ANARCHY AND LIBERTY

The arrest Saturday in New York of the anarchistic movement, composed of agitators unknown to fortune, although not to what passes in this world as fame, renders temporarily without influence a source of evil opposition to constituted government.

The pass-words of democracy are easily passed, and apt to lose their meaning in the passage. Free speech is one of the bulwarks upon which our individual freedom rests. Yet free speech does not imply immoral speech, not speech with the obvious and declared desire of formenting revolution. The men and women in question, most of them born on a foreign soil, and received generously into our nation with the free rights of citizens, have used our hospitality to strike at the foundations of our laws. There may be a few to weep their martyrdom. But they will be very few.

It has been duly provided by law that those whose conscience is against all form of war, and who would gladly see whatever calamity in preference to war, shall be excused from bearing arms beside their fellow-citizens. Our people does not desire to enforce against any man's scruples the duty of defending his nation, for the possibility that it, the whole people, may be wrong, and one man right.

But the objection of these anarchists was not personal. It was universal. They wanted no one to serve. And to prevent anyone from serving, to break down the expressed will of the people, they used all the spurious arguments concerning the liberty of the individual, which have been the weapon of the demagogue and the ruin of true liberty so long as society has existed as an institution. The vast majority has provided for the minute minority irreconcilable to the conduct of war. Now we find that minute minority striving to bend the vast majority to its wishes. It is not content with its own freedom of choice. It will choose for the whole nation. That is their desired personal liberty. That is the freedom of choice which they proclaim!

Russia, from which many of them came, does not need them, but she would avail herself of them as well as we. If they desire to upheave the world, and to mould it afresh in the image of their own desires they had far better begin in the land which was unfortunate enough to bring them forth, and among peoples of whose kin they are. If they desire absolute liberty of action, they had far better go to some uninhabited and desolate isle. For only when there are no other men within the bounds of intercourse may a man enjoy absolute liberty.

Our nation is endeavoring by the current method, which is all that it may use, to wipe out eternally the anarchy of national war. And here, when all our strength is needed for our purpose, a group of egoists strives to undo our endeavor, and to substitute individual anarchy, to reduce us to the law of barbarians.

If the liberty of anarchy is liberty, then we had better be given death.