Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Farmers’ Protective
Association, held at Atchison, February 7th, 1888.
MR. CHAIRMAN: When I was visited, a few days ago, by a committee of
Atchison county farmers, and requested to welcome the members of this
Association to my home, I very cheerfully assented. I was glad to
gratify my old neighbors and friends, and, in their name, bid their
fellow-members of the Protective Associative a cordial welcome to
Atchison. I knew that their greeting, their reception, their
hospitality, would supplement and emphasize my words, and so, if I
should fail in fairly expressing the pleasure they feel in having you
for their guests, their kindliness and generosity would atone for my
failure. I greet and welcome you, therefore, in the full assurance that
your brief sojourn here will be made enjoyable by all the gracious
courtesies that inspire generous hearts, and that you will return to
your homes carrying with you only pleasant memories of your visit to
Atchison, and of the hospitality of your hosts, the members of the
Atchison county branch of your organization.
I cannot claim a close familiarity with the aims, principles, and
workings of your Association. But I have learned, from its constitution,
that its objects are “the protection of the person and property of its
members, and to assist the civil authorities in the enforcement of law.”
The uninitiated speak of it as an “anti-horse thief society,” and it
seems to exercise a wholesome influence over those individuals who
entertain communistic ideas concerning property rights in horseflesh.
And if your organization had no other or broader aims than to make
horse-stealing unprofitable and horse thieves unsafe, it would be a
useful society. A Western sheriff in pursuit of a horse thief will ride
faster and go further than will an officer in search of any other
criminal, because he knows that his tenure of office largely depends
upon the energy, activity, courage, and success of his pursuit. He
knows, too, that he is backed by a public sentiment which holds
horse-stealing to be one of the gravest and meanest of crimes, and so he
is impelled to activity and vigilance by the strongest incentives—his
sense of official duty, his desire to win the approval of his
fellow-citizens, and his fear of popular condemnation should he fail in
his mission.
But your constitution does not pledge your support to the enforcement of
the law against horse-stealing alone. It explicitly declares that the
objects of your association are, “the protection of the person and
property of its members, and to assist the civil authorities in the
enforcement of law.” The wisest and greatest of Americans said that this
government of ours was a government “of the people, by the people, for
the people.” In this country, all power, all authority, is vested in the
people. They make and unmake laws. He, therefore, who derides or
disregards law, is not contemning or defying a despot or an autocrat—he
is antagonizing the sovereign power of the people.
Law may not be, as Coke defines it, “the perfection of wisdom.” I have
known laws, indeed, that were rather the perfection of folly. But, good
or bad, as laws in this country are merely the expression of the
people’s will, they should be respected as long as they remain laws. For
law is just as necessary to the human race as is the air we breathe or
the food we eat. William Pitt truly said that “where law ends, tyranny
begins.” Contempt for and disregard of law naturally lead to anarchy,
and anarchy, soon becoming intolerable, invites despotism. Nations
prosper, peoples thrive, as their laws are wise, humane, and just; but
even a bad law is better than no law at all. Lawlessness means disorder,
tumult, crime; it means the oppression of the weak by the strong; and,
in the end, it means despotism. A people who cannot make and obey their
own laws will, just as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow morning,
at last invite the rule of an autocrat who will make laws for them.
No system of government is perfect. I doubt very much whether a system
of laws can ever be devised that will be perfect. But human nature is
weak and selfish, and law, with its pains and penalties, is necessary to
restrain its passions and subdue its violence. Until the sublime lessons
of the Sermon on the Mount become the inspiration of every human
heart—that is, until the millennium shall come—mankind must be governed
by law, and the laws must be made by human beings who have all the
frailties and imperfections of their fellows. Wisely and honestly as
they may legislate, they will make mistakes. Carefully and intelligently
as they may frame codes, they cannot fit them to deal with every vice,
and folly, and imperfection, and passion of poor humanity, and so
injustice may be done in the very temples dedicated to law.
But, after all, the law-makers of America, State and National, have done
and are doing fairly well. Wrongs exist that should be rooted out.
Selfishness, and greed, and rapacity, are always active and aggressive,
and when they are curbed or beaten back in one direction, they seek new
fields and pastures in which to gorge themselves. Corporate power and
privilege needs to be firmly and effectively limited and regulated.
Those latter-day crimes against the people, the so-called “trusts,”
should be prohibited, in every section of this country, by National as
well as State laws. Men who combine to regulate the supplies of this
country; who purchase or lease, and then lock up a manufactory of
linseed oil, as was done in this city only a brief while ago, and thus
not only destroy an important municipal industry, but destroy the
products of thousands of farms in half a dozen surrounding counties—the
men who are responsible for such things as this, no matter what excuse
they may make, are criminal in the sight of God and man, and should be
punished, not by fine alone, but by imprisonment. The meanest horse
thief who ever invaded a farmer’s stable at midnight is not more
dangerous than are the men who organize and manage such “trusts” as
these. Let us have laws, severe, far-reaching, swift, and merciless in
their operation, to punish the greedy cormorants who are, under the
guise of regulating production and supply, organizing “trusts” to
control everything that is produced in America. And, if necessary, let
us have “Protective Associations” everywhere, to “assist the civil
authorities in the enforcement of law.”
Of late years, too, this country has been invaded by a horde of alien
malcontents who, under the guise of a new philosophy, are sedulously
preaching the gospel of universal hate and promiscuous robbery. All laws
should, according to their theories, be repealed; every man who, by his
thrift or industry, has accumulated property, is a thief; the real
criminals are not those who steal horses, but those who pretend to own
them; all forms of government are tyranny; and there can be no true
liberty, no real freedom, until governments and laws are all utterly
obliterated. This is the doctrine of one wing of these malcontents. But
another gang, going to the other extreme, preach the theory that the
government should be everything and do everything. They would blot out
the individual, utterly. The government should own all property, conduct
all business affairs, monopolize all industries. Everybody and
everything should be reduced to a dull, dead level; every man, woman and
child should be controlled, in all he does, by the State; should do
nothing except in the service of the State, and have nothing except by
permission of the State.
These anarchic and socialistic forces are, however, although as wide
apart as the poles in their theories, allied like Siamese twins in their
common hatred of the existing order of things, and howl, in sympathetic
tune, “Down with the government;” “Down with law;” “Down with property
rights.”
Every thoughtful, sensible American citizen, native-born or naturalized,
should unite in demanding that these apostles of hate and lawlessness
should be suppressed. They outrage the liberty of the land. They degrade
our boasted freedom of speech. They abuse the generosity of our laws.
They are public pests. They should be regarded and dealt with as
criminals. Organizations such as yours should hold them to be public
enemies, as obnoxious to public order and safety, and far more
dangerous, than are the horse thieves who invade your barns or your
fields. Is not a man who preaches and advocates wholesale murder, arson,
or robbery, a more vicious criminal than the man who murders, burns, or
steals in a retail way? And why should the rope of the scaffold dangle
and the doors of the penitentiary open for the one class of criminals,
who actually perpetrate these crimes, while the other and more vicious
and cowardly class are permitted to run at large, and howl their
atrocious doctrines through the press or on the stump?
It is time that the law-respecting, intelligent citizens of the United
States were awakening to a sense of the dangers that menace our country.
They are strong enough to deal with all these dangers—strong enough to
throttle, with one hand, the preachers of hate and lawlessness, while
with the other they beat down the allied trusts and the grasping
monopolies of the land. The people of America are slow to anger, I know.
They are patient, industrious, and inclined to laugh at the cry of
“wolf.” They did not believe, until the civil war had burst upon them,
that it would ever come; and even when the roar of hostile cannon was
thundering in their ears, both sides thought the conflict would end in
sixty days. But these sober, patient, industrious people, when once
aroused, are terrible in their anger, and as remorseless as fate. And
they can fight! The bloodiest battles, the most desperate conflicts the
world has ever known, attest their valor, their endurance, their sublime
patriotism, and their love of our country and its institutions. I trust
the coming years have in store for us, and for our children, no renewal
of such scenes of strife and bloodshed and destruction as marked the
period from 1861 to 1865. But it is not wise to shut our eyes to the
dangers that menace our laws and our form of government, nor to fail or
refuse to adopt measures for the preservation of the public peace and
the punishment of those who are seeking to disturb it.
I have, perhaps, wandered away from the subjects you have met to
discuss. But your constitution furnished the text, and I am sure you
will pardon the digression. You meet, as law-abiding, law-respecting
citizens, to organize for the protection of your own interests under the
laws. An American citizen can have no higher aspiration than to see his
country governed by just laws, justly administered by just men. When
this aspiration is realized, the person, the property, the inalienable
rights of every American citizen will be safe against aggressors. To
realize this aspiration, a healthy, intelligent public sentiment is
necessary, and I verily believe that your organization, if its announced
objects are kept steadily in view, will have a tendency to create such a
sentiment. I trust your deliberations may be pleasant and harmonious,
and that you may, one and all, return to your homes and your work
inspired with a firm determination to do whatsoever you can to secure
just laws, and to see that they are justly administered by just men.