It is the immigration of “the oppressed of all nations” that has made
this country one of the most lawless 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 father’s 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 head 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. 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 cry 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 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?
Mostly 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 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 of a republic have always as good government,
as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of person,
property and liberty, as they merit. They can have whatever 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 really
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 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 bystanders”—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. Make your own
computation from your own data; I insist only that a rioter shot in
time saves the shooting of 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 nor intimidate a legislator or voter who will not
take a bribe nor 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
them 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 confess
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 dis-esteem they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking
fairly well of one another.