It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has made
this country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change from
good to bad took place within a generation--so quickly that few of us
have had the nimbleness of apprehension to "get it through our heads."
We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we
were taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard.
America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always and
everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those
who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest
thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything
but to be oppressed--makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their
saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic
oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly,
but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without
a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his
nose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.
All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of Southeastern
Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories
of Europe--even of Southeastern Europe--may not be a good man; I say
only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. In nine instances in
ten he is a brute whom it would be God's mercy to drown on his arrival,
for he is constitutionally unhappy.
Let us not deny him his grievance: he works--when he works--for men no
better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part
of his pay in "truck" at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay
itself is inadequate--hardly more than double what he could get in his
own country. Against all this his howl is justified; but his rioting and
assassination are not--not even when directed against the property and
persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other
laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for
whom and for what pay they please--when he denies this right, and with
it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting
him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and
his horrible kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this
just debt of nature, and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual
spring rise, constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that
decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of
government under which their country groans, A nation that will not
enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its
people.
This "citizen soldiery" business is a ghastly failure. The National
Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a
Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which
the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so?
Nine times in ten it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by
the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with
a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime
enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a Republic is
without a shadow of excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are
not enforced; if corporations and capital are "tyrannous and strong;" if
white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this
is our own fault--the fault of those, among others, who seek redress
or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people have always as good
government, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of
person, property and liberty, as they deserve. They can have what ever
they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting
in the right way. If as citizens of a Republic we lack the virtue and
intelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it
"Executes a freeman's will
As lightning does the will of God"
we are unfit to be citizens of a Republic, undeserving of peace,
prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions due
to our own moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way,
Messieurs the Masses to correct public evils: put wise and good men into
power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will
not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when
you submit and shot when you rise.
To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that
twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal
mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, "as the law
provides." Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken,
including even those of "innocent spectators"--though that kind of
angel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue
judges had permitted officers in command of the "firing lines" to be
persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves
large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have
saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plus
those that for a long time to come will be taken, and minus those that
were taken at that time. Make your own computation from your own data; I
insist only that a rioter shot in time saves nine.
You know--you, the People--that all this is true. You know that in
a Republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it
cures--that it cures none. You know that even the "money power" is
powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that
nobody can bribe or intimidate a voter who will not take a bribe or
suffer himself to be intimidated--that there can be no "money power"
in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know that "bosses" and
"machines" can not control you if you will not suffer then to divide you
into "parties" by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions.
You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has the
courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in your
hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don't consider you dangerous--not
very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces for
confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confesses his own.
From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that you
rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he who
echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think and flatters
you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well of
newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your disesteem
they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well of
one another.