During the panic of 1893, some firms of Hartford, Conn., concluded to pay their workmen with checks drawn against their bank balance, which, on account of the scarcity of money, was temporarily not available. But knowing that their workmen had no bank-accounts, a number of bearer checks were printed in amounts of one, two, and five dollars. These checks were readily accepted by the retail dealers of Hartford and relieved the pressure of the panic to a considerable extent.
Hardly had these measures been taken when the agents of the modern knights of exploitation sent notice to the firms that their act came within the law that imposes a tax of ten per cent. per annum on the circulation of such notes. These checks were therefore withdrawn and the hardships of the panic fell with full force upon the workmen of Hartford.
If these firms of Hartford concluded that common checks would be of no use to the workmen, and that bearer checks made out in even amounts would answer the purpose; and further, if the agents of the modern knights of exploitation were so ready to see the difference and were able to apply at once the whip of law to suppress this uncalled-for competition of ordinary traders with the exalted profession of banking, there must be some radical difference between the two forms of checks. If Mr. Fisher cannot see this difference, it is none of my fault, and since his argument is based on a denial of such a difference, I cannot but reject his alleged refutation of my assertion until he has gathered the necessary information to discuss the point at issue more intelligently.
If Mr. Fisher would hold that the government, or any other agent appointed by the people, should have demanded such securities of those firms as would protect the holders of such checks against loss, he would, I think, make a very rational demand. But such a Measure would enable everyone possessing adequate credit to turn this credit into money without the payment of interest proper, which would confirm the correctness of my standpoint.
I did take notice of the hire-on-loaned-tools-in-the-absence-of-money argument, and have expressed my conviction that in the absence of money, or its equivalent, the hire on loaned tools would materially exceed the present rate, which is in full accord with my theory.
According to the accepted law of value, every increment of value does correspond, at the margin, with some effort or pain, and the subjective estimate, at the margin, of the privation of waiting has obviously no measurable existence where the supply of saved goods so enormously exceeds the demand that “over-production” has become the chronic disease of this century.
Hugo Bilgram.
White-Flag Anarchism — A Color Line.
At this time, when militant Anarchists, by deeds of fanatical violence and senseless destruction, are filling the timid and gentle with horror, darkening counsel, and stopping with prejudice the ears of the intellectual who were just beginning to listen and to think, when it is gravely proposed to make “organized murder” the legal definition of Anarchism, and when prominent Anarchists are repudiating the name Anarchist as one inevitably misunderstood, it is manifest that philosophical Anarchism is in danger of being altogether swamped and indefinitely postponed unless some decisive step be taken to render the distinction of our views clear.
If we do not do this we shall continually see, on the one band, the credit of our good deeds transferred to our dynamiting namesakes; and, on the other, shall ourselves receive the blame of their fanatical outbreaks and follies.
And if it can be claimed that the dictionaries now justify Anarchism as the philosophical name of a sect of non-invasive Socialists, it must be admitted that they much more emphatically justify the popular use of the term as a synonym of disorder, chaos, and the propaganda of assassination.
And it is indisputable that the newspapers are the great teachers of the masses today, and that they almost invariably use the term in the latter sense.
And it is folly for us to keep asserting that we are the only Anarchists and that these dynamiters are not Anarchists at all. However true that may be philosophically, the practical fact is that they have the name, and will never lose it, — could not if they would.
If we do not therefore at once adopt some distinctive name, or use some unmistakable sign which reporters can grasp and the masses instantly comprehend, with-out the trouble of hairsplitting and philosophical explanations, we shall find ourselves in the amusing position of a certain reforming editor in Kansas, who is obliged to keep a standing advertisement to prove that the name of his paper does not necessarily mean the devil.
I believe I can furnish a sign (from which shall necessarily come a name) which will meet all the required indications and make the distinction instantly manifest, if not completely clear, to the dullest indifference.
And it is of the utmost practical importance that those whom we would teach should have this distinction always in mind.
In education, object teaching is the modern method, as it is also the most ancient and the most effective.
From time immemorial all divisions of human thought have been symbolized by outward signs, badges, flags, and colors. We are not wise If we ignore human nature.
The Collectivists have one unmistakable sign — the red flag — under which they are all broadly grouped. If we permit ourselves to be enrolled under that banner we are hopelessly confounded with them.
Red has always been the color of piracy, war, blood, fire, and hate. If also the color of liberty and of love, very few will think of that when unfurled as the flag of a party whose avowed policy is terrorism and the appeal to force. I do not hesitate to say that when the red flag is unrolled the first thought of even a majority of its friends is of a sea of blood and fire. Passion, revenge, and hate are what it inspires, for non-invasion, intellectual evolution, and universal sympathy are not favorite thoughts in the brain of a man with a dagger in one hand and a bomb in the other, and who is nerving himself to use them.
I propose that instead of a red flag we have a white flag with a red heart in its centre. And over the heart our watchword, Equal Liberty; beneath, the motto, “The World Is Our Country,” in letters of green.
Our object is the evolution of society to a normal order by untrammelled natural growth. Our methods are those of intelligent discussion, “moral suasion,” and economic equity, solely. We believe that the inevitable result of our doctrines is universal peace, reasonableness, prosperity, and fraternity.
Now, by the universal consent of mankind, white is the color of peace and of amicable and reasoning conference. A white flag needs no explanation where it is manifestly not used with the idea of surrender, which the red heart precludes. And the red heart is equally unmistakable, — all the symbolism of one blood, the Common Heart, fraternity, and universal love, which the most favorable imagination can discover in the red flag, are still more clearly contained in the white. The lettering is green, for that is the recognized color of youth, hope, growth, prosperity, and healthy vision.
Instantly, and to the dullest eye, without one word of explanation, such a flag will be understood to declare that we believe in peace, liberty, and fraternity, while the more thoughtful will perceive the deeper implications of the abolition of party, national lines, and local patriotism, the assertion of non-invasion, free-thought, free-trade, free-love, coöperation, social order, and prosperity. An opposition to the red flag will be equally manifest.
Display such a flag, at a public meeting, with a broad declaration of principles, and call the attention of the press, and within a month the whole civilized world will know that there is a distinction between red flag and white-flag Anarchism, and will be prepared to listen to the declaration that the one trusts in terrorism and enforced change, while the other looks to education and economic evolution.
As a means of propaganda, it would be unexcelled.
Such a distinction once made on the retina, as it were, would never be forgotten, and would be universally used by friend and foe alike. It is one that the press can easily employ and the people readily understand.
Mr. Walker would find, with this distinction, that he could still retain the name Anarchist and be understood.
Mr. Byington would find the ears of editors suddenly opened to the words of his Letter-Writing Corps, and a distinction made at once in their minds which it would take a lifetime of his praiseworthy efforts to establish or make plain.
Those who have read my poem, “No Flag,” may accuse me of inconsistency, but whatever apparent justification there may be for this in the outward form, there is clearly none in the essential spirit.
I respectfully submit this suggestion to my comrades.
A heart gules on a field argent.
J. Wm. Lloyd.
Unforeseen Effects of Mail Monopoly.
[G. F. Stephens In Philadelphia Justice.]
Even that over-assumption of functions by government which seems least important, deserves instant condemnation, because its effects may be evil out of all apparent proportion. The State monopoly of letter-carrying appeared to involve nothing more serious than making those who do not write letters pay the expenses of those who do, compelling those whose letters are carried a few squares to pay for carrying other people’s letters thousands of miles, distributing tons of periodicals below cost, prohibiting as criminal private enterprise in letter-carrying, bartering out patronage by thousands of political appointments in the postal service and by postal contracts for services and supplies, donating fortunes in mail subsidies, bringing about scandals like the Star Route rascalities and the appointment of Mr. Wanamaker to the Postmaster Generalship, making a most dangerous precedent for the unreasoning demands of State Socialists within and without the regular political parties, and committing the State to the absurdity of maintaining that to carry a four pound package is a function of government, but to carry a five-pound package is not.
Now, however, this assumption by the State of the business of individuals, the test of the government’s duty being that the act in question is of necessity a monopoly, serves as a conceded excuse for a move toward strong government and centralization so serious that beside it the much-berated Force bill was a little matter. The railroad corporations take up the mail service as the tariff thieves hold up the endangered infant industry, as the dynamited stock jobber seizes the nearest available clerk for a bomb-shield, as the termagant in the slums, whose deviltry has brought her to the verge of neighborly chastisement, snatches the nearest brat and shrieks, “Hit me now wid de child in me arms!”
No wonder that Eastern street-car companies, when their employees struck, sought to attach mail-boxes to the cars, that stopping them might be a crime against the Union. No wonder the railroad corporations do not appeal to local authority, the resistance of whose officers would be a local affair, but to the Federal government and Federal troops, a government whose chief executive is a land speculator, whose attorney general has been the hired attorney of railroad corporations, and whose Senate voted down the resolution of one of its number that no senator should sit in judgment on railroad cases while retained and salaried as a railroad lawyer.
The Bourgeois Sowing the Wind.
[New York Sun.]
The assassination of President Carnot and the attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Crisp!, have aroused the French and Italian governments to the necessity of more efficient measures for the extirpation of Anarchists. The legislation almost simultaneously proposed in the two countries has a three-fold aim. First, to stifle the propagation of Anarchistic doctrines; secondly, to extinguish the notoriety, the love of which seems to lie at the root of homicidal mania; and, thirdly, to render more summary and certain the conviction of persons guilty of inciting to Anarchistic crimes.
The Italian government was the first to move in this direction, Signor Crisp introducing a bill which passed its first reading on Sunday in the Chamber of Deputies. This measure increases the severity of the existing law regarding the manufacture and possession of explosives, apparently imposing on the accused person the burden of self-exculpation, besides greatly augmenting the penalty in the event of conviction. What is even more to the point, the bill renders punishable not only the publication of Anarchist doctrine, but the utterance of apologies for Anarchist crimes when such have been committed. It is obvious that a speaker or writer who undertakes to defend or palliate an assassination, like that of Carnot, for example, virtually makes himself an accessory after the fact. He ought to be dealt with as such, and he will be henceforth in Italy, if Signor Crispi can pass his bill. We should mention further that the proposed law empowers the government to deport to Africa all those who have shown themselves dangerous to the community through the propagation of Anarchistic teachings and the attempt to justify deeds done in pursuance thereof. The idea seems to be that, since the Anarchists are avowed haters of civilization, they will find just the thing that suits them in Abyssinia or Somali Land.
A somewhat similar bill was brought forward on Monday in the French Chamber of Deputies and referred to a committee. This measure transfers a certain category of offences from the Assize Courts to the so-called Correctional Tribunals, which are composed of judges without juries. Among the offences specified are spoken or printed incitations to murder, incendiarism, and explosions, and also all public endeavors to defend or palliate such crimes after their perpetration. The alleged reason for the change of tribunals is the unwillingness of jurors to convict, lest the judges should in their discretion inflict the maximum penalty. The real motive is manifestly to minimize the effect of the threatening letters with which attempts are made to paralize the arm of justice in Anarchist trials. The bill gives the judges power to put securely out of the way persons convicted of provoking or palliating Anarchist offences, by ordering their transportation to trans-oceanic penal settlements. A scarcely less important feature of the proposed law makes the reporting of Anarchist trials an offence punishable with imprisonment or fine, such an enactment, if rigorously enforced, would go far to stop the glorification of men like Valliant, Henry, and Santo in the minds of their semi-insane accomplices. A summary and secret trial, and a speedy and secret execution, followed by the consignment of the corpse of the convict to a nameless grave, would probably constitute an effective mode of dealing with a form of mania whose toleration is incompatible with the safety of society.
[New York Sun.]
The French authorities are in a state of alarm approaching panic over the warnings of fresh Anarchist plots. The information has been furnished principally by the London and other foreign police, and extraordinary precautions have been taken to prevent the execution of the bloodthirsty designs. These measures are so stringent that all foreigners in France are likely to suffer inconvenience. Merely stopping to admire the architecture of the public buildings is likely to lead to arrest on suspicion, as an innocent Englishman found who gazed curiously for five minutes at the Foreign Office recently. The customs inspectors have been instructed to investigate the contents of everything larger than a small orange. The bill for the suppression of Anarchy, which is almost certain to pass the Chamber, is one of the most drastic pieces of legislation in history. It literally fulfills Macaulay’s prophecy that it might prove necessary to destroy liberty in order to preserve civilization. It almost forbids people to think Anarchy. It certainly forbids them to mention it in a private letter. It tries offenders without a jury, and on conviction sends them to solitary confinement, and possibly to Cayenne.
Arrangements for international coöperation against the Anarchists are believed to be making satisfactory progress. Germany is the principal obstacle. More complete police coöperation will undoubtedly be agreed upon.
[London Correspondence of the New York Times.]
Although it is apparent enough that the French government will carry its proposed new press law through the Chamber of Deputies by a round majority, the character of the debate on the measure produces the effect on observers of a moral defeat for the ministry. It is impossible to evade the fact that the arguments are heavily on the side of the opposition, and they are being advanced day after day, and with a gravity and force which command general attention. I have never known the London papers to print such full reports of a French parliamentary debate before, not even in the exciting season of the Panama exposures. This is clearly due to a feeling here, which is shared at Berlin and other centres of European politics, that revolutionary trouble is brewing in France.
One gets at the root of this feeling best by examining one statement which has been made over and over again in the Chamber of Deputies and out of it during the week, namely, that Carnot’s death was primarily due to the corrupt and rotten standards of present French politics, as much as to the Panama upheaval or to Grévy or to the Wilson decoration scandal. One Radical speaker after another has fastened attention upon the fact that as recently as Vaillant’s murderous demonstration in the Chamber of Deputies an additional sum of $165.000 was voted to strengthen the police force, which already had an annual sum of $5.000.000, of which four-fifths was charged to the Paris force. With all this money worse than nothing has been done. The police at Cette, Lyons, and Paris alike knew all about Cesarib, had carried his “dossier” in their books for months, and purported to have him under strict surveillance as a dangerous man, yet let him journey by rail and foot to Lyons, buy a knife, talk of his intentions almost at random, and stab the President in his carriage, in a crowded street, en féte, as if there were no such thing as a policeman in all France. To speak plainly, these huge sums, ostensibly devoted to the police service, have been subjected to all sorts of thieving tolls by the politicians in control. No official attempt is forthcoming to show by the books that the money was expended honestly. It is tacitly conceded that it wasn’t. This is bad enough, but worse remains. The police system, inherited by the republic from the empire, was never up the mark of cleanliness and efficiency set by the other departments of the republic in the earlier days, when it represented really a reforming impulse. Since Andrieux took the police force bodily into politics, it has been degenerating steadily, till now it produces all the vilest aspects of the Duc de Morny’s rule. Under the empire its heads were venal, and its ranks were filled with informers, mouchards, and agents provocateurs. At every step in the Anarchist investigations one runs across a slimy trail of police spies, joining in plots, levying blackmail on plotters, helping on conspiracies for their own benefit or to entangle rival politicians whom their chiefs wish to destroy, until the question arises if they be not more dangerous vermin than the bomb-throwers themselves.
It is to these unclean hands that the enforcement of a new dragnet law, which abolishes juries, establishes courts sitting in camera, and puts every citizen’s life and liberty at the mercy of any two informers, is to be entrusted. One need not wait long, I fancy, for spirited manifestations of public resentment. Meanwhile, the effect of the measure in the Chamber of Deputies has been to drive the old Radicals, headed by Brisson, into an almost open alliance with the Socialists, and this incongruous union is picking up recruits from the aristocratic Extreme Right of types which recall now Mirabeau, now Philippe Egalite. There has not existed before, since the formation of the republic, any such consolidated opposition party. Its appearance now marks a momentous departure in French politics. Its one controlling issue will be to turn the rascals out, and, unless the face of affairs completely changes, it will literally sweep the country when the general election comes.
[Charles A. Dana in a Tribune Interview.]
“There was a great deal of anxiety, however, I found, among the liberal-minded for fear that the new law on the press and the law providing for the trial of persons accused of Anarchy might be carried entirely too far, and provoke a reaction which would over-throw the republic. Several gentlemen, and not all of them belonging to the liberal element so called, expressed an anxiety on that subject to me. They said: ‘If you destroy the right of trial by jury in these cases, and if you provide for private trials, of which no report would be allowed in any newspaper, where is the liberty we have contended for so long?’”
Competition and Industrial Disorder.
[Frank H. Foster tn Boston Labor Leader.]
It is to be regretted that many wage-earners are sadly handicapped in approaching the discussion of social and economic problems, by lack of that training which would enable them to look at both sides of the question.
It is commonly assumed by the advocates of State Socialism that the principle of competition is to blame for everything that is out of joint in the social order. The fact that this or that thing is wrong, that this or that corrupt politician or tyrannical capitalist lives, that men are out of work or forced to accept hard conditions of labor, is pointed to as irrefutable evidence of the fallacy of competition. This is based on no sounder logic than the bare assertion that because two things exist at the same time, one must therefore be the cause of the other. State Socialists seldom attempt to put in the connecting link and show just how competition is to blame for industrial ills, but content themselves with abusing everybody who does not accept, upon the mere assertion, the illogical theory which they profess.
Did it ever occur to our over-zealous friends that to accept their principle of reasoning literally is to make out a much stronger case for the other side of the argument? If the competitive principle is responsible for everything that exists in the social order, it is responsible for the good as well as the bad. If it is responsible for Carnegie, and Pullman, and Olney, it is equally responsible for Jefferson, for Phillips, for Lincoln, for Altgeld, for Henry D. Lloyd, and for every high-minded patriot and statesman who has adorned our country’s roll of honor. If it is to be held as the inspiring cause for every special instance of poverty and misgovernment, so also must it be credited with every achievement of progress and every institution of freedom.
America has had greater freedom of competition than any other land. Because of this, because its prizes, political, social, and industrial, have been in the free-for-all class, millions of people from other lands have come to this country. It would not be difficult to specifically prove that those things which are wrong in our institutions have emanated from the desertion of the competitive principle. In politics, bossism and ring rule come from ignoring or overthrowing the competitive principle in the party organization. Whenever, by a combination of circumstances, a party gets so powerful as to have no competition, it is invariably certain to abuse the power, until the competitive principle grows strong enough to compass its downfall.
Industrially, when the field was free, the people of the United States prospered. When Congress choked competition, by going into partnership with certain lines of manufacturers, it helped to increase social inequality, labor gluts, panics, and industrial depressions. The money monopoly is the creature of the anti-competitive principle. The national banking system, protected by the State in its monopoly, secured from competition by law, works its evil results upon the mass. The land monopoly is precisely in the same line of development, and it is not too much to say that, wherever in the field of open business the State has entered, the effect has been disastrous.
The general law of progress is the antithesis of the State Socialistic idea. It has been made by developing opportunity, not by restricting competition. Better times and conditions can be stimulated by abolishing monopoly, and to do this, the use of the ballot, intelligently united, is essential. Our State Socialistic friends are facing the wrong way. They are blind to the national instinct, ignorant of the history of economics, and, zealous and honest though many of them may be, they most grievously err in seeking to inject into the American labor movement their reactionary and misguided policies.
The true Socialist is he who looks at society as a whole, who weighs the great social and moral impulses which are manifesting themselves on all hands, who uses the forces of natural law for economic advancement, Freedom, not restriction; the play of the emulative and competitive principle among free agencies; the voluntary association of citizens and wage-earners for mutual aid; this is the road which leads onward and upward, as the downward path is as surely the result of the attempt to strangle the liberty principle.
[Mr. Foster’s excellent argument is marred by the unsupported assertion that the use of the ballot is “essential” to the movement for the abolition of monopoly. Surely he does not want us to take the statement literally. He may regard the ballot as a method of obtaining freedom, but he cannot possibly regard it as the method. And if it is not the method, it is not “essential.” Moreover, Mr. Foster himself contradicts his assertion by telling us, in the last paragraph, that the “road which leads onward and upward” is “freedom, not restriction; the play of the emulative and competitive principle among free agencies, the voluntary association of citizens and wage earners for mutual aid.” Now, if this is the road, where does the ballot come in? To be sure, the monopolistic legislation might be repealed through the ballot, and the formation of a repeal party has been urged by some Anarchists. But the feasibility of the plan is more than doubtful.]
The Art and Moral of Ibsen’s “Ghosts.”
[Poet-Lore.]
When Æschylus chose to found his greatest tragedies on the story of the father devouring his own children, I wonder, dear * * * , if the “Heralds,” “Advertisers,” and “Globes,” the “Critics,” and “Literary Worlds” of that elder day, or aught then corresponding to them, frowned down the primal subject-matter as too grisly for art, just as they now “cock their critic nose” at Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” as abnormal and unfit for representation.
Abnormal it may be, — I am sure I hope so, — although the violence of the widespread outcry against it in conventional circles fosters the suspicion that some “galled jades” are wincing under the keen touch of truth; but there are more ways than one of devouring one’s own children, not all equally gory, but all equally lamentable, and why should dramatic art confine itself to empty admiration of the Greek mode of the Banquet Thyestean? Have the critics, who talk about the painfulness of “Ghosts,” and declare that “hacking and hewing is not art but butchery,” forgotten their Homer, abjured their Æschylus, and recanted Aristotle’s famous dictum that the aim of tragedy is the purgation of the soul by pity and terror? Are we grown too delicate to endure anything more caustic than light opera and low comedy? To be sure, the great themes underlying Greek tragedy have lost their contemporaneous hold, and need the historic as well as the æsthetic sense fitly to revivify them; but their modern counterparts are embodied, for whoso has eyes to see, in more than one phase of human life at this actual hour, and if ever the old themes were fit, — as most indubitably and grandly they were, — then their modern counterparts are also fit. The symbolic sense of the true poet is open to them; the imaginative construction of the genuine dramatist is bound to exhibit them, recreated boldly in the flesh, after his own fashion, following therein, as he needs must, in the path of the creators of old, yet not in the letter, like a slave, but in the spirit, like a peer.
This, it seemed to me, as I watched “Ghosts” at the Tremont Theater [Boston], is exactly what Ibsen does, in the face of an audience but partially awake to his profound originality, and under the noses of critics who apparently lack the necessary qualification for un-biassed criticism of original work, — namely, capacity to trace literary and æsthetic evolutions. To this the newspapers next morning bore curious witness, all of them praising the players and damning the play, with one honorable exception, — the Boston “Transcript.” That paper’s well-considered criticism was evidently the fruit of a broader knowledge of world literature and a more catholic sympathy with the progress of art.
As for me, I must confess to you that I was utterly absorbed in the performance. My praise of the players is that they showed me the play, — simple in outline, subtle in effects, artistic, irresistible.
Clytemnestra’s speech in the “Agamemnon” recurred to me at the close of Ibsen’s Act I., like a metaphor carven for his plot. The passage is but one of several in which Æschylus gives the gist of his trilogy. Clytemnestra speaks of “the fat-fed curse of this race,” wherefrom “is bred this craving of the maw for blood to lick, ever new gore, ere the old woe be done.” Just so large and fatal, though translated into modern terms, is the revelation of the grim motive of Ibsen’s play, worked up to by such simple means, by such life-like, natural dialogue, with such admirable meagreness of detail, or of rant, with such sure and telling force, till, just when Mrs. Alving has brought her well-laid plans to a smooth issue, and is declaring that from henceforth “it shall be for me as though he who is dead had never lived in this house,” the sounds from the Conservatory, Regina’s sharp whisper, suffice to thrill her with the shadow of her doom, as she starts to her feet, crying, “Ghosts!”
Appreciated to the full or not, the effect of this was unmistakably felt by the house. And think of the moral of it, the philosophy of it, the art of it, — bringing in the whole action and concentrating it in one word like a blow!
Mrs. Goodfriend’s personation throughout this act was most adequately conceived of the self-poised, disciplined, executive woman, alive to intellectual implications Parson Menders would have had to have pounded into him and would have got all wrong then. That Mr. Lawrence showed just such an amiable, conventionally clever, and morally obtuse parson as Ibsen’s parson is, is praise enough for his part.
Ibsen’s art tends toward condensation. You have noticed, no doubt, how he packs the regulation drama of five acts into three. It is by no loss of construction. The orthodox protasis, epitasis, and climax are all attended to in one stroke in Act I.
Act II., considered as the halting-place of the movement, corresponding to the usual Act IV., is also masterly in management. At first it seems to be made use of to exploit Parson Mander’s character a little more fully by means of Engstrand, an unexpectedly humorous figure as played by Mr. Elton, as well as of Mrs. Alving; then, revealing still further the dead man’s hand on the reins of Oswald’s fate, it seems to drive straight on to the porch of the catastrophe. But the halt is there, condensed. It comes suddenly at the last of the act, and in imminent danger of being interrupted; for the anticipated result of Oswald’s heart-rending confidences to his mother is to make her tell her secret as unreservedly. Still, she does not do so. “Now she is going to!” said a quick-witted girl behind me. “Well! now she will!” She does not, because she is a woman, as Ibsen draws her and Mrs. Goodfriend played her, of suppressed impulse and tempered experience, who is confirmed in the habit of seeing her way rationally before acting, Yet the situation calls aloud for what she withholds, and the complication of Oswald’s love for Regina adds to the argument.
To tell the truth, I was so hurried on by the artistic necessity myself at this point, that not only did I forget the structural rules and lose sight of the fact — which I realized afterwards — that it was Ibsen’s craft that had deceived me, but I also got out of patience with Mrs. Goodfriend, and thought she was overdoing her reserve; but since refreshing my memory by the book, I yield to her better study of Ibsen. The halt is in the part, and the rhetoricians should make the most of Ibsen’s loyalty to the catabasis. Abridged as it is in respect to space, it is introduced at such a cleverly irritating moment that in respect to effect it is quite un-abridged. The skilful use of this is again apparent in the stress it puts upon the moment when Mrs. Alving recognizes what Oswald means by “the joy of life,” perceives the sins against it which have entailed their fate upon them, and sees at last the vanity of scheming against it. The first rivet of Ibsen’s action is marked by the word “Ghosts.” The second rivet is driven home in the phrase, “the joy of life.” “Now I can speak,” says Mrs. Alving. “Now, my boy, you shall know the whole truth. And then you can choose. Oswald! Regina!” Mender’s entrance stops her from it, and then instigates her to it, his proposal to send Regina to England and Oswald’s interference making the truth still more imperative. Then again she is stopped by a different and most effective dramatic device, — “The Orphanage is on fire!”
Useful as this event is in the second act, it had other uses, too. From the first it was prepared for, and it provides an ironical impersonal comment on Mrs. Alving as well as on the parson.
It is not easy to rate Ibsen’s playcraft too high; and as for the critic who finds nothing in “Ghosts” but “a note-book stolen from a dissecting table,” one feels tempted to say that he has seen the play without seeing it, for never was scientific note-book rich as this is in the artist’s way of seeing and the dramatist’s way of putting his divination.
Parson Mender’s portraiture is not forgotten in the powerful dramaturgy of the closing act. His professional jurisdiction over the preserves of conventional morality receives a satire both biting and smooth, that puts the last polish on the picture. The vulgarity that lurks in Regina’s character — and not unjustifiably, for, like Edmund in Shakspere’s “Lear,” she resents her wrongs — is next revealed to the life, and then, with the stage clear for the catastrophe, the last act fulls to its culmination.
Mr. Courtenay Thorpe’s boyish boredom rings the true intonation all along in the lighter utterances of his first appearances as Oswald. Again, in the desolating anguish of his revelation of his impending fate, and then in his selfish absorption in his plans to meliorate his dreary future, his every accent was the right one. And in the final act, where the difficulties of the part attain their climax, he was marvellous, just where Mrs. Goodfriend, as it seemed to me, began to fail in the integrity of her personation. Oswald’s part had been that of the victim; in this act it becomes the retribution. His weakness develops an edge toward his mother sharper than the sword of Orestes, more bitter than the daggers Hamlet spoke to Queen Gertrude. For the theme of “Ghosts” is not merely that “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children”; that is but the initial and more commonplace half of the motive. The supplementary half is the sin of the mothers’ passivity, — their crime against their own souls, of which no plea of irresponsibility, ignorance, or duty to “Law and Order” shall save them from reaping the woe appointed for themselves and their seed. This responsibility neither shall the mothers escape, says Ibsen, nor the judgment shall they elude, for all their shirking and juggling. The cry of this age for the freedom of woman to be indeed responsible reverberates in “Ghosts.”
This conception of Mrs. Alving’s share in the drama was not perfectly brought out by Mrs. Goodfriend. If it had been, her star would not have paled at the last in tragic fire beside Oswald’s. It would have burned with a more awful light in a culmination to thank the fullest powers of a tragedy queen.
The moral side of “Ghosts” is, to my mind, you see, merged in the artistic, and the high quality of the twain is so incontestable that I am out of all patience with the blindness of those who regard the play as destructive in its lesson, instead of as constructive morally as it is dramatically. They forget the emphasis I have spoken of which Ibsen lays on “the joy of life” and “the joy of work,” for “at bottom,” says Oswald, “it’s the same thing.” Not the drudging grind, but the labor love delights in. And when they talk of the pessimist Ibsen, who preaches the gloomy gospel of helpless inheritance of sin and disease, I long that they should appreciate And honor the optimist Ibsen, true artist and poet, who, through the via dolorosa, guides to health and pleasure, to the joy of life and work. It is the sins against that which are punished in “Ghosts.”
The New Theatre in Germany.
[Revue des Deux Mendes.]
The tendency of the German to reason about every-thing, leads him to put emphasis on the point that the theatre should be a school of manners. In Germany there are more dramatic critics who regard a play from a moral point of view. Without insisting that the drama should teach a direct lesson, the German critic realizes that in any interpretation of life by art there always will be something taught, salutaty or harmful, and that it is a matter of the first importance that this lesson should be salutary. An interesting evidence of this is the establishment of two theatres in Berlin, by Bruno Wille, where representations are given to subscribers who form a society. The oldest of these, which is nearly four years old, is now directly controlled by the Socialist party. This party ousted Wille from this theatre because he was considered too much of an Anarchist; so he founded the other theatre. Wille is, it is true, an Anarchist, but one who is an enemy of all violence. Both theatres are prosperous and number their adherents by thousands. Their object is not any social or political progaganda, but simply, as the laws of the societies declare, to offer their members, in return for a very small monthly contribution, the opportunity of seeing fine works of art, dramatic or musical, or of hearing lectures at which these works are commented on and explained.
The Kind State!
[Free Life.]
It appears that in Russia the peasants to some extent have been paying their taxes out of money lent to them by the State. Money was lent on grain by the State bank, both directly and through the Zemstovs, etc., while the railway tariff was lowered in certain directions. What the State always does is to rob you of 1¼d and give you back the ¼d. Kind, honest, truthful, clever State!
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.
