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Title: Deportation, its meaning and menace

Author: Alexander Berkman
        Emma Goldman

Release date: July 1, 2022 [eBook #68442]

Language: English

Original publication: United States:

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


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                              DEPORTATION
                        _Its Meaning and Menace_


                _Last Message to the People of America_
                                   By
                           ALEXANDER BERKMAN
                                  and
                              EMMA GOLDMAN


            Ellis Island, New York, U. S. A., December, 1919




                              INTRODUCTION


With pencil and scraps of paper concealed behind the persons of friends
who had come to say good-bye at the Ellis Island Deportation Station,
Alexander Berkman hastily scribbled the last lines of this pamphlet.

I think it is the best introduction to this pamphlet to say that before
its writing was finished the rulers of America began deporting men
directly and obviously for the offense of _striking against the
industrial owners of America_.

The “Red Ark” is gone. In the darkness of early morning it slipped away,
leaving behind many wives and children destitute of support. They were
denied even the knowledge of the sailing of the ship, denied the right
of farewell to the husbands and fathers they may never see again. After
the boat was gone, women and children came to the dock to visit the
prisoners, bringing such little comforts as are known to the working
class, seedy overcoats for the Russian winter, cheap gloves and odds and
ends of food. They were told that the ship was gone. The refined cruelty
of the thing was too much for them; they stormed the ferry-house, broke
a window, screamed and cried, and were driven away by soldiers.

The “Red Ark” will loom big in American history. It is the first
picturesque incident of the beginning effort of the War Millionaires to
crush the soul of America and insure the safety of the dollars they have
looted over the graves of Europe and through the deaths of the quarter
million soldier boys whom American mothers now mourn.

Yes, the “Red Ark” will go into history. Alexander Berkman and Emma
Goldman whom the screaming harlots of the yellow press have chosen to
call the “leaders” of those whose distinction is that they have no
leaders, are more fortunate than otherwise. Berkman and Goldman have
been deported as “Russians.” They were born in Russia, but they did
their thirty years’ work of enlightenment in this, our America. I think
they are therefore Americans, in the best sense, and the best of
Americans. They fought for the elementary rights of men, here in our
country when others of us were afraid to speak, or would not pay the
price. In all the leading cities of this land, they have contributed to
the intellectual life of the younger, aspiring generation. I venture to
say that there is hardly a liberal in the United States whose life has
not been influenced directly or indirectly and made better, by Alexander
Berkman and Emma Goldman.

Alexander Berkman spent in American prisons more years than I like to
remember. He did it deliberately. He did it for the welfare of men, and
the American portion of mankind. He never hesitated to offer his life
for his brother. I recall a picture; it is in Russia. We were gathered
in Moscow. It looked as though the Revolution were going to its death.
Everywhere the Soviet armies were retreating, the masses were sinking
into despair, the German working class was not rising in rebellion as we
had hoped, the Austrians likewise; the White Terror was raising its head
throughout Russia. A pallid girl, a Russian-American immigrant returned
to her native country, held in her hand the bulletin of the day’s news.
“A hundred Alexander Berkmans distributed throughout Europe at this
time, and the history of Europe would be different!” she exclaimed.

Berkman wrote a book, “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,” which is one of
America’s vital literary products. It won for him the admiration of such
intellectuals here as had the courage to admire.

The “intellectuals” for the most part did not bid Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman good-bye. Most of those who dared to visit the
passengers of the “Red Ark” in their Ellis Island prison were young men
and women of the working class. That is as it should be. It is in the
working class where Goldman and Berkman’s brave work will find the
growth that will count. American plutocracy knew this. That is why
American plutocracy deported Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

This pamphlet is the “good-bye message” of Alexander Berkman and Emma
Goldman; and I think it is in spirit the message of all the passengers
of the “Red Ark.” As such it appears first in this form and will appear
later in history. Read it and keep it for the future.

                                                           ROBERT MINOR.




                  DEPORTATION—_Its Meaning and Menace_


The war is over, but peace there is not. On a score of fronts human
slaughter is going on as before; men, women, and children are dying by
the hundred thousands because of the blockade of Russia; the “small
nations” are still under the iron heel of the foreign oppressor;
Ireland, India, Egypt, Persia, Korea, and numerous other peoples, are
being decimated and exploited even more ruthlessly than before the
advent of the Great Prophet of World Democracy; “self-determination” has
become a by-word, nay, a crime, and world-wide imperialism has gotten a
strangle hold upon humanity.

What, then, has the Great War accomplished? To what purpose the
sacrifice of millions of human lives, the unnamable loss in blood and
treasure? What, especially, has happened in these United States?

Fresh in mind are still the wonderful promises made in behalf of the
War. It was to be the _last_ war, a holy crusade of liberty against
tyranny, a war upon all wars that was to sweep the earth clear of
oppression and misery, and make the world safe for true democracy.

As with a sacred fire burned the heart of mankind. What soul so small,
what human so low, not to be inspired by the glorious shibboleth of
liberty and well-being for all! A tornado of social enthusiasm, a
new-born world consciousness, swept the United States. The people were
aflame with a new faith; they would slay the Dragon of Despotism, and
conquer the world for democracy.

True, it was but yesterday their sovereign will registered a mighty
protest against human slaughter and bloodshed. With a magnificent
majority they had voted not to participate in the foreign War, not to
become entangled in the treacherous schemes of European despotisms.
Triumphantly they had elected as President of the United States the man
who “kept them out of the war” that he might still keep them out of it.

Then suddenly, almost over night, came the change. From Wall Street
sounded the bugle ordering the retreat of Humanity. Its echo
reverberated in Washington, and thence throughout the whole country.
There began a campaign of war publicity that roused the tiger in man and
fed his lust for blood and vengeance. The quiet, phlegmatic German was
transformed into the “Vicious Hun,” and made the villain of the wildest
stories of “enemy” atrocities and outrages. The nation-wide propaganda
of hatred, persecution, and intolerance carried its subtle poison into
the hearts of the obscurest hamlet, and the minds of the people were
systematically confused and perverted by rivers of printer’s ink. The
conscience of America, wanting peace, was stifled in the folds of the
national emblem, and its voice drowned by the martial beat of a thousand
war drums.

Here and there a note of protest was heard. Radicals of various
political and social faiths—Anarchists, Socialists, I. W. Ws., some
pacifists, conscientious objectors, and other anti-militarists—sought to
stem the tide of the war hysteria. They pointed out that the people of
the United States had no interest in the European War. That this
country, because of its geographical location and natural advantages,
was beyond all danger of invasion. They showed that the War was the
result of European over-preparedness for war, aggravated by a crisis in
capitalist competition, old monarchical rivalries and ambitions of
super-despotic rulers. The peoples of Europe, the radicals emphasized,
had neither say nor interest in the war: they were the sheep led to
slaughter on the altar of Mammon contending against Baal. America’s
great humanitarian mission, the war protestants insisted, was to keep
out of the war, and use its potent influence and compelling economic and
financial power to terminate the European slaughter and bring peace to
the bleeding nations of the old world.

But these voices of sanity and judgment were lost in the storm of
unloosed war passions. The brave men and women that dared to speak in
behalf of peace and humanity, that had the surpassing integrity of
remaining true to themselves and to their ideals, with the courage of
facing danger and death for conscience sake—these, the truest friends of
Man, had to bear the cross of Golgotha, as did the Nazarene of yore, as
the lovers of humanity have done all through the centuries of human
progress. The jail and lynch law for them; execution and persecution by
their contemporaries. But if it be true that history repeats itself,
surely these political “criminals” of today will be hailed tomorrow as
martyrs and pioneers.

The popular war hysteria was roused and especially successfully
cultivated by the alleged progressive, “intellectual” element in the
United States. Their notoriously overwhelming self-esteem and vanity had
been subtly flattered by their fellow-intellectual, the college
professor become President. This American _intelligentzia_ inclusive of
a good many quite unintelligent suffragettes, was the real “balance of
power” in the re-election of Woodrow Wilson. The silken cord
(occasionally golden in spots) of mutual interest that bound the
President and the intellectual element ultimately proved much stronger
at their end than at his. The feeling of gratitude is always more potent
with the giver than with the recipient. Howbeit the “liberals”, the
“radicals”, were devoted heart and soul to the professor,—they stood
solidly behind the President, to use their own intellectually expressive
phrase.

Shame upon the mighty power of the human mind! It was the “radical
intellectuals” who, as a class, turned traitors to the best interests of
humanity, perverted their calling and traditions, and became the
bloodiest canines of Mars. With a power of sophistry that the Greek
masters of false logic never matched, they cited history, philosophy,
science—aye, they called their very Christ to witness that the killing
of man by man is a most worthy and respectable occupation, indeed a very
Christian institution, and that wholesale human slaughter, if properly
directed and successfully conducted, is a very necessary evolutionary
factor, a great blessing in disguise.

It was this “intellectual” element that by perversion of the human mind
turned a peace-demanding people into a war-mad mob. The popular refusal
to volunteer for Service was hailed by them as a universal demand for
military draft as “the most democratic expression of a free
citizenship.” Forced service became in their interpretation “equality of
contribution for rich and poor alike.” The protest of one’s conscience
against killing was branded by them as high treason, and even mere
disagreement regarding the causes of the war, or the slightest criticism
of the administration, was condemned as disloyalty and pro-Germanism.
Every expression of humanity, of social sympathy, and understanding was
cried down with a Babel of high phrases, in which “patriotism” and
“democracy” competed in volume. Oh, the tragedy of the human mind that
absorbs fine words and empty phrases, and is deaf to motives and blind
to deeds!

Yet there lacked unanimity in the strenuously cultivated war demand.
There was no popular enthusiasm for American participation in the
European holocaust. Mothers protested against their children being torn
from the home hearth; fathers hid their young sons. The spirit of
discontent was abroad. The Government had to resort to drastic methods:
the hand of white terror was lifted in Washington. Again we raised our
voices to warn the people,—we, the revolutionists of various social
views who remained true to our ideal of human brotherhood and
proletarian solidarity. We pointed out that the masses of the world had
nothing to gain and everything to lose by war; that the chief sufferers
of every war were the workers, and that they were being used as mere
pawns in the game of international diplomacy and imperialist capitalism.
We reminded the toilers that they alone possessed the power to wage war
or make peace, and that they—as the creators of the world’s wealth—were
the true arbiters of the fate of humanity. Their mission, we reiterated,
is to secure peace on earth, and the product of labor to the producers.

Emphatically we warned the people of America against the policy of
suppression by the enactment of special legislation. Alleged war
necessity was being used—we asserted—to incorporate in the statute books
new laws and new legal principles that would remain operative _after_
the war, and be effective for the continued prohibition of
governmentally unapproved thoughts and views. The practice of stifling
and choking free speech and press, established and tolerated during the
war, sets a most dangerous precedent for after-war days. The principle
of such outrages upon liberty once introduced, it will require a long
and arduous struggle to win back the liberties lost. “Eternal vigilance
is the price of liberty.” Thus we argued.

Here again the “intellectuals” and radicals of chameleon hue hastened to
the rescue of the forces of reaction. We were scoffed at, our “vain
fears” ridiculed. It was all for the best interests of the country—the
sophists protested—for the greater security and glory of Democracy.


                                   II

Now reaction is in full swing. The actual reality is even darker than
our worst predictions. Liberty is dead, and white terror on top
dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past. Not a city in
the whole wide land but that forbids the least expression of an
unpopular opinion. It is descriptive of the whole situation that after
thirty years’ activity in New York, we are unable—upon our return from
prison—to secure any hall, large or small, to lecture even on the
subject of prison life or to speak on the question of amnesty for
political and industrial prisoners. The doors of every meeting place are
closed to us, as well as to other revolutionists, by order of the powers
that be.

Free press has been abolished, and every radical paper that dares speak
out, is summarily suppressed. Raids of public gatherings, of offices,
and private dwelling places, accomplished with utmost brutality and
uncalled for violence, are of daily occurrence throughout the United
States. The headquarters of Anarchists, of Socialists, of I. W. Ws., of
the Union of Russian Workers, and numerous other progressive and
educational organizations, have been raided by the local police and
Federal agents in practically every city of this country. Men and women
are beaten up indiscriminately, fearfully clubbed and blackjacked
without any provocation, frequently to be released afterwards because no
offence whatever could be charged against them. Books and whole
libraries of “radical centers” are confiscated, even text books of
arithmetic or geography torn to shreds, furniture destroyed, pianos and
victrolas smashed to kindling wood—all in the name of the new Democracy
and for the safety of the glorious, free Republic of these United
States.

The half-baked radicals, their hearts as soft as their heads, now stand
aghast at this terrible sight. They had helped to win the war. Some had
sacrificed fathers, brothers, husbands—all of them had suffered an agony
of misery and tears, to help the cause of humanity, to make the world
safe for democracy. Is _this_ what we fought and bled for? they are
asking. Have we been misled by the fine-sounding phrases of a Professor,
and have we in turn helped to delude the people, the suffering masses of
the world? Is the great prophet of the New Democracy strong only in
rhetoric?

Pity the mind that awaits miracles and looks expectantly to a universal
Savior. The clear-sighted man, well informed, may reasonably foresee the
inevitability of certain results from given causes. But only a charlatan
can play the great Savior, and only the fool has faith in him.
Individuals, however great, may profoundly influence, but are powerless
to control, the fate of mankind. Deep socio-political causes produced
the war. The Kaiser did not create it, though the spirit of Prussianism
no doubt accelerated its coming. Nor is President Wilson responsible for
the present bloody peace. He did not make the war: he was made by it. He
did not make the peace: he was unmade by it. The social and economic
forces that control the world are stronger than any man, than any set of
men. These forces are inherent in the fundamental institutions of our
wage-slave civilization, in the social atmosphere created by it, and in
the individual mind. These forces are by no means harmonious. The human
heart and mind, eternally reaching out for greater joy and beauty—the
spirit of idealism, in short—is constantly at strife with the
established, the institutionalized. These contending social and human
factors produce war, as they produce revolution.

The powers that succeeded in turning the instinctive current of man’s
idealism into the channels of war, became the masters of human destiny
for the nonce. By a campaign of publicity and advertising on a scale
history had never witnessed before, by chicanery and lying, by
exaggeration and misrepresentation, by persistent and long-continued
appeals to the basest as well as to the noblest traits of man, by every
imaginable and unprecedented manner and method, the great financial
interests, eager for war and aided by the international Junkers, thrust
humanity into the great world war. Whatever of noble impulse and
unsophisticated patriotism there was in the hearts of the masses, in and
out of uniform, was soon almost totally drained in the fearsome rivers
of human blood, in the brutal, filthy, degrading charnel house of
elemental passions set on fire. But the tiger in man, once thoroughly
awakened, grew strong and more vicious with the sights he witnessed and
the food he was fed on. The basest propensities unchained, the
anti-social tendencies engendered and encouraged by the war, and the war
propaganda, are now let loose upon the country. Hatred, intolerance,
persecution and suppression—the efficient “educational” factors in the
preparedness and war campaign—are now permeating the very heart of this
country and propagating its virulent poison into every phase of our
social life.

But there is no more “Hun” to be hated and lynched. Commerce and
business know their interests. We must feed Germany—at a good profit. We
must do business with its people. Exit the Hun—_der Moor hat seine
Schuldigkeit gethan_. What a significant side-light on the artificiality
and life-brevity of national and racial antagonisms, when the fires of
mutual distrust and hatred are not fed by the interested stokers of
business and religion! But the Frankenstein and intolerance and
suppression cultivated by the war campaign is there, alive and vital,
and must find some vent for his accumulated bitterness and misery.

Oh, there, the radical, the Bolshevik! What better prey to be cast to
the Frankenstein monster?

The powers that be—the plutocratic imperialist and the
jingo-profiteer—all heave a happy sigh of relief.


                                  III

The after-war conditions in the United States are filling the Government
and the more intelligent, class-conscious capitalists with trepidation.
Revolution is stalking across Europe. Its spectre is threatening
America. Disquieting signs multiply daily. A new discontent, boding ill
and full of terrible possibilities, is manifest in every walk of life.
The war has satisfied no one. Only too obviously the glorious promises
failed of fulfilment. Excepting the great financial interests and some
smaller war profiteers, the American people at large are aching with a
poignant disappointment. Some vaguely, other more consciously and
clearly, but almost all feel themselves in some way victimized. They had
brought supreme sacrifices, suffered untold misery and pain, in the
confident hope of a great change to come into their lives after the
victorious war, in the assurance of a radically changed and bettered
world.

The people feel cheated. Not yet have they been able to fix their gaze
definitely upon the specific source of their disappointments, to define
the true causes of their discontent. But their impatience with existing
conditions is passionate and bitter, and their former faith in the
established order profoundly shaken. Significant symptoms of a social
breakdown! Revolutions begin in the heart and in the mind. Action
follows in due course. Political and industrial institutions, bereft of
the people’s faith in them, are doomed. The changed attitude toward the
once honored and sacred conditions, now evident throughout the land,
symbolizes the complete bankruptcy of the existing order. The old
conceptions and ideas underlying present-day society are fast
disintegrating. New ideals are germinating in the hearts of the masses—a
prolific soil, rich with the promise of a brighter future. America is on
the threshold of the Social Revolution.

All this is well realized by the financial and political masters of this
country. The situation is profoundly disquieting. But most terrifying to
them is the new attitude of labor. It is unprecedented, intolerable in
its complete disregard of long accepted standards and conditions, its
open rebellion against Things as They Are, its “shameless demands,” its
defiance of constituted authority. Is it possible, the masters wonder,
that we had gone too far in our war-time promises of democracy and
freedom, of justice to the workers, of well-being for all? Too reckless
was our motto, “Labor will win the war”: it has given the toilers a
sense of their power, it has made them arrogant, aye, menacing. No more
are they satisfied with “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”; no,
not even with wages doubled and trebled. They are laying sacrilegious
hands upon the most sacrosanct institution of private ownership, they
challenge the exclusive mastery of the owner in his own mine and mill,
they demand actual participation in industry, even in the most secret
councils that control production and manipulate distribution,—aye, they
even dare suggest the taking over by labor of all industry.

Unheard of impudence! Yet this is not all. More menacing still is the
revolutionary spirit that is beginning to transfuse itself through every
rank of labor, from the highest-paid to the lowest, organized and the
unorganized as well. Disobedience is rampant. Gone is the good old
respect for orders, the will of superiors is secretly thwarted or openly
defied, the mystic power of contracts has lost its old hold. Labor is in
rebellion—in rebellion against State and Capital, aye, even against
their own leaders that have so long held them in check.

No time is to be lost! Quick, drastic action is necessary. Else the
brewing storm will overwhelm us, and the workers deprive us of the
wealth we have been at such pains to accumulate. Even now there are such
terribly disquieting rumblings, as if the very earth were shaking
beneath our feet—rumors of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” of
“Soviets of workers, soldiers and sailors.” Horrible thought! Why, if
the soldiers _should_ join these discontented workers, what would become
of us poor capitalists? Indeed, have not the police of Boston already
set the precedent—made common cause with labor, these traitors to their
masters!

“Soviet of Workers,” dictatorship of the Proletariat! Why, that’s the
Russian idea, the terrible Bolshevik menace. Never shall this, the most
heinous crime, be forgiven Soviet Russia! Readily would we overlook
their repudiation of the Czar’s numerous obligations and even their
refusal to pay their debts to the American and European money lenders.
We’d find some way to recuperate our losses, at a reasonable profit,
maybe. But that they have broken down the very pillars of capitalism,
abolished profits, given to the peasants the masters’ lands for
cultivation and use, proclaimed all wealth common property, and
subjected the aristocrat and capitalist to the indignity of working for
a living—this hellish arch-crime they shall never be forgiven.

That such things should threaten the rich men of this free country is
intolerable. Nothing must be left undone to prevent such a calamity. It
would be terrible to be put on a level with the common laborer, and we
with all our millions unable to procure champagne, because, forsooth,
some hod-carrier’s brat—illegitimate, perchance—did not get his milk for
breakfast. Unthinkable! That is chaos, anarchy! We must not permit our
beloved country to come to such a pass. Labor rebellion and discontent
must be crushed, energetically, forthwith. Bolsheviki ways and Soviet
ideas must gain no foothold in America. But the thing must be done
diplomatically; the workers must not be permitted to look into our
cards. We should be strong as a lion, subtle as the snake.


                                   IV

The war-time anti-Hun propaganda is now directed against the
“Bolshevik,” “the radical,” and particularly against the Slav or
anything resembling him. The man or woman of Russian birth or
nationality is made the especial target. The press, the pulpit, all the
servile tools of capitalism and imperialism combine to paint Russia,
Soviet Russia, in colors of blood and infamy. No misrepresentation, no
lie too base to be flung at Russia. Falsehood and forgery the weapons
where guns and bayonets have failed. The direct result of this poison
propaganda is now culminating in American pogroms against Russians,
Bolsheviki, communists, radicals, and progressives in general.

The United States has fortunately always been free from the vicious
spirit of race hatred and persecution of the foreigner. The native negro
excepted, this country has known no race problem. The American people
were never guilty of harboring bitterness or deep-seated prejudice
against members of other nationalities. In truth, the great majority of
them are themselves of foreign birth or descent, the only true native
being the American Indian. Whatever racial differences there may exist
between the various nationalities or stocks, they have never assumed the
form of active strife. On the contrary, they have always been of a
superficial nature, due to misunderstanding or other temporary causes,
and have never manifested themselves in anything save light,
good-humored banter. Even the much-advertised antagonism of the West
toward the Chinese and Japanese is not due to any inherent hatred, but
rather to very definite commercial and industrial factors. In the case
of the Russians especially, as well as in regard to members of the
various branches of the Slavic race, the people of America have always
been particularly friendly and well-disposed. But suddenly all the
war-time hatred toward the “Hun enemy,” the blindest intolerance and
persecution are poured upon the head of the Russian, the Slav. Great
indeed is the power of propaganda! Great is the power of the American
thought controller—the capitalist press. The Russian has become the
victim of American pogroms!

Often and again in the past have we Anarchists pointed out that the
feudal lords of this land would follow, in their march to imperialism,
in the footsteps of the Czars of old Russia, and even outdo their
preceptors. Our liberal friends denounced us as fanatics, alarmists, and
pessimists. Yet now we are confronted with a state of affairs in
democratic America which, in point of brutality and utter repudiation of
every fundamental libertarian principle, surpasses the worst autocratic
methods the Czars of Russia ever dared apply against political
dissenters.

The world is familiar with the story of the pogrom horrors practiced
upon the Jews of Czarist Russia. But what the world, especially the
American world, does not know is that every pogrom in Russia was
directly incited, financed, and prepared by the Government as a means of
distracting the attention of the Russian people from the corrupt
despotic regime under which they suffered—a deliberate method of
confusing and checking the fast growing discontent and holding back the
rising tide of revolutionary upheaval.

But thoughtful people in Russia were not long deceived by this hellish
stratagem. That is why Russians of character and intelligence never lent
themselves to the practice of Jew-baiting and persecution. The
authorities frequently had to resort to importing the human dregs of
distant communities, fill them with vodka, and then turn them loose on
the defenceless Jews. These Black Hundreds and hooligans of Czarist
Russia were the infamous regime now forever cast into the abyss of
oblivion by the awakened and regenerated spirit of New Russia. There
have been no pogroms in Soviet Russia.

But the Black Hundreds and the hooligans have now come to life again—in
democratic America. Here they are more mad and pernicious than their
Russian colleagues in crime had ever been. Their wild orgies of assault
and destruction are directed, not against the Jew, but against the more
comprehensive scape-goat of Capitalism, “the alien,” the “radical.”
These are being made the lightning rod upon which is to be drawn all the
fury of the storm that is menacing the American plutocracy. As the Czars
pointed at the Jew as the sole source and cause of the Russian people’s
poverty and servitude, so the feudal lords of America have chosen the
“foreign radical,” “the Bolshevik” as the vicarious victim for the sins
of the capitalist order. But while no intelligent and self-respecting
Russian ever degraded himself with the Czar’s bloody work, we see in our
democracy so-called cultured people, professional men and women, “good
Americans,” inspired and aided by the “respectable, reputable” press,
turn into bestial mobs. We see high Government officials, State and
Federal, play the part of the hooligans, encouraging and aiding the
American Black Hundred of legionaries, in a frenzied crusade against the
“foreigner,” whose sole crime consists in taking seriously the American
guarantees of free speech, free press, and free assembly.

The war hate against everything German was vicious enough, though the
people of America were repeatedly assured that we were not making war
against the German people. One can understand also, though not
countenance, the vulgar clamor against the best and finest expressions
of German culture, the stupid prohibition of the language of Goethe and
Schiller, of the revolutionary music of Wagner and Beethoven, the poetry
of Heine, the writings of Nietzsche, and all the other great creative
works of Teuton genius. But what possible reason is there for the
post-war hatred toward aliens in general and Russians in particular? The
outrages and cruelties perpetrated upon Germans in America during the
war pale almost into insignificance compared with the horrible treatment
the Russians in the United States are now subjected to. In fact, the
Czarist pogroms, barring a few exceptions, never rivaled the fearful
excesses now happening almost daily in various American cities, their
victims, men and women, guilty only of being Russians.

This state of affairs is the more significant because Russians, and the
Slavic people in general, were hitherto always welcomed to these shores
as the best offering Europe contributed to the Moloch of American
industry. The Slav was so good natured, and docile, such a patient
slave, so appreciative of the liberties he enjoyed in the new
land—“liberties” which the socially conscious American had long since
learned to see as a delusion and a snare. But to the unsophisticated
Russian peasant, always half-starved and browbeaten, they seemed real
and resplendant, the symbol of paradise found. By the thousands he
flocked to the promised land, swarmed into the centers of industry to
build our railroads, forge iron, dig coal, till the soil, weave cloth,
and toil at scores of other useful occupations, his reward a mere
pittance.

Nor was it only the workers in fields and factories who were welcomed
here from Russia. Russian culture was an honored guest in America. The
great literature of the Slav, his music, his dancing—all found the most
generous reception and fullest appreciation. Above all, the Russian
_intelligentzia_, the political refugees, exiles, and active
revolutionists that came to America, and came—most of them—not merely to
express their opinions but rather to plot the forcible overthrow of the
Russian autocracy, all found sympathetic hearing and generous purses in
this country, aye, even at the seat of Government.

And now? Now it is considered the most heinous crime to have been born
in Russia.

What has caused this peculiar change? What is back of this sudden
reversal of feeling?

_It is the Russian Revolution_. Not, of course, the Miliukov-Kerensky
revolution, but the real revolution that gave birth to Soviet Russia.
The submissive, enslaved, long-suffering Russian people unexpectedly
transformed into a free, daring Giant breaking a new path for the
progress of mankind—that is the reason for the changed attitude of the
capitalistic world. It is one thing to help Russian revolutionists to
overthrow the Czar and to put in his place a “democratic” form of
government which has proven such a boon to our own Czars of commerce and
industry. But it is quite a different thing to see the Prometheus of
labor rise in his might, strike off his chains, and with the full
consciousness of his complete economic power bring to life the dreams
and aspirations of a thousand years,—the economic, political, and
spiritual emancipation of the masses of the world. This pioneer social
experiment now being tried in Russia—the greatest and most fundamental
ever witnessed in all history—is the guiding star to all the oppressed
and disinherited of the world. Already its magic light is spreading over
the whole European horizon, the harbinger of the approaching Dawn of
Man. What if it should traverse the ocean and embrace our own shores
within its orbit? The whole social order of the financial Czars,
industrial Kaisers, and land Barons of America is at stake: the “order”
maintained by club and gun, by jail and lynch law in and out of court;
the “order” founded on robbery and violence, built upon sham and
unreason, artificiality and insanity, and supported by misery and
starvation, by the water-cure, the dungeon and straitjacket; an “order”
that transcends all chaos and daily makes confusion worse confounded.

Such social “order” is doomed. It bears within itself the virus of
disintegration. Already the conscience of America is awakening. The war
marked the crisis. Already American men have chosen imprisonment,
torture, and death, rather than become participants in an unholy war.
Already American men and women are beginning to realize the anti-social
destructive character and purpose of authority and government by
violence, force, and fraud. Already the workers of America are
outgrowing the vicious circle of craft-unionism, learning the lesson and
the power of solidarity of the international proletariat, and gaining
confidence in their own initiative and judgment, to the confusion and
terror of their antiquated, spineless leadership. Already they are
seeing through the sham of “equality before the law,” and are in open
rebellion to government by injunction.

A spark from the glowing flame of Soviet Russia, and the purse-proud
autocracy of America may be swept away by the social conflagration.

Wherefore the united chorus of all Czars and Kaisers, “Death to the
Bolsheviki, the aliens, the I. W. Ws., the Communists, the Anarchists!”


                                   V

Whatever might be said of the American plutocracy and the Government, no
one can accuse them of originality. The methods used by them to confuse
and confound the people are but cheap imitations of the old tactics long
resorted to by the despotic rulers of Europe. Even before the world war
Washington had borrowed many a trick from London. And all through the
war American militarism, with its conscription, espionage, torture of
conscientious objectors, and suppressive legislation, was but
aping—stupidly and destructively—the _modus operandi_ of the bankrupt
imperialism of the Old World. For lack of originality and ideas,
American officialdom was content to be the echo of the military and
court circles of London and Paris. And now again we witness Washington
following in the exact footsteps of the worst autocracy of modern times.
For the hue and cry against the “alien” is a faithful replica of the
persecution of the Jews by the Czars of Russia, and the American pogroms
against radicals are the exaggerated picture of Russian Jew-baiting.

And, finally, the most infamous and most inhuman method of Czarist
Russia, the method that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of the finest
and bravest men and women of Russia, and systematically robbed the
country of the very flower of its youth, is now being transplanted on
American soil, in these great United States, the freest democracy on
earth. The dreaded Russian _administrative process_ the newest American
institutions! Sudden seizure, anonymous denunciation, star chamber
proceedings, the third degree, secret deportation and banishment to
unknown lands. O shades of Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry!
That you must witness the bloodiest weapon of Czarism rescued from the
ruins of defunct absolutism and introduced into the country for whose
freedom you had fought so heroically!

What means the administrative process?

It means the suppression and elimination of the political protestant and
social rebel. It is the practice of picking men upon the street, on the
merest suspicion of “political untrustworthiness,” of arresting them in
their club rooms or homes, tearing them away from their families,
locking them up in jails or detention pens, holding them _incommunicado_
for weeks and months, depriving them of a hearing in open court, denying
them trial by jury, and finally deporting them or banishing them to
unknown shores. All this, not for any crime committed or even any
punishable act charged, but merely on the denunciation of an enemy or
the irresponsible accusation by a Secret Service man that the “suspect”
holds certain unpopular or “forbidden” opinions.

Lest the truth or accuracy of this statement be called in question, let
it be stated that at this very moment there are one hundred such
“political suspects” held at Ellis Island, with several hundred more in
the various Immigration Detention jails, every one of them a victim of
the administrative process described above. Not one of them is charged
with any specific crime; one and all are accused of entertaining
“illegal” views on political or Social questions. Nearly all of them
have been seized on the street or arrested in their homes or
reading-rooms while engaged in the dangerous pursuit of studying the
English language, mathematics, or American history. (The latter seems
lately to be regarded by the authorities as a particularly dangerous
occupation, and those guilty of it a _prima facie_ menace to our
American institutions.) Others were arrested in the factory, at their
work bench, or in the numerous recent raids of homes and peaceful
meetings. Many of them were beaten and clubbed most brutally, the wounds
of some necessitating hospital treatment. In the police stations they
were subjected to the third degree, threatened, tortured, and finally
thrust into the bull pens of Ellis Island. Here they are treated as
dangerous felons, kept all the time under lock and key, and allowed to
see their wives and families only once a week, with a screen between
them and malicious guards constantly at their side. Here their mail is
subjected to the most stringent censorship, and their letters delivered
or not, according to the whims of the petty officials in charge. Here
some of them, because they dared protest against their isolation and the
putrid food, were placed in the insane asylum. Here it was that the
brutal treatment and unbearable conditions of existence drove men and
women, the politicals awaiting deportation, to the desperate extremity
of a hunger strike, the last resort of defenseless beings, the
paradoxical self-defense of despair. For weeks and months these men have
now been kept prisoners at Ellis Island, tortured by the thought of
their wives and children whom the Government has ruthlessly deprived of
support, and living in constant uncertainty of the fate that is awaiting
them, for the good American Government, refinedly cruel, is keeping
their destination secret, and certain death may be the goal of the
deportees when the hour of departure finally strikes.

Such is the treatment and the fate of the first group of Russian
refugees from American “democracy.” Such is the process known as the
administrative methods, penalizing governmentally unapproved Thought,
suppressing _disbelief_ in the omniscience of the powers that be.

In enlightened, free America. Not in Darkest Russia.

When the terrible significance of the administrative process practiced
in Russia became known in Europe, civilization stood aghast. It caused a
storm of protest in the British Parliament, and called forth violent
interpellations in the Italian Diet and the French Chamber. Even the
German Reichstag, in the days of the omnipotent Kaiser, ventured a
heated debate of the barbaric administrative process which doomed
thousands of innocents to underground dungeons and the frozen _taigas_
of Siberia.

Are the Czar’s methods, the Third Section, the secret political spy
organizations, anonymous denunciations, star chamber proceedings,
deprivation of trial, wholesale deportations and banishment, to become
an established American institution? Let the people speak.

The full significance of the principle of deportation is becoming daily
more apparent. The field of its menace is progressively broadening. Not
only the alien social rebel is to be crushed by the new White Terror.
Its hand is already reaching out far for the naturalized American whose
social views are frowned upon by the Government. And yet deeper it
strikes. One hundred per cent Americanism is to root out the last
vestige, the very memory, of traditional American freedom. Not alone
foreigners, but the naturalized citizen and the native-born are to be
mentally fumigated, made politically “reliable” and governmentally
_kosher_, by eliminating the social critics and industrial protestants,
by denaturalization and banishment, by exile to the Island of Guam or to
Alaska, the future Siberia of the United States.

Following the “alien radical,” the naturalized American is the first
victim of the Czarification of America. Patriotic profiteers and
political hooligans are united in the cry for the “Americanization” of
the foreigner in the United States. He is to be “naturalized,”
intellectually sterilized and immunized to Bolshevism, so that he may
properly appreciate the glorious spirit of American democracy.
Simultaneously, however, the Federal Government is introducing the new
policy of summarily depriving the naturalized American of his
citizenship, in order to bring him when so desired, within the scope of
the administrative process which subjects the victim to deportation
without trial.

A most important precedent had already been set. The case of Emma
Goldman affords significant proof to what lengths the Government will go
to rid itself of a disquieting social rebel, though he be a citizen for
a quarter of a century.

The story is interesting and enlightening. More than eight years ago
Secret Service men of the Federal Government were ordered to gather
“material” in Rochester, N. Y., or elsewhere, that would enable the
authorities to disfranchise a certain Rochester citizen. The man in
question was of no concern whatever to Washington, as subsequent events
proved. He was an ordinary citizen, a quiet working man, without any
interest in social or political questions. He was never known to
entertain any unpopular views or opinions. As a matter of fact, the man
had long been considered dead by his local friends and acquaintances;
since he had disappeared from his home years previously and no clue to
his whereabouts or any sign that he was still among the living could be
found; indeed, has not been found till this day, notwithstanding the
best efforts. At great expense, and with considerable winking at its own
rules and regulations in such matters, the United States Government
finally disfranchised the man—the corpse, perhaps, for anything known to
the contrary. The proceeding necessitated a good deal of secrecy and
subterfuge, for even the wife of the man in question, whose status as
citizen by right of her marriage was involved, was not apprised by the
Government of its intended action. On the pretext that the man was not
fully of legal age at the time of his naturalization—about 20 years
before—the mighty Republic of America declared the citizenship of the
man of unknown whereabouts and against whom no crime or offence of any
kind was ever charged, as null and void.

Ten years passed. The disfranchised citizen, so far as humanly known,
was still as dead as at the time of his denaturalization. No trace of
him could be found, and nothing more was heard of the motives and
purposes of the Government in depriving of citizenship a man who had
apparently been dead for years. Dark and peculiar are the ways of
Government.

More time passed. Then it became known that the United States Government
intended to deport Emma Goldman. But Emma Goldman had acquired
citizenship by marriage 30 years before, and, as a citizen, she could
not be deported under the present laws of the United States. But lo and
behold! The Government suddenly announced that Emma Goldman was a
citizen no more, because her husband had been disfranchised ten years
ago!

Dark and peculiar indeed are the ways of government. But there is method
in its madness.

What a striking comment this case affords on the true character of
government, and the chicanery and subterfuge it resorts to when legal
means fail to achieve its purposes. Long did the United States
Government bide its time. The moment was not propitious to get rid of
Emma Goldman. But she must be gotten rid of, by fair means or foul. Yet
public sentiment was not ready for such things as deportation and
banishment. Patience! The hour of a great popular hysteria will come,
will be made, if necessary, and then we shall deport this _bete noir_ of
government.

The moment has now come. It is here. The national hysteria against
radicals, inspired and fed by the bourgeois press, pulpit, and
politicians, has created the atmosphere needed to introduce in America
the principle and practice of banishment. At last the Government may
deport Emma Goldman, for through the width and breadth of the country
there is not a Judge—and possibly not even a jury—with enough integrity
and courage to give this _enfant terrible_ a fair hearing and an
unprejudiced examination of her claim to citizenship.

Therefore Emma Goldman is to be deported.

But her case sets a precedent, and American life is ruled by legal
precedents. Henceforth the naturalized citizen may be disfranchised, on
one pretext or another, and deported because of his or her social views
and opinions. Already Congress is preparing to embody this worthy
precedent in our national legislation by passing special laws providing
for the disenfranchisement of naturalized Americans for reasons
satisfactory to our autocratic regime.

Thus another link is forged to chain the great American people. For it
is against the liberties and welfare of the people at large that these
new methods are fundamentally directed. Not merely against Emma Goldman,
the Anarchists, the I. W. Ws., Communists, and other revolutionists.
These are but the primary victims, the prologue which introduces and
shadows forth the tragedy about to be enacted.

The ultimate blow of the imperialist plutocracy of America is aimed at
Labor, at the increasing discontent of the masses, their growing
class-consciousness, and their progressive aspiration for more joy and
life and beauty. The fate of America is in the balance.

That is the true meaning and the real menace of the principle of
deportation, banishment, and exile, now being introduced in the life of
the United States. That is the purpose of the State and Federal
Anti-Anarchist laws, criminal-syndicalist-legislation, and all similar
weapons that the master class is forging for the defeat of the awakening
proletariat of America.

Shall the United States, once the land of opportunity, the refuge of all
the oppressed, be Prussianized, Czarified? Shall the melting pot of the
world be turned into a fiery caldron brewing strife and slaughter,
spitting tyranny and assassination? Shall we here, on this soil baptized
with the sacred blood of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War,
engage in the sanguinary struggle of brother against brother? Shall we
re-enact in this land the frightful nightmare of Darkest Russia? Shall
this land re-echo the horrible tramp, tramp of a thousand feet, on their
way to an American Siberia? Tortured bodies, manacled hands, clanking
chains, in weary, endless procession—shall that be the heritage of our
youth? Shall the songs of mothers be turned into a dirge, and little
babies be suckled with the teat of hate?

No, it shall not be. There is yet time to pause, to turn back. High
time, high time for the voice of every true man and woman, of every
lover of liberty, to thunder forth such a mighty collective protest that
shall reverberate from North to South, and East to West, and rouse the
awakened manhood of America to a heroic stand for Liberty and Justice.

But if not,—if our warning prediction unhappily come true and the
fearful tragedy be played to its end, yet shall we not despair, nor
misdoubt the _finale_.

Hateful is the Dream of Oppression. And as vain. Where the man who could
name the judges that doomed Socrates? Where the persecutors of the
Gracchi, the banishers of Aristides, the excommunicators of Spinoza and
Tolstoy? Their very memory is obliterated by the footsteps of Progress.
Unceasingly it marches, forward and upward, all obstacles
notwithstanding, keeping time with the heart beats of Humanity. Vain the
efforts to halt it, to banish ideas, to strangle thought. Vain the
frenzied struggle to turn back the hands of Time. The mightiest Goliath
of Reaction has fought his last fight—his final gesture, Old Russia, a
hopeless surrender. Too late to revive this corpse. It is beyond
resurrection. Attempts there may be, aye, will be, for the Bourbons
never learn,—and the people are long suffering. But attempts useless,
destructive, utterly fatal to their purpose. The Dream of Reaction ends
in abysmal nightmare.

It is darkest before dawn, in history as in nature. But the dawn has
begun. In Russia. Its light is a promise and the hope of the world.




                           WHAT’S TO BE DONE?


Men and women of America, there is much work to be done. If you hate
injustice and tyranny, if you love liberty and beauty, there is work for
you. If oppression rouses your indignation, and the sight of misery and
ugliness makes you unhappy, there is work for you. If your country is
dear to you and the people your kin, there is work for you. There is
much to be done.

Whoever you are, artist or educator, writer or worker—be you but a true
man or true woman—there is important work for you. Let not prejudice and
narrow-mindedness blind you. Let not a false press mislead you. Permit
not this country to sink to the depths of despotism. Do not stand
supinely by, while every passing day strengthens reaction. Rouse
yourself and others to resent injustice and every outrage on liberty.
Demand an open mind and fair hearing for every idea. Hold sacred the
right of expression: protect the freedom of speech and press. Suffer not
Thought to be forcibly limited and opinions proscribed. Make conscience
free, undisciplined. Allow no curtailment of aspirations and ideals.
These are the levers of progress, the fountain-head of joy and beauty.

Join your efforts, lovers of humanity. Do not uphold the hand that
strangles Life. Align yourselves with the dreamers of the Better Day.
The cause is worthy, the need urgent. The future looks towards you, its
voice calls you, calls.

May it not call in vain.

And you, fellow workers in factory, mine, and field, a great mission is
yours. You, the feeders of the world and the creators of its wealth, you
are the most interested in the fate of your country. The menace of
despotism is greatest to you. Long has your masters’ service humiliated
and degraded you. Will you permit yourselves to be driven into still
more abject slavery? Your emancipation is _your_ work. Others may help,
but you alone can win. In shop and union, take up this your greatest
problem. Let not the least of you be victimized. Remember, an injury to
one is the concern of all. No worker can stand alone in the face of
organized capitalism with all its legislative and military weapons.
Learn solidarity: each with a common purpose, all with a common effort.
Know your enemy: there is no “mutual interest” between the robber and
the robbed. Understand your true friends. You’ll always find them
maligned and persecuted by _your_ enemies. The idealists, the seekers of
the slaveless world, speak from _your_ heart. Give them hearing.

Your fate, the fate of the country, is in _your_ hands. Yours is the
mightiest power. There is no strength in the Government, except you give
it. No strength in your masters, except you suffer it. The only true
mastery is in you, the working class, in your power to feed and clothe
the world and make it joyous. The greatest power, for good or evil. Use
it for liberty, for justice. Allow no suppression of the freedom of
thought and speech, for it is a snare for _your_ undoing. Sooner or
later every suppression comes home to labor, for its greater
enslavement. Realize the menace of deportation, of the principle of
banishment and exile. ’Tis the latest method of the American plutocracy
to silence the discontent of the workers. Lose no time. It is of the
most vital importance to you. It threatens you, your union, your very
existence. Take the matter up in your organizations. The fortunes of
labor in America are at stake. Only your united effort can conquer the
peril that menaces you. Take action. Rouse the workers of the whole
country. In union and solidarity, in clear purpose and courage is your
only salvation.


Quotations from American and Foreign Authors Which Would Fall Under the
               Criminal Anarchy Law, Espionage Law, Etc.

These authors, distinguished thinkers, philosophers and humanitarians of
world-wide renown would, if still alive and of foreign birth, not be
permitted on American shores if they tried to land here, or, if born
Americans, they would be threatened by deportation to the Island of
Guam.


                            ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The man who will not investigate both sides of a question is dishonest.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or
even one hundred defeats.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The authors of the Declaration of Independence meant it to be a
stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn free
people back into the paths of despotism.

I have always thought that all men should be free, but if any should be
slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and
secondly those who desire it for others.

If there is anything that it is the duty of the whole people never to
intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and
perpetuity of their own liberties.


                            THOMAS JEFFERSON

All eyes are opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the
light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth,
that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,
nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,
by the grace of God.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1)
Without government, as among our Indians. (2) Under governments wherein
the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England,
in a slight degree, and in our States, in a great one. (3) Under
governments of force; as is the case in all other monarchies, and in
most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence
under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over
sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition
is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great
degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it.
The mass of mankind under that, enjoys a precious degree of liberty and
happiness. It has its evils, too; the principal of which is the
turbulence to which it is subject. But weight this against the
oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Even this evil is
productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of governments, and
nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it, that a
little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the
political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions,
indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the
people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should
render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of
rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine
necessary for the sound health of governments.

                  *       *       *       *       *

We have long enough suffered under the base prostitution of law to party
passions in one judge, and the imbecility of another.

                  *       *       *       *       *

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand
by itself.


                         WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Liberty for each, for all, and forever.

No person will rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the
world are put in peril.

When I look at these crowded thousands, and see them trample on their
consciences and the rights of their fellowmen at the bidding of a piece
of parchment, I say, my curse be on the Constitution of the United
States.

Why, sir, no freedom of speech or inquiry is conceded to me in this
land. Am I not vehemently told both at the North and the South that I
have no right to meddle with the question of slavery? And my right to
speak on any other subject, in opposition to public opinion, is equally
denied to me.

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there
not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth, and as
uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or
speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on
fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife
from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not
equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will
be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap
from its pedestal and hasten to the resurrection of the dead.—_In the
first issue of the Liberator, January 1, 1831._


                            WENDELL PHILLIPS

If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, let it crack.

Nothing but Freedom, Justice, and Truth is of any permanent advantage to
the mass of mankind. To these society, left to itself, is always
tending.

“The right to think, to know and to utter,” as John Milton said, is the
dearest of all liberties. Without this right, there can be no liberty to
any people; with it, there can be no slavery.

When you have convinced thinking men that it is right, and humane men
that it is just, you will gain your cause. Men always lose half of what
is gained by violence. What is gained by argument, is gained forever.

The manna of liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten.

Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake
to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

Let us believe that the whole truth can never do harm to the whole of
virtue; and remember that in order to get the whole of truth, you must
allow every man, right or wrong, freely to utter his conscience, and
protect him in so doing. Entire unshackled freedom for every man’s life,
no matter how wide its range. The community which dares not protect its
humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no
matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves.


                         STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS

Governments have hitherto been established, and have apologized for the
unseemly fact of their existence, from the necessity of establishing and
maintaining order; but order has never yet been maintained, revolutions
and violent outbreaks have never yet been ended, public peace and
harmony have never yet been secured, for the precise reason that the
organic, essential, and indestructible natures of the objects which it
was attempted to reduce to order have always been constricted and
infringed by every such attempt. Just in proportion as the effort is
less and less made to reduce men to order, just in that proportion they
become more orderly, as witness the difference in the state of society
in Austria and the United States. Plant an army of one hundred thousand
soldiers in New York, as at Paris, to preserve the peace, and we should
have a bloody revolution in a week; and be assured that the only remedy
for what little of turbulence remains among us, as compared with
European societies, will be found to be more liberty. When there remain
positively no external restrictions, there will be positively no
disturbance, provided always certain regulating principles of justice,
to which I shall advert presently, are accepted and enter into the
public mind, serving as substitutes for every species of repressive
laws.


                              HENRY GEORGE

In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious forces that,
producing inequality, destroy Liberty. On the horizon the clouds begin
to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further; we must
trust her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay.
It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should
be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail
themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on
equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or
Liberty withdraws her light! Either this, or darkness comes on, and the
very forces that progress has evolved turn to powers that work
destruction. This is the universal law. This is the lesson of the
centuries. Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social
structure cannot stand.


                          HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for
it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A
common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may
see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates,
powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale
to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and
consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a
palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable
business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.
Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at
the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as
machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the
militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there
is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but
they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and
wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as
well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as
these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and
office-holders—serve the State chiefly with their heads; and as they
rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the
devil, without _intending_ it, as God.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government
today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace, be associated with it.
I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as _my_
government which is the _slave’s_ government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse
allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its
inefficiency are great and unendurable.


                          RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are.

                  *       *       *       *       *

                   For what avail the plough or sail
                   Or land or life, if freedom fail?

                  *       *       *       *       *

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes
in the twisting.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and
prisons is very ill laid out.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.
What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in
the word _politics_ which now for ages has signified _cunning_,
intimating that the State is a trick?

                  *       *       *       *       *

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what
is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to
carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were
titular and ephemeral but him. I am ashamed to think how easily we
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions.


                              EDMUND BURKE

All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with
experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of
justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to
dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity to the reigning
interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of
state. It is a reason which I own I cannot penetrate. What sort of a
protection is this of the general right, that is maintained by
infringing the rights of particulars? What sort of justice is this which
is enforced by breaches of its own laws? These paradoxes I leave to be
solved by the able heads of legislators and politicians. For my part, I
say what a plain man would say on such occasion. I can never believe
that any institution, agreeable to nature, and proper for mankind, could
find it necessary, or even expedient, in any case whatsoever, to do what
the best and worthiest instinct of mankind warn us to avoid. But no
wonder that what is set up in opposition to the state of nature should
preserve itself by trampling upon the law of nature.


                              THOMAS PAINE

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine
to the dead.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for
government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and
govern itself; but so contrary is the practice of old governments to the
reason of the case, that the expenses of them increase in the proportion
they ought to diminish. It is but few general laws that civilized life
requires, and those of such common usefulness, that whether they are
enforced by the forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly
the same. If we consider what the principles are that first condense men
into society, and what the motives that regulate their mutual
intercourse afterwards, we shall find, by the time we arrive at what is
called government, that nearly the whole of the business is performed by
the natural operation of the parts upon each other.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best
state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant
and the most rascally individuals of mankind.


                            JOHN STUART MILL

Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man
named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public
opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision. Born in an
age and country abounding in individual greatness, this man has been
handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the age, as the
most virtuous man in it; while we know him as the head and prototype of
all subsequent teachers of virtue, the source equally of the lofty
inspiration of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, the
two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. Their
acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since
lived—whose fame, still growing after more than two thousand years, all
but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native
city illustrious—was put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial
conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the Gods
recognized by the State; indeed his accusers asserted (see the
“Apologia”) that he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by
his doctrines and instructions, a “corrupter of youth.” Of these charges
the tribunal, there is every ground for believing, honestly found him
guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved
best of mankind, to be put to death as a criminal.


                            HERBERT SPENCER

When we have made our constitution purely democratic, thinks to himself
the earnest reformer, we shall have brought government into harmony with
absolute justice. Such a faith, though perhaps needful for the age, is a
very erroneous one. By no process can coercion be made equitable. The
freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule
of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many
is tyranny also, only of a less intense kind. “You shall do as we will,
and not as you will,” is in either case the declaration; and, if the
hundred make it to ninety-nine instead of the ninety-nine to the
hundred, it is only a fraction less immoral. Of two such parties,
whichever fulfills this declaration, necessarily breaks the law of equal
freedom: the only difference being that by the one it is broken in the
persons of ninety-nine, whilst by the other it is broken in the persons
of a hundred. And the merit of the democratic form of government
consists solely in this,—that it trespasses against the smallest number.

The very existence of majorities and minorities is indicative of an
immoral state. The man whose character harmonizes with the moral law,
we found to be one who can obtain complete happiness without
establishing the happiness of his fellows. But the enactment of public
arrangements by vote implies a society consisting of men otherwise
constituted—implies that the desires of some cannot be satisfied
without sacrificing the desires of others—implies that in the pursuit
of their happiness the majority inflict a certain amount of
_un_happiness on the minority—implies, therefore, organic immorality.
Thus, from another point of view, we again perceive that even in its
most equitable form it is impossible for government to disassociate
itself from evil; and further, that, unless the right to ignore the
State is recognized, its acts must be essentially criminal.


                            LYOF N. TOLSTOY

The cause of the miserable condition of the workers is slavery. The
cause of slavery is legislation. Legislation rests on organized
violence. It follows that an improvement in the condition of the people
is possible only through the abolition of organized violence. “But
organized violence is government, and how can we live without
governments? Without governments there will be chaos, anarchy; all the
achievements of civilization will perish, and the people will revert to
their primitive barbarism.” But why should we suppose this? Why think
that non-official people could not arrange it, not for themselves, but
for others? We see, on the contrary, that in the most diverse matters
people in our times arrange their own lives incomparably better than
those who govern them arrange for them. Without the least help from
government, and often in spite of the interference of government, people
organize all sorts of social undertakings—workmen’s unions, co-operative
societies, railway companies, and syndicates. If collections for public
works are needed, why should we suppose that free people could not
without violence voluntarily collect the necessary means, and carry out
all that is carried out by means of taxes, if only the undertakings in
question are really useful for anybody? Why suppose that there cannot be
tribunals without violence?

                  *       *       *       *       *

The robber generally plundered the rich, the governments generally
plunder the poor and protect those rich who assist in their crimes. The
robber doing his work risked his life, while the governments risk
nothing, but base their whole activity on lies and deception. The robber
did not compel anyone to join his band, the governments generally enrol
their soldiers by force. All who paid the tax to the robber had equal
security from danger. But in the state, the more any one takes part in
the organized fraud the more he receives not merely of protection, but
also of reward.


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