[Unedited]
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”
John Hay.
On Picket Duty.
It is certainly very liberal on the part of the “Cincinnatian,” a Nationalist organ, to reprint in full and on its first page Mr. Donisthorpe’s “Defence of Anarchy.” Should it pursue such a policy long, it will make Anarchists of all its subscribers.
“Lucifer,” whose “specialty is sexology,” makes J. K. Ingalls inquire “which maxim is best adapted to reduce violence and wrong-doing to a minimum, — the Golden Rule or the Sex talionis.” This is one of the sad results of having sex on the brain.
Lucien Saniel, the Socialist Labor party’s candidate for the New York mayoralty, declared on the stump that, if he were to be elected, he would, in the event of a street-car strike, order the capitalists owning the street-car line to resume traffic in two hours or lose their charter. It is pretty safe to talk tall of what one would do in remote contingencies. If Lucien Saniel were mayor of New York at the time of a street-car strike, he probably would follow the rule that most mayors follow, and do the thing in his judgment beet calculated to insure his reelection.
I am thoroughly convinced that the mind of Mr. J. Greevz Fisher, the debate between whom and Mr. Bilgram is continued on another page, runs, when considering financial problems, in so deep a groove that it is incapable of grasping the views which it undertakes to combat. When Mr. Fisher confounds mutual banking with inflationism; when, on the strength of the Anarchists’ assertion that the laborer’s wages ought to be sufficient to buy back his product, he supposes them to believe that the laborer wishes or needs to actually buy it back; when he charges the Anarchists with contemplating an increase in the total exchanging power of the currency without a corresponding increase in the total value of the currency (of course the two things are identical); and when he persists in these ridiculous errors after there have been pages of discussion and refutation, — he simply demonstrates the futility of further discussion. A man who clings to the old exploded notion that a three-cent piece is sufficient for the transaction of all the world’s business must be left where he belongs, — in the past; and that is Mr. Fisher’s economic habitat. As good a soldier of liberty as he is in general, when it comes to finance he is a back number. And I am weary of back numbers. It is useful to discuss only with those who, keeping abreast of modern thought, can understand what is said to them. Besides, the conundrum propounded by Mr. Bilgram will sufficiently tax Mr. Fisher’s mental energies for the present.
A syndicate article on Anarchy has lately appeared in the New York “Press” and in other important journals. Like nearly all newspaper articles on this subject, it contained some truth and much wild exaggeration. Since I am named as the source of the writer’s information, I wish to state distinctly that I am responsible only for the truthful portions. The writer himself told the lies. And his worst lie was his promise to show me a proof of the article prior to its appearance.
One of Liberty’s subscribers, Mr. P. H. Burns, of Helena, Montana, thinks that, in view of the great interest taken in Anarchism at the present time, it would be a good idea to issue a souvenir number of Liberty, containing from twenty-four to fifty pages, in the hope that, by the ccoöperation of the subscribers in purchasing and distributing extra copies, an edition of ten thousand copies or more might be circulated. That the idea is a good one there is no doubt; but the generosity of Liberty’s friends is already taxed nearly to the limit in the effort to publish the paper regularly in its ordinary form. I fear that for the present we must content ourselves with this.
Whenever Henry George does a good and brave thing, it is especially fitting that I, who hold him in a contempt that is well-nigh unspeakable, should be among the first to give him credit for it. For this reason, among others, I print in another column his manly words before a recent political meeting in denunciation of David B. Hill as the father of the anti-Anarchist bill. From the standpoint of the purpose of the meeting the utterance was certainly impolitic; for, in the present state of public opinion toward Anarchism, Hill could only gain by being exhibited as a bitterly unfair and oppressive opponent thereof. The disgust of the committee in charge must therefore have been great. And so united is the daily press in its determination to suppress every good word in behalf of Anarchism that, with the exception of the New York “World,” not a single paper printed the slightest report of this portion of Mr. George’s remarks. Liberty does what it can to offset this suppression, and frankly acknowledges the sturdiness of Mr. George’s attitude. But in so doing it retracts not a syllable of its stern judgment in the past. Yes, David B. Hill is, as Mr. George says, a nice man to talk about freedom of opinion; and so is Henry George. He has shown courage and fairness on this subject before now. He showed these qualities before 1887; he has shown them repeatedly since 1887. But in that memorable year he developed a depth of treachery to which few men of his calibre have ever descended and for which nothing hereafter can atone. It is probable that the future has other November Elevenths in store, and it is important to know upon whom we can rely. This we know, if precedent proves anything, — that Henry George’s conduct, when such a crisis comes, will be governed by his political interest at the time. This year it was insignificant; in 1887 it was great. But though at the next crisis it should be as great or greater, he cannot disappoint us again, for we shall expect nothing. Meanwhile let the infamous record stand; he will try in vain to wash his bloody hands. He never will forgive Hill for his tyrannical bill; much less will I forgive Aim, from whom more was to be expected, for his justification of the Garys and the Grinnells. And I print once more what I said on a similar occasion in 1889: “Henry George’s Standard” makes a protest against the attitude of the Chicago authorities toward public meetings and processions. It is too late in the day, Mr. George, for you to pose as a champion of freedom of speech. You once had a chance to vindicate that cause such as comes to a man but once in a lifetime, and in the trial hour you not only failed the cause, but betrayed it. Let one of the meetings against the suppression of which you now protest be held; let some one present throw a bomb and kill an officer; let the speakers be arrested on a charge of murder; let a jury packed with the hirelings of capital convict them; let a judge sentence them to be hanged; let the supreme court formally sanction the whole; let a large portion of the people, hounded on by a bloodthirsty and prostituted press, clamor for these men’s death; and let this culminate in the middle of a political campaign in which you are running for office: under these circumstances should we not see you do again what you have done once already, — declare that a supreme court can do no wrong, that in face of its opinion you recant yours, that the convicted men deserve to be hanged, and that you will not lift voice or pen to save them? We have known you, Henry George, in the past, and we know you for the future. The lamp holds out to burn, but for no such vile sinner as yourself. In vain your efforts to return to the fold. As Ingersoll says, ‘’Twon’t do.’”
“In abolishing rent and interest, the last vestiges of old-time slavery, the Revolution abolishes at one stroke the sword of the executioner, the seal of the magistrate, the club of the policeman, the gunge of the exciseman, the erasing-knife of the department clerk, all those insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel.” — Proudhon.
The appearance in the editorial column of articles over other signatures than the editor’s initial indicates that the editor approves their central purpose and general tenor, though he does not hold himself responsible for every phrase or word. But the appearance in other parts of the paper of articles by the same or other writers by no means indicates that he disapproves them in any respect, such disposition of them being governed largely by motives of convenience.
A Business Government.*
The purification of government is the topic of the hour. The revelations of the senatorial committee, not yet complete, have aroused interest in a problem which has hitherto been slighted. The interest has not been quite a fervent interest; indeed, the comparative apathy of the public has been roundly denounced by some publications.
We are all at heart corrupt, they say, or such evidence as has been brought forward would cause such a wave of popular indignation as would sweep forever, — and a good deal more of such rhetoric. The truth is that the evidence merely corroborates what had before been a settled conviction of most people. Everybody knew that New York politics was corrupt, but nobody had facts to back the opinion. So still everybody knows that precisely similar corruption prevails in every large city of the United States, — yes, of the world, — and to a less extent in smaller places.
Everybody knows that the State and national governments as well as the European monarchies are similarly corrupt, although by different methods from police methods.
But until now the New York city government could snap its fingers in the face of aspersors, with the demand, “Prove it. Support your charges; or you only convict yourself of malignancy and lying.”
And until now the evidence to support the charges was not attainable.
So now everybody knows that laws are made against Chinese; yet the Chinese continue to come. Everybody knows that occasional flashes reveal a state of affairs in the customs department approaching that in the New York city police department. Everybody knows the boasts that rich men have made of their power to purchase legislation.
Everybody guesses very well what exists beneath, but there is as yet no means of establishing what is well known to men of the world, — what none but sentimentalists would deny.
Even the managers of the present inquiry, if we may accept provisionally printed statements, have no hope of permanent reform. They expect that similar purifications will be periodically required under the administration of any party, — a sort of moral house-cleaning.
It would seem that no long argument should be needed to convince people that there must be something fundamentally out of gear in a mechanism which breaks down as soon as it starts, so to speak.
There is one thing that may console us: badly off as we are, there are others in a worse way. Although governmental corruption is universal, there are degrees of it. In China it is said to be colossal; in Turkey and Russia, with their semi-civilized autocracies, there is well-nigh as much as in China. The European governments are by no means so bad, although more corrupt than the United States; while England, which, although a monarchy in name, is in spirit and institutions freer than any democracy, probably suffers less from corruption than any other existing government.
The more intense the form of government, the more closely it tries to direct and control the acts of its subjects, the more certainly is corruption developed: the more closely circumscribed the functions of government, the more carefully repelled its encroachments, the more easily is purity preserved.
It is full time that such matters were investigated with a cool head. We are too apt to let our emotions rule us in such matters; to burst forth in denunciation of what could not be otherwise, and to resort to ill-considered and ineffective remedies before we have even tried to discover the causes.
And it would seem probable, too, from all analogy, that some new principle of government must soon be propounded and, after due thought, accepted. The material progress of the world has in our day — in the past brief seventy or eighty years — culminated. Methods of manufacture, of commerce, of travel, are as far from those of the past as the methods of the Martians may be from these.
Just now a well-known politician is reported to have made a tour through New York State, speaking in ten different places in a day. We jump on the train at New York, dine, go to bed, breakfast, and before another dinner are a thousand miles away in Chicago or New Orleans.
What a fairy tale for our grandfathers that would have been! So with our Arabian Nights telegraphs and telephones and electric lights, which our dull minds call humdrum and matter-of-course, not knowing a romantic age when we live in it. Add to this an industrial development which suffers only from its over-efficiency, — which produces so much that we have not enough. So at least say they who talk of over-production as an ill.
But our political arrangements are of the past; not medbeval, it is true, but of the time of queues and knee-breeches; nearer in spirit, if not in years, to medisevalism than to modern times.
New suggestions, it would seem, in matters political ought to be as acceptable as in matters mechanical: an age which regards flying machines as a near probability should have its nerves fortified against the shock of novelty in merely intellectual propositions.
Yet the principle that I am about to set forth, while new to most of us, is really far from novel. It has been discussed by thinkers more or less for ages, and would before now have been taken up by the people had the times been ripe for it.
Morality! morality! is now the cry. Honesty and probity and all that sort of thing the purists say that the people demand “in trumpet tones.”
How can you expect, messieurs reformers, that all the virtues can spring from a poisoned soil? that honesty can come from a system that is founded on dishonest?
“Dishonesty?” you ask with a start; “what do you mean? We do not know what you are talking about. We propose to elect honest men, and then things will be done honestly, will they not? System, forsooth! What is the man talking about?”
I assert that not only the New York city government, but that that of the United States and of England, and France, and Russia, and all other countries, is based upon open dishonesty, — more than dishonesty, theft, — more than theft, robbery by violence. What do you call an institution that gets the whole of its income by taking it by force? An honest institution? Hardly.
The principle of supporting governments by taxation, of making people pay for things against their will, is at bottom a principle of warfare, of robbery; and everything that stands upon it is inevitably permeated with dishonesty. The principle of the future will be that of voluntary payment for protection as much as for cigars.
This is the principle which I do not announce, — for it has been before announced, — but which I press upon the attention of the world.
Before you slam the book shut, listen.
I am not proposing immediate action.
I am not asking you to vote for anybody or anything. I ask for the acquiescence of the mind only. Very possibly some of the objections which you can urge more quickly than I can reply may be paramount. Very certainly no immediate change of method can be expected or even desired. All that can be asked is a quiet mental acquiescence in a proposition on the face of it inexpugnable, and a thoughtful consideration of its eventual practicability.
At the worst it is but an attempt at a political flying-machine; and sneers, even for flying-machines, are out of order in an age all new.
But we need not take this worst view of it, for, after all, it is not so absurd to think that, if we want to be honest, it is well to start by being honest, and not to pick a man’s pocket in the first place, and then hug ourselves for our virtue in rendering him a strict account of the oatmeal and sugar we have bought for him, and the small commission we have kept for our own support. Better, more virtuous, indisputably, to refrain from picking his pocket in the first place.
“But it would be impracticable,” you say. “All that you say may be true in the abstract about taxes being dishonest; but, after all, it is mere Sunday-school talk, impossible quixotism; things are not done in that way in the world of facts. We talk honesty, but we don’t really mean it. Business has nothing to do with the golden rule. It was a business-government, you remember, that you were going to talk about.”
It is because it is a business-government that is demanded in a business-age that fundamental honesty, the first requirement of business, is necessary. I say that honesty is the first requirement of business, not as a sentimental phrase, or with any blindness to the pervasive dishonesty that actually exists in business. Knowing all of this very well, I still say that honesty is the foundation of business; the principle of honesty, of giving in return for what others are willing to give, and of giving equal value for equal value, is what makes business possible; and that dishonesty, wide-spread as it is, is an evanescent aberration, a survival of the military methods of the age which we are leaving behind us.
In the future — not so very far in the future either — government will be reduced to a minimum; and what government there is will get its pay as other enterprises do, by deserving it and earning it, not by taking it.
How is it possible that government, as it is today, should be otherwise than corrupt? Conceive, if you please, a business concern conducted as government is conducted. Or conceive government as it is, turned into a business concern. Suppose, for example, all the other functions of government abolished, and the function of life-insurance assumed instead.
In the first place, all existing life-insurance concerns would be prohibited and abolished, so that no standard of competition would remain by which we could judge of the quality of the insurance offered to us by government.
We should all have to take it, whether we liked it or not, as Squeers’s pupils took the sulphur and molasses; in fact, we should be regarded as “disloyal” if we even entertained an opinion that the governmental insurance was not the beat possible.
Our premiums would be taken, if not paid, by the summary proceeding of selling our property and appropriating the amount demanded. There would be a vast crowd of insurance officials elected every year, with absolute power, when once they were elected, to fix the amount of premiums to be taken and to determine the mode of their expenditure. Under these circumstances the Great American Insurance Company would become very much what the Great American Republic is now.
The officials, knowing that their tenure of office and emolument depended more upon getting votes than upon doing their work, would inevitably make getting votes their business, as would those who had formerly had their places and wanted to get them again. Two parties, the Ins and the Outs, would alternate in running the concern, and both would be compelled for the preservation of their life to run it more for their own benefit than for the economical insurance of other people. Each would have to put up a part of his emoluments to pay for the operation of getting votes, and, as long as there were plenty of men out of work and hard up, votes could be bought and would be bought by subscription, of the Ins to keep their places, of the Outs to get them.
Doubtless this would be wrong, but it would be inevitable.
The amount of premiums to be collected would be as great as the officials dared to make it; the insurance would be as inefficient as they dared to make it. Being without the commercial check of bargaining, the customer not being able to refuse to buy, nothing but the fear of popular revulsion, throwing them out of their places, would restrain the exactions of the officials. All sorts of plausible pretexts for establishing new places and increasing the pay-roll and the premium fund would be invented.
Lavish expenditure upon buildings and other plant would be encouraged and admired by the insured as evidence of the greatness of the Great American Insurance Company. When the danger point in the amount of premiums demanded was approached, recourse would be had to bonds, thus skilfully making the running expenditure seem trifling, when really it was enormously increased; even deficiency bonds to meet the running expenses would be issued.
It is easy to see that a business carried on in this way would at once degenerate into a nest of corruption, as governments everywhere tend to degenerate.
The only remedy will be found to be placing the governments on a business footing, — giving their members the commercial privilege of refusing to buy the wares offered at their pleasure.
It must be remembered that, after all, governments are but machines for accomplishing certain purposes.
Three kinds of things governments, for the most part, at present assume to do: first, protecting the lives, possessions, and liberties of their adherents; secondly, carrying on certain undertakings which, it is said, voluntary associations could not do; thirdly, making people be good.
The last is not admitted as a legitimate function of government nowadays by thinkers and writers; nevertheless in the popular mind and in practice it is one of its recognized occupations.
Life will be pleasanter, though, for every-body when governments finally relinquish trying to make people be good, as they must eventually. Such attempts are the Sunday laws, the liquor prohibition laws, and all such, which a tyrannically-minded majority enacts. There is no more sense in Sunday laws than there would be in Saturday laws if our Jewish compatriots happened to be in the majority. They, however, are far more tolerant than to enact such laws, although what they might become if demoralized by the possession of power cannot be foretold.
The attempt to make people be good is formally antagonized in the Declaration of Independence, where it asserts the pursuit of happiness as something to be protected by the government. Now to pursue happiness means to do as you please, whether what you please appears virtuous to the majority or not, provided only that you do not restrain them from their pursuit of happiness.
Some day men will get tired of hounding each other for different notions of happiness; persecution will teach tolerance; the prize-fighter will enjoy as much bloody eye and broken nose as gives him pleasure, and none will be distressed if they are not obliged to pay to witness the amusement.
Take out the third heading, the inculcation and enforcement of virtue as a necessary occupation of government.
Along with this abolish the whole business of industrial undertakings by governments. Lloyds would do the work of the Lighthouse Board far better and cheaper. Street-cleaning, even now, must be done by a private cleaner, employed by an association of house-holders, if it is to be done at all, except in the main thoroughfares, which the officials of the Great American Governing Company do not venture to neglect. Street-building and paving would be better done in the same way.
Even railroad-building, which, if anything, might be guessed to be probably better done by government, is admittedly better done by private initiative.
I cannot further partieularize, but it is evident à priori that where the purchaser may decline to pay he is likely to get better service in public works. Take away public works as a necessary function of government.
Finally, protection, the only remaining function of government, if it is to be called protection at all, must be done with the consent of the protected; otherwise, it ceases to be protection and becomes attack.
As men lose their superstitious respect for governmental institutions, a respect which is a survival of the respect for the monarch personally, and which is naturally still strong, having existed during the ages of development from the primitive savage state, they will learn that they can do better for themselves various things which they now concede to governments, they will restrict the functions of government to protection only, and even this will be performed by voluntary payments.
Such a change implies, of course, many other changes in the spontaneous adjustments of society. What these changes will be in substance has been elaborately worked out by other writers, whose conclusions may not at this time be set forth. It is sufficient to say that for those who care to pursue the subject it can be shown that they are in the direction of greater freedom and consideration for the individual, and the completer fulfilment of democratic ideals, in opposition to the tyrannical and all-engulfing State with which State Socialism threatens us.
John Beverley Robinson.
* This paper was written for one of the prominent American reviews, and rejected as too theoretical. Its appearance in the editorial columns of Liberty should be accompanied by the statement that the writer uses the word government in its loose and popular sense, instead of observing the rigidly scientific definition given to the term by the editor. Of course, if judged by the definition referred to, — “coercion of the non-invasive individual,” — the “business government” here foreshadowed would not be a government at all, but a simple business enterprise.
The “Irreparable” Repaired.
This is a season at which the editor of Liberty may, with propriety, depart from his usual custom and say a word or two of politics. Two years ago, when some of my fellow-Anarchists were throwing bats in air over the “irreparable disaster” which in their view had overtaken the Republican party, I wrote the following words to dampen their enthusiasm:
“Irreparable disasters” are no new thing in politics; their most astonishing feature is the speed with which they are generally repaired. I have seen the fortunes of the Democracy at a far lower ebb than has yet been reached by Republicanism, but today it is on top again. Republicanism seems to me equally likely to experience a revival. Though it sees its rival in full possession of the Capitol, it knows that the Tarpeian Rock is near, and it will await its hour. At the proper time it will again find welcome at the people’s hands. The great mass of voters will not lose faith in government until economic reform has been put in operation without the aid of government and in spite of it; then indeed they will abandon politics altogether; but until then they will continue to oscillate from party to party, their confidence in government unshaken, quite as gullible as ever.
By the election of 1894 my prophecy of 1892 has been fulfilled even sooner and more emphatically than I had expected, and the record of the last two years is a complete vindication of the anti-political attitude which I maintained, despite the disapproval of some of my comrades, during the last presidential campaign. If I erred at all, it was in placing too much rather than too little faith in the pledges of the Democratic party. I allowed that the Democrats might give us a revenue tariff adjusted incidentally with an eye to American interests, and State regulation of finance instead of national regulation. They have done neither. They have given us a tariff which in many of its sections is purely protective, and the bank-note tax they have positively refused to touch. And, although they spent too much time over the tariff snarl to enable them to do much in the direction of fulfilling my expectation of new measures of paternalism, they nevertheless have managed to present us with an income tax, have invented a new phase of absolutism in the shape of government by injunction in order to dispense with trial by jury, have given a startling and perilous twist to the constitution by an unprecedented stretching of the powers conferred by it upon the central authority whereby federal troops may hereafter usurp the protective functions heretofore exercised by local authorities, and have come within an ace of passing an anti-Anarchist bill.
This record must be entrancing to the gaze of those Anarchists who either voted or cheered for Cleveland in 1892. I call attention to it not to pose as a prophet or to exult over the comrades who differed with me two years ago, but simply to emphasize the lesson that in politics there is nothing for Anarchism. T.
Inspired by a “Picket Duty” paragraph and one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms in Liberty, Mr. John Badcock, Jr., last January delivered an able lecture before the South Place Junior Ethical Society in London on “Slaves to Duty,” which he has since published as a thirty-page pamphlet. In this lecture Mr. Badcock lays the spook of duty most effectively. He takes up, one by one, the various kinds of duties, — political, social, marital, filial, etc., — discusses them as to their merits and demerits, and demonstrates that the subordination of self on the part of the individual to their requirements prevents him from appreciating the full value of existence and realizing the promises it originally holds out. In the place of duty Mr. Badcock puts — nothing, as “superstitions never want replacing,” but simply counsels people to study where their true and lasting interests lie and to turn all their energies to the furtherance of these, regardless of codes, moral and political. In treating of the nature of motive, Mr. Badcock rejects the notion that a motive is fundamentally ever other than egoistic. To speak of any motive as altruistic in its source, he holds is false. It is refreshing to turn from the maudlin ethical sentimentalism of the times among nearly all classes of reformers to these sane and healthy pages of Liberty’s English friend.
Interest is Just.
To the Editor of Liberty:
Sir, — Mr. Bilgram may declare as often as he likes that in the absence of money the rate of interest would of necessity be much higher than it is now; but his assertions will not make it so. The rate of interest is wholly independent of the plentifulness or scarcity of money, and is equally independent of its existence, contrivance, discovery, or customary adoption. The rate of interest is determined by the plentifulness and productiveness of wealth or capital. The entire absence of the usage of one commodity as a denominator of price would have no further effect than to impede the process of exchange. But money is not indispensable even for exchange. Barter is always possible. In fact, monetary exchange is only a phase of barter where one commodity is conventionally caused to enter into almost every bargain and even into almost every calculation. But still less is money absolutely requisite for every loan. The loan of a knife or the loan of a loaf — credit of either tools or materials in marginal cases (which determine the whole) — cause a deprivation to the lender for the benefit of the borrower. If one lend another his horse for a day, it is not enough to feed it and pay for its having aged one day. The lender has been deprived of a day’s pleasure from the combination of himself and the horse. He has had to do without the horse. Is he to have nothing in justice for this infliction The hire of the horse may be paid in corn or Coin; the value paid will depend upon the profit to be secured to the borrower through the use, and to be surrendered by the lender through the non-use, of the horse. The parties and society and the world will be a day older when the hiring is ended and the horse returns. Neither the seasons nor our lives can be recalled. Their lapse can be valued by supply and demand. Many horses and small marginal profit from their use will produce small rate of hire. Few horses and high marginal profit will cause a high rate. So abundant wealth and low marginal profit will produce low interest, even if there be no monetary custom or if gold or money be dear and scarce. When actual wealth is large and potential wealth upon its last increment is small, then interest must be low, whether money abound or there is none. If Mr. Bilgram be right when he states the contrary, he may also be able to analyze the forces at work and name those which must cause the effect he announces. It will not suffice to contend that the absence of money, when it hampers exchange, reduces the productiveness of capital and labor, and hence, the potential wealth in prospect being less, the rate of interest must be by so much the less. This consideration cannot weigh in inquiring whether interest rises and falls with the scarcity and plentifulness of money. As money becomes scarce, it becomes more potent in exact proportion to its rise in value. Its monetary function is intensified, in fact, in a slightly greater degree because the portability of a certain equivalent of value increases. If gold were ten times as valuable, one sovereign would do as much work in conveying and exchanging value as ten do now. In retail trade no doubt this would frequently substitute the bulkier florin for the portable sovereign, but in wholesale and international trans• actions portability would be gained. If, on the other hand, gold were to fall to one-tenth its value, the sovereign would only do two shillings’ worth of monetary work, and the rate of interest would be wholly unaffected after the disturbance incidental to the transition had subsided.
The case named by Mr. Bilgram, where firms at Hartford, Conn., tried to substitute checks for notes, only goes to prove that, so long as one mode of credit has a halo and glamor thrown over it by government privilege, no close imitation of it can be tolerated. Credit never can circulate exactly as money; and no government ought so to act as to create an artificial over-resemblance between credit and money. Rights are a creation of conventionalism and custom, or (as some think) of law. Anarchists believe that rights may exist apart from government; but so long as government regards itself and is generally regarded as the basis of rights, it can impose such conditions as it chooses upon the legal recognition of rights. In England it imposes a fee of one penny upon the issue of every check. A check payable on demand is a bill of exchange between two parties. Government in England also recognizes a bank note. Here negotiability is conferred and upheld by law. A bank can reissue the same note again and again, the old date upon its face not invalidating it. But he who would reissue the same check would infringe the stamp acts. This is by the way. The fact is that credit, however created, has the same effect upon prices as an lame of notes. There may be a perceptible difference between two forms of checks.. This is not at all the same as a “radical difference” claimed by Mr. Bilgram.
Mr. Bilgram’s recent work on money (for a copy of which I thank him) reveals no Anarchist, but a thorough monetary gbvernmentalist. Credit is not money, and even Mr. Bilgram’s projected machinery would fail to make it so. Neither government nor Anarchy can make promise equal to performance. It may be superior for some purposes, but it must always be classed apart. All the help of all the governments in the world will never “enable every one possessing adequate credit to turn this credit into money.” There are many people who could borrow if they chose, but who do not choose to do so. Turning one’s credit into money is a circumlocution for borrowing.
Over-production is a fallacy. The supposed gain from more money would be more production; hence, of course, more over production.
As for Mr. Tucker, it would be well if he could show what kind of errors are not recognizable as those of a quack or a crank. Whenever a writer goes in for some nostrum, he becomes thereby and to that extent a quack; and by his error he betrays some crookedness in his mental machinery, — the crankiness of a crank. On the question of currency it is almost safe to assume without discussion that every machinery. monger is a crank. It is only when Anarchists, who ought to lead the van of progress, entangle themselves in such quackery that it becomes worth while to analyze their mode of puzzleheadedness and place a finger upon the very slip which leads to the disaster. General Walker may distinctly declare many things. The point for an Anarchist is, can the particular declaration be proved, and how? The demand for money is amply satisfied at the present moment, and there is no money famine whatever! There are many poor people, truly, of whom a possibly large proportion could make profitable use of other people’s wealth if it could be entrusted to them. Those who can invent and elaborate means for extending these loans will benefit society and doubtless forward the progress of liberty, for both go hand in band. But it is not money which is wanted to effect this; nor prating about the producer buying back his product, — the last thing in the world he would dream of doing. It is rather by a frank recognition of the just obligation of the borrower to admit that the lender is a vender of a commodity (the loan) for which he ought to be paid the market price. This is as true under utter freedom or Anarchy as under law and government.
Does Mr. Tucker consider currency is restricted in Ireland, where the Bank of Ireland is unable to keep in circulation its authorized issue of notes? Surely he must be aware of the oft-repeated failures of inflationists. All these doctrinaires would greedily accept General Walker’s or any other man’s word for it that the demand for money cannot be satisfied under mono-metallism (or Mr. Tucker’s corrected version of General Walker’s supposed loose statement); but it is obvious that their fancied discoveries of money famines and their charlatan treatment crushed small business men and kept labor in subjection. Mutual banking would be all right if it propounded a method of lending wealth. When it proposes to create it by getting people to handle pieces of paper and laments that it is the want of liberty alone which prevents this being done, it is a curse to the cause of liberty, and must be spurned as a faulty weapon and a treacherous friend. J. Greevz Fisher.
Rejoinder.
Mr. Fisher may declare as often as he likes that the rate of interest is determined by the plentifulness and productiveness of wealth or capital; but his assertion will not make it so.
I presume he will admit that the normal rate of interest is determined by normal conditions, and that abnormal plentifulness or scarcity of capital plays no part in the determination of the normal rate. Nor can he maintain that now, when a large number of manufactories are idle, there is a scarcity of capital that could account for an iota of interest.
Next, as to the productivity of capital. If this phrase means anything, it means that the value of goods produced by the aid of capital exceeds the cost of their production. However, modern economists have at last arrived at the conclusion that competitive values always tend to that point where utility and disutility equate. The value of the hire of the horse in the illustration presented is, accordingly, determined by the equation of the marginal day’s pleasure (utility) on the one side, and a day’s attention, feed, risk, and loss by ageing (disutility) on the other. Determined by the marginal day’s pleasure, the hire is accordingly equal to the expenditures enumerated, and the excess, claimed to constitute interest, remains unaccounted for. The alleged productivity of capital, as a result of the operation of supply and demand, is accordingly a myth, and Mr. Fisher’s assertion falls to the ground in every particular.
Since I deny that the value of money rises in exact proportion as it becomes scarce, I consider the quibble based on this fallacy out of order.
The Hartford incident, instead of being a justification of the government’s attitude, shows conclusively that, by choosing to Impose arbitrary conditions, it forcibly prevents manufacturers from taking those steps that would definitely terminate all crises.
Why does my opponent assert that credit is not and cannot be money? Our dispute hinges on interest, and any form of currency commanding interest must be included in our discussion. Borrowers cannot refuse to pay the stipulated interest on the ground that they received only “promises” (bank-notes), but no money; and Mr. Fisher should not avail himself of this technicality, postulating a distinction where there is no difference bearing on the subject under discussion.
In the measure in which interest is a payment for risk, I not only admit, but maintain, that interest is just. I only assail as unjust that part of interest which is said to be paid for being “deprived of a day’s pleasure from the combination of himself and the horse”; and I wish Mr. Fisher would explain, on this basis, the following conundrum.
First case: Farmer F has a horse worth $500, which Sportsman S hires from him for one year, the stipulated hire being $125, of which $100 covers the loss due to ageing, and $25 the interest on the value of the horse.
Second case: from Banker B, who possesses the right to issue bank-notes to be used as currency, S borrows $500 in notes, for one year, at 5 per cent., and buys the horse of F, who, having no present use for the money, keeps it for one year. At the end of the year he buys the horse for $400, the ageing representing a loss of $100, and 5, adding $125, returns this money to the banker, cancelling his loan.
Conundrum: in both cases F was deprived of a year’s pleasure from the combination of himself and wealth worth $500, but only in the first case is he paid for his abstinence. In neither case was the banker deprived of any combination betwixt himself and any wealth, yet in the second case he obtains the pay which F had earned by his abstinence. Why should this be so? The loss of interest to F in the second case cannot be attributed to his neglect of utilizing the notes, for they were not wealth; they were only promises, and by keeping them he deprived nobody of any opportunity. Moreover, if he had used the notes and they had been in circulation during the year, each holder would have been deprived of the pleasure of the possession of wealth worth $500 while the notes were in his possession, and the successive holders would have sustained an aggregate loss of one year’s pleasure. But even assuming that the exchange facilities conferred by the notes had been an adequate remuneration for this loss, the question remains, why does the banker receive the pay for their abstinence? The banker’s obligation of being constantly prepared to redeem the notes, should they be presented, is no adequate excuse, since it is known that bankers have on hand a redemption fund of only about twenty per cent. of the volume of the outstanding notes; hence the abstinence practised by the banker is only about one-fifth of that of the holders of the notes, yet the banker gets all the pay, while the holders of the notes get none.
The holder of bank-notes has delivered wealth to society, and has in hand merely a right to demand an equivalent from society at some future time. He is, accordingly, a creditor, an abstainer. If abstinence is that which entitles a person to interest, then the possessor of money is entitled to interest on the value of the money in his possession. Of course, such a claim would be absurd; but not more so than the claim for payment of interest for a mere delay in consuming that which a man has produced.
Now, one more word. Judging from the past discussion, my opponent has about half a dozen independent theories of interest at his fingers’ ends. Now interest is due to the scarcity of capital, then to the productivity of capital, next it is a remuneration for abstinence, or the pay for the superiority of the banker’s over the borrower’s credit. By the alternate use of these theories the issue can successfully be evaded. If these tactics are to be continued, then the sooner we conclude this farce of a debate, the better. It is impossible to try conclusions with an adversary who, upon being approached, retreats and takes a stand in another quarter of the arena. Hugo Bilgram.
Hill’s Anti-Anarchist Bill.
At a political mass meeting held in Cooper Union Saturday evening, November 8, to ratify the nominations of the anti-Hill Democracy, Henry George, who was the principal speaker of the evening, surprised the audience by scoring Hill in the following fashion for his action in introducing the anti-Anarchist bill:
Mr. Hill is posing as a defender of liberty of opinion! He has raised the cry against the A. P. A. I do not need to tell anyone here that I do not belong to the A. P. A. I do not have to tell anyone here that I am not a bigot in religion. For, seek where you please, there is one place where you will not find them, and that is in the ranks of the Single-Tax men. As for this A. P. A., I have seen the thing where it began; I have heard the beat of the Orange drums on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne at Belfast, and a very funny thing it is. Wherever that bigotry exists it is simply an importation from the other side of the water, — something that grew up there. It was a device of the landlords to split the Irish people. But it will die out here. It cannot live at this time and in this country.
David B. Hill is posing as the defender of the right of belief and opinion! He is a nice man to pose as a defender of that right. Here is something that there has been very little said about. I would like to occupy a little time in speaking of it.
Here is a copy of Senate Bill No. 2314. Since the first congress met, aye, since the first colonial legislature was formed, there never has been so wanton, so flagrant an attack upon the principle of liberty of thought as this bill, and David B. Hill is its author. This is the bill popularly known as the Anti-Anarchist Bill, — the bill introduced into the Senate of the United States in its closing days by David B. Hill. I am not an Anarchist; it is also needless for me to say that; but I am far from sharing in that opinion that Anarchists are merely men who want to use dynamite. The Anarchists have not a monopoly of physical force. That has been used over and over again, — by trades unions, by the American patriots, by people of all kinds. Anarchy, in its true meaning, is a belief; it is a political philosophy; it is an extension to its ultimate of tha old Democratic belief that the best government was the government that governed least. The Anarchists would abolish govern. ment. In that I think they are mistaken. I think they go too far on one side, just as the Socialists go too far on the other side. But every Anarchist has a right to his opinion.
Now, what is this bill, “A bill to provide for the exclusion and deportation of alien Anarchists”? It provides that every alien seeking admission into the United States is to be examined, if he is suspected of being an Anarchist. Examined as to what? As to whether he ever blew up a house? Ever killed an emperor I Ever murdered a brutal and oppressive governor, whom human laws could not reach? No, nothing of that kind. He is to be examined by pertinent questions as to his antecedents, and as to hie opinions of gorernment! As to his opinions of government! Is there any difference in examining a man as to his opinions of government, and, if you don’t like him, sending him back again, than in examining him as to his opinion as to God, and, if you do not like it, sending him back? He is also to be examined as to whether he belongs to any society or association of known Anarchistic tendencies, and this board “may examine the person of such alien for marks indicative of such membership.” What does that mean? It means to strip him naked and examine him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet for marks. What marks? Do you suppose that men watched for by all the police of the monarchies of Europe make marks on themselves, so that they can be known by them when caught? No, but in some of those countries political prisoners are marked. This precious bill made that a way of finding out whether any man coming to this country in search of liberty had been under the ban of the despotic police of Europe. And more: this board may accept evidence of an immigrant’s common reputation as an Anarchist, and “the orders, decrees, or judgments of foreign governments and police investigations may be taken as prima facie evidence, to be deemed sufficient, unless successfully controverted!”
What is this bill? It is an attempt to make this great republic of the West one of the partners, and the most efficient partner, in the league of European despots to put down freedom of thought. It goes on to provide that, in case these precious examiners think there is evidence of the alien holding such opinions, he is to be sent back from this country. And further, the bill goes on to appropriate $80,000 of American money — $60,000 of money wrung from labor by the most atrocious taxation — to send agents, who are virtually to be police spies, to Europe, there to confer with the political police of European countries, and to give information of passengers to this country suspected to be Anarchists.
Why, under this bill such a man as Prince Kropotkine, a man who enjoys the hospitality of England today; a man who, as an investigator, has rendered the greatest scientific service; or such a man as Elisee Reclus, who enjoys the freedom of free Switzerland; a man who stands today as the most eminent of living geographers; under that bill, if these men came to this country, they could be detained at the dock, examined on their opinions as to government, stripped to their skins and searched for marks, and then sent back to Europe! The man who introduced that bill was David B. Hill; a man posing as a Democrat, posing today as a lover of labor; posing today as a defender of free thought. There never was such an atrocious bill introduced into the Congress of the United States. [Cheers.] And in that senate that has become an American House of Millionaires; that senate that was only anxious to serve the Sugar Trust for good and sufficient reasons; in that senate this atrocious bill passed without opposition, and it might have been today the law of the laud, just as that atrocious Russian Treaty that binds us to send back political offenders to Russia is the law of the land. It might have been the law of the land, but, thank God! there was one real Democrat in his place in the House, a New York Democrat, a Single-Tax Democrat, — John DeWitt Warner, — who stood up and protested and killed that bill there and then. No man who ever introduced such a bill as that into the senate of the United States, whatever else he may have done; no man who ever fathered such a bill as that, can have my vote at any time or for anything! [Great cheers.] And John DeWitt Warner, the man who stood up and saved the honor of the American name, the man who has been true to all his pledges, — he has been turned down by Tammany. You cannot vote for him this year.
“The garden of the laws is full of ironical plants, of unexpected Mowers and by no means its slightest charm is this subversion of the natural order, whereby appear at the end of stems and branches fruit just the opposite of that which is promised by the essence of the tree or bush. The apple-tree bears figs, and the cherry-tree medlars: plants yield sweet potatoes, and hollyhocks salsify. It is delicious.” Séverine.
The Beauties of Government.
The readers of Liberty are urgently invited to contribute to this department. It is open to any statement of facts which exhibit the State in any phase of its fourfold capacity of fool, meddler, knave, and tyrant. Either original accounts based upon the writer’s own knowledge, or apparently reliable accounts clipped front recent publications, are welcome.
MORE ABOUT MAJORITY MANUFACTURE.
[New York Sun.]
CHICAGO, Nov. 8. — If one-tenth of the threats made by members of the two leading political parties to punish infractions of the registration laws are carried out, the Illinois State prisons at Joliet and Chester will have to be increased in capacity fourfold, or a lot of new prisons built, to accommodate Chicago’s political malefactors. Article VI of the General Election law, which provides for the punishment of offenders against its provisions, is incisive and plain in its terms as regards fraudulent registration and any offence that is likely to militate against a fair registration.
That hundreds of cases of the most flagrant violations of these provisions exist is a fact well known to the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican city central committees. In every precinct of every ward in the city wholesale frauds have been perpetrated, — an unusual thing in Chicago, for, while it has been a common practice to “colonize” voters in past years, this has usually been carried on only in the down-town or business districts and in the districts immediately surrounding these localities, largely given over to tramp lodging houses. In no other cities in the world are such nefarious dives as common as in Chicago. On State, Clark, West Madison, West Randolph, West Washington, and Halsted streets, Fifth avenue and its North Side continuation, known as Wells street„North Clark street, and dozens of minor thoroughfares crossing these streets, there are hundreds of such places. Most of them are old, ramshackle frame structures or disreputable-looking, tumble-down brick buildings, and in the “levee” district of State street, and in “Chinatown,” as Clark street south of Van Buren is called, scores of damp, foul-smelling basements are utilized, where the lowest types of men congregate and sleep at prices of from five to fifteen cents a night each. These places are the hotbeds of disease and vice. Morally they are the plague spots of this overgrown town; in a sanitary way they are a menace to public health. It would seem that, with a magnificent appropriation for cleaning its streets and alleys and a health department abundantly supplied with funds, something might be done to eliminate such nests of vice and squalor from the city’s map. But nothing of the kind is done — and why?
The answer is simple. These localities are political paradises; the men who control the vermin-infested lodging houses and basement dives are men of political power, and are growing rich from the very cultivation of foulness. Their ability to dictate how hundreds of men who are nightly huddled into their dens shall vote make them men of political might, and none who have aspirations for honors of office that are the gifts of the people can afford to ignore them. They are the men who made “Bath House John” Coughlin, Powers, O’Brien, and other gamblers and dive keepers aldermen, and they send disreputable men to the legislature or set them up in high places at home. Even the judiciary is not free from the contamination, and the ermine of more than one judge in our courts of record is soiled by the vermin of South Clark street.
With such a condition of things it is easy to see how corruption in registration is facilitated in quarters where everything should be done to check it. A partisan judiciary is responsible in great measure for the frauds that have been perpetrated in preparing the registration lists for 1894. Chicago is not always Democratic, and Cook county gives a plurality for one party quite as frequently as for the other. Therefore the election of judges becomes purely a political matter, and it is not too much to presume that judges thus elevated to office have at heart the interests of their own particular party and the perpetuation of its power; or, if it is not the party in power, then the overthrow of the opposition and its own elevation.
Right here are shown the loopholes through which a vast proportion of the frauds creep in. Naturalization of aliens is one of the most important features of a political campaign in Cook county. Party head-quarters are the centres of naturalization work, and the county committees appoint sub-committees, whose work is to get all the new voters they can for their respective parties. Out of the campaign fund is paid the small fee demanded by the courts for turning a foreigner into a full-fledged American citizen and voter, and the ignorant alien who desires to become an American, with a hyphenated prefix, is usually ready to promise his vote to the party which first approaches him with an offer of free naturalization.
He is then told to report to the party headquarters at a certain time, and when a squad of fifty or a hundred is assembled, the services of a judge are secured, and the party is marched to the court room chaperoned by trusty henchmen. The evidence required by law to entitle a man to citizenship, if the alien cannot furnish it, is easily manufactured, and the judge, who is generally in a hurry to get through with the crowd, seldom performs his duties in the manner contemplated by the law. His Honor is of the same political faith as the “trusties,” who are in charge of the raw material from which voters are made, and he does not question very closely. A witness is introduced — he may testify for the entire batch of applicants, if he dares perjure himself in such a wholesale manner — and testifies that he has known So and So for such a length of time; that the man has to his knowledge lived in the United States for at least five years and in the State at least one year. That ends the formula, unless the judge is suspicious of fraud, — a very rare occurrence. The clerk says: “Fifty cents, please,” and the man is ready to register as a voter.
In registration the opportunities for fraud are practically limitless, and the indications and proofs in this year’s registration show that in the political history of Illinois nothing like it was ever before known. Thus far thousands of fictitious names have been discovered on the registry by the active workers of both parties. A name becomes a “suspect” to the Republicans if they do not know how it got in the list, and it is a case of “horse and horse” with the Democrats. Of between 9,000 and 10,000 names on the suspect list it is estimated that fully 6,000 will be dropped, and that nobody will appear at the polls to answer to them, for fear of consequences. But this number does not by any means include the entire fraudulent registration, possibly not one-half of it, and it is probable that from 15,000 to 20,000 illegal votes will be cast in Chicago.
More than 1,000 illegal votes will be counted in the Twenty-third ward, unless the plans of “colonizers” can be frustrated. Such notorious crooks as “Jerry” Daly, “Clabby” Burns, and “Major” Samson have been devoting their undivided attention to the work of colonization, and the result is that lodging houses and cheap hotels are flooded with thieves, disreputables, and hoboes who have registered. The frauds are not confined to colonization. Men who have never as much as slept in the ward are registered in the various precincts. On the registration books they are assigned to fictitious residences. Dozens of men, too, are registered from single houses of size sufficient for only the smallest families. In the Fourth precinct, given up almost entirely to factories and containing but few residences, more than 700 names are registered, which is several hundred more than ever appeared on the books before. At 139 Erie street is “Joe” Higgins’s saloon and concert hall, a wretched-looking two-story frame shanty, from which a dozen voters are registered, though, it is declared, not one of the men registered lives in the building.
In a small building at 93 Kinzie street is a “colony” of twenty-three alleged voters; irons the Garfield House, 81 Wells street, are registered the names of more than fifty men as voters; the Bangor House, Market and Michigan streets, is put down as the residence of more than one hundred voters, or double its normal capacity of lodgers. At 364 South Clark street, in the Second ward, a low saloon with three cramped rooms above, gives shelter, it is declared, to nineteen voters, and a low dive at 22 Meridian street, in the Eighteenth ward, harbors the enormous number of eighty-six, though a family of six would be uncomfortably crowded in its small and miserable rooms.
One might go on almost indefinitely citing instances of palpable frauds and violations of the law. Some arrests have been made; others are threatened with imprisonment, and a few are in jail or held under bait bonds to answer charges against them, but it is im-probable that many will go to either Joliet or Chester for their participation in the wholesale fraud of the campaign of 1894. Chicago couldn’t afford such a depletion of its population.
CHICAGO, Oct. 28. — There is no doubt that there have been wholesale frauds in the recent registration of voters.
The “Herald” this morning prints a list of 200 names of suspects on the Republican side, alleging that the Republicans have been colonizing the negroes. The “Tribune’s” leading news article is headed: “Bums on the Run,” followed by the state-ment that Joliet prison stares Democratic colonizers in the face.
One day several hundred ignorant foreigners were taken into the Circuit Court. The only English word they knew was “five.”
“How long have you lived in this country?” would be asked.
“Five,” was the reply.
“What is your name?”
“Five,” and so on through the list, the answer being “Five” to each, even when asked if they would renounce allegiance to all foreign potentates and powers. Another crowd, all Italians, was brought in by a politician named Pat Sanders, and the only reply made by a majority to the questions was “Pat San.”
PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 28. — An effort to purge the assessors’ lists of perhaps 60,000 names of persons who would not be entitled to vote has been made by some of the best known Democrats in the city.
As a result 500 names were expunged in the Fifth ward alone yesterday, and many more are likely to follow in the other wards. One assessor was arrested last night, warrants were issued for two others, and more will be issued this week.
Registration frauds are easily accomplished in Philadelphia. There is no law requiring personal registration, but the small army of assessors make what is supposed to be a personal house-to-house canvass of the several wards and record the names of the voters.
It is easy to leave on the lists the names of men who have moved from the city, and thus the registration is swelled for a great popular uprising of the people. In this manner the lists were so palpably padded this fall that the fraud was easily discoverable.
PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 2. — The climax to the great registration frauds in this city was reached today when the “Record” found a dog registered in due and regular form, on the assessor’s list in the eighth division of the Eighth ward, as a voter under the name of “William Rifle.” Willie is just a plain, ordinary dog, and according to the affidavit of his mistress, Mrs. Annie Chapin, made today, he is wholly innocent of any participation in the fraud.
Mrs. Chapin swears that, when Joseph H. Moore, the colored assessor, came to her house, at 1231 Canby street, and asked for all the voters in the house, she gave him the only three there were, her husband and two boarders.
“That all?” asked Moore.
“Yes, all except the dog,” replied Mrs. Chapin in a joke.
“What’s his name?”
“Willie.”
“Willie, eh? We’ll put him down as Willie Rifle. You ought to have four voters in this house, anyhow. If anybody asks you who Willie Rifle is, tell them he’s a lodger. Ta-ta.”
Mrs. Chapin says the assessor seemed to enjoy the joke hugely, and she thought it really was a joke on his part. When she saw the name on the list, she was. very much surprised. Moore was arrested today, and Magistrate Eisenbrown held him under $800 bail to answer for frauds in his bailiwick.
[Chicago Times.]
Evidence was placed in the hands of the Democratic executive committee yesterday which removes all doubt as to the aid being given to the Republicans by the Pullman company. Not only is the Pullman company giving financial assistance to the Republican legislative ticket, but proof is given that it is coercing its employees to vote the Republican ticket by threats to close down the works in the event of Republican defeat.
It is stated on reliable authority that the Pullman company has for several days been laying off a number of men until after election, the managers telling them that they will be reinstated if a Republican legislature is elected. Day before yesterday, it is alleged, sixteen blacksmiths were laid off in this manner, the following notice aecompanying the order:
“If the Democrats elect a majority in the legislature, the company may have no further need for your services, but, if the Republicans win, you will be reinstated at increased wages.”
This statement was made to several of the Democratic managers yesterday by some of the men so laid off. Their names are not made public for the reason that they would be blacklisted if they were known to the Pullman company. It is said that several men in every department have been laid off with these threats, the object being to frighten them and the men still at work into voting the Republican ticket. It is said that but six forges in the blacksmithing department are running, so greatly has the force of black-smiths been reduced.
It was also announced yesterday that the Illinois Steel Company at South Chicago.had ordered its men to turn out Saturday night and march in the Republican parade. Most of the employees in the Illinois Steel Works are Democrats or Populists, but they are afraid to disobey the orders for fear of losing their jobs. There is every evidence showing that these big corporations are using their entire power in behalf of the Republicans, and it explains why the candidates on the Republican ticket were so hospitably entertained by the Illinois Steel Company and the Pullman company during their recent visit to South Chicago and Pullman.
[Oh, it is clear as daylight that there is no excuse for bombs, no excuse for strikes, no excuse for boycotts, no excuse even for complaint, in a land where the workingman has the ballot, — which “executes the freeman’s will as lightning does the will of God.”]
POLICE CENSORSHIP OF THE STAGE.
[New York Sun.]
Herr Johann Most and his band of Anarchist actors were not permitted to produce the play “Die Weber” in Newark last night. It was to have been given in Oertel’s Hall in Fifteenth avenue, but, on orders from Police Captain Bergen, the hall was kept closed. When the Most actors arrived and found that they could not play, they put up a big sign saying that the police bad unjustly interfered, but that the show would be given at a later date.
Capt. Bergen had the sign taken down, and then Most and his followers went to Zink’s Hall, in Bedford street. When the police followed them, the crowd hurriedly left by a rear entrance and cane; back to this city. Sixty-five mounted and foot policemen kept the several thousand people in the vicinity of Oertel’s Hall on the move, and in an hour the streets were clear.
[That Gerhardt Hauptmann’s “Weavers,” after scoring a brilliant success in Paris, after capturing the entire New York press through an amateur performance in an obscure theatre on the Bowery, and after production in Berlin by the will of the emperor, should now be swept from the boards by a gang of Newark “cops” is indeed an anti-climax.]
A MACHINE FOR BLACKMAILING PARENTS.
[New York Sun.]
A good deal of discussion has lately been occasioned by an incident at one of the sessions of the Lexow committee, concerning the authority exercised by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. As was stated by a member of the committee, it has been the custom of the legislature “to give Mr. Gerry about what he wanted” when he came to Albany asking for legislation. We are bound to say that it would have been better all around if the custom had been followed with a little more discrimination.
Under successive amendments to the penal code and to the general statutes, any agent of the Gerry society can take any man’s child in the street or from his home, and arraign him before a police justice; and, if the agent can convince the police justice that the child would be better off in an institution, there the child goes and there the child stays, with no power in the State save Mr. Gerry’s pleasure that can get him out. The time-honored writ of habeas corpus must issue compulsorily, of course, when applied for; but it is here merely a form, since the judges can regard only the technical accuracy of the wording of the commitment, and are forbidden to inquire into the right and wrong of the case. There can be an appeal, it is true, from the police justice’s commitment to the Court of General Sessions; but the appeal is virtually annulled before it is taken, by provisions that it must be made within ten days, and that, in case of a decision adverse to the society, Mr. Gerry has the rare privilege of appealing to the General Term of the Supreme Court and thence to the Court of Appeals. As the cost of such litigation is invariably beyond the means of the parent, it is almost never undertaken. To clinch the hopelessness of the situation, a law has been passed providing that, in the case of the prolonged appeals referred to, which may run through a period of years, the child shall remain in the custody of the Gerry society, as much secluded from its parents as if it had been decided finally that the parents were unfit to care for it.
To state these surprising enactments shows the necessity for their abolition.
[These arbitrary laws, as the evidence before the Lexow committee shows, were passed, as are all such laws, to give policemen and judges a chance to get money out of parents by threatening them with the loss of their chil-dren. Of this character is the paternalism of government.]
BETWEEN TWO FIRES.
[New York Sun.]
Quiet usually reigns on Sunday afternoons in Printing House square as compared with the bustle that prevails on week days. The Italian and Greek push-cart men are less numerous than on other days. They are, as a rule, dressed in their best Sunday clothes, and, if unmolested, would stand as silently as sphinxes beside their carts waiting for customers and looking anxiously at every passer-by. But on Sundays more than on other days the push-cart men are the victims of the hoodlums from the Fourth and First wards, who swoop down on the helpless peddlers, and sometimes carry away a day’s profit in one raid.
The old trick of the hoodlums is familiar to almost every Park row pedestrian. One will crawl up behind a push-cart man, grab an apple or a handful of chest-nuts, and scamper off at top speed. The unfortunate pushcart man gives chase, and then the rest of the guerrillas charge down and carry away as much stuff as they can. The experienced peddlers have learned not to follow the first thief who gets merely a trifle; they simply yell at him, and lie in wait for the others with the long clubs which all carry. The policemen stand idly by and laugh at the successful raids of the gangs. Some of the young guerrillas have the peddlers in such a state of terror that they can walk boldly up to the stands and help themselves to whatever they choose. The peddlers who pay such tribute are seldom molested by other gangs.
If the peddler should retaliate by clubbing the young thieves, the police are apt to be on hand to arrest him. He is then taken to the station house and locked up, while his wagon and stock are kept in the back room. There the fruit and candy are subject to the mercies of the reserves, and the wares that escape them are likely to have become unsalable by the next day, when the peddler is taken to court. Perhaps he is fined from $1 to $5 in court. It takes two weeks for him to recover from one arrest.
“The ordinance with respect to peddlers should be amended,” said a police justice, who will not hold a peddler or fine him unless there is a specific complaint against him. “The peddlers pay the city a license fee for the privilege of plying their vocation, and then they are arrested for doing what the law allows them to do.”
[Thus do the police make the hoodlums their willing agents whereby to keep the station-house refreshment rooms supplied with dainties. And the indignity of the peddler’s imprisonment is aggravated by the sight of fat policemen complacently devouring his property, who at the slightest word of protest club the victim to the earth and lift him up again by the hair of his head.]
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
[New York Sun.]
LONDON, Nov. 3. — Disclosures made during the past week that certain members of the London County Council, who are also prominent in the ranks of the Social Purity League, have been financing obscure papers at the expense of the ratepayers have caused a shock to the public, and have given the opposition to the purity movement a chance to allege that “purityite,” “progressive,” and “boodler” are synonymous. When the matter was first brought up in the Council, it seemed likely to be buried. Out-side inquiry, however, brought out proof that the chairman of the Council and the chairman of the Taxation Committee, with other “progressives,” held the majority of the shares of several unknown papers, to which are given exclusively official advertisements, the cost of which amounts annually to thousands of pounds. These papers, it is also shown, are circu-lated at the public expense. The agitation thus started is being actively carried on, and the indications now are that a demand will be made that the members accused withdraw from the Council.
[What’s the matter with boodle, bribery, and jobbery when carried on by the truly good? Are not all things pure to the pure?]
A LAW THAT INN-KEEPERS LIKE.
[London Truth.]
I heard the other day of a novel method of evading the Sunday-closing act, which has come into favor in Scotland. The would-be evader of the law goes to an inn on Sunday night and books a bedroom. He pays his half-crown, or whatever it may be, and departs. No law coffipels him to sleep in the bed he has engaged. On the Sabbath morn he returns to take his ease In the inn. He does not come alone, but brings with him other thirsty souls to spend the day with him, and then it is a case of “Willie brewed a peck o’ maut.” In some localities the hotels are crammed to overflowing on Sunday with “bona fide travellers” of this new type, and their equally bona fide guests. So difficult is it to make people sober by act of Parliament!
[The law intended to lessen the landlord’s liquor sales not only fails of its object, but actually adds to the landlord’s income by enabling him to rent his rooms.]
PROPAGANDA BY DEED.
[New York Sun.]
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7. — Gen. Kelly, leader of the Industrial army, which left here last summer for Washington, while addressing a crowd last evening in Oakland was ordered by Policeman Scanlan to desist. Kelly refused, when Scanlan took him into custody, and the two marched off. They had not gone far when Scanlan suddenly began clubbing Kelly and fractured his skull. A crowd of several hundred men marched to the City Hall and demanded that Scanlan be placed under arrest. The authorities quickly granted the demand, thereby preventing probable violence. Kelly’s condition is serious.
[This is the kind of trepanning operation by which government tries to get correct ideas into the brains of those whom it professes to consider misguided.]
Anarchist Letter-Writing Corps.
The Secretary wants every reader of Liberty to send in his name for enrolment. Those who do so thereby pledge themselves to write, when possible, a letter every fortnight, on Anarchism or kindred subjects, to the “target” assigned in Liberty for that fortnight. All, whether members or not, are asked to lose no opportunity of informing the secretary of suitable targets. Address, Stephen T. Byington, 38 Council Hall. Oberlin, Ohio.
The first man who sent in his name for enrolment when the corps was started has proved that he is still awake by inducing his next-door neighbor to join. He has the assurance of my distinguished regard.
Who will do better?
It has been suggested by two correspondents that I ought to be more definite in telling what line of attack I would propose for each target. I think my critics are right, and will try to follow their advice. But I do not wish to be understood as dictating in any case what a member shall write. If any writer has an idea of his own that suits him better than mine, he will doubtless do better work in most cases by following his own inspiration.
Target, section A. — Bolton Hall, editor of “Tax Reform Studies,” P. 0. Box 88, Buffalo, N. Y. “Tax Reform Studies” is a plate-matter service of two columns weekly, devoted to the discussion of taxation in all its aspects, except that reference to the tariff is ruled out. The editor’s remarks mostly aim at the abolition of the tax on personal property, but he prints letters and clippings on all sides. He will without doubt print brief, clear letters in favor of voluntary taxation.
Section B. — James Turner, 189-171 North Market Street, Nashville, Tenn., a wholesale grocer who is beginning to see that something is wrong and to feel for light on social and economic questions. Show him what is wrong in our present system, and what should be done to remedy it, and recommend our literature to him.
Section C. — J. A. Wayland, editor of the “Coming Nation,” Tennessee City, Tenn., a Nationalist and Populist, now engaged in starting the Ruskin Coöperative Community at Ruskin, Tenn.; a man of some wealth as well as enthusiasm. The motto at the head of his paper is: “The nation must own all monopolies. Private monopoly must be replaced by public monopoly. Nothing so vitally impairs the welfare of the people as private monopoly.” In the issue of October 20-an article entitled “This is a Free Country” contained the following:
You have a right to get married — if you buy the right of some officer.
You have a right to use money — if you buy the right of the bankers.
You have a right to make whiskey — if you buy the right.
You have a right to manufacture tobacco — if you buy the right.
You have a right to die and be buried — if you or your friends buy the right of the coffin trust.
There is no end of rights in this free country — but I have never seen any of thenr that did not have to be purchased. A horde of blood-suckers tap your veins at every turn and live in idle profligateness on your labor.
Free Country? Well, just a few?
Point out the evils of public monopoly, its interference with freedom, and how unnecessary it is. He pays much attention to the money question, like all Populists.
Stephen T. Byington.
Don’t keep Liberty to yourself, share it with others!
Liberty’s Library
Leonard E. Read: Accent On The Right: To Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), who sought for truth rather than outcome and never witnessed the fruits his labor bore. Obedience to conscience was his first rule; we witness the results.
Leonard E. Read: Anything That’s Peaceful: Many favor peace but not many favor the things that make for peace. — Thomas à Kempis
Leonard E. Read: Awake for Freedom’s Sake: Finally, share with others. Forget about “reforming” them! The more we share, the more we learn. This is in the interest of self and freedom!
Leonard E. Read: Castles in the Air: If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. — Henry David Thoreau
Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State: Political philosophy is dominated by a myth, the myth of the necessity of the state. The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. In this provocative book, Gerard Casey argues that social order can be spontaneously generated, that such spontaneous order is the norm in human society and that deviations from the ordered norms can be dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the state.
Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers: Murray Rothbard: Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) was an economist, historian, philosopher, and legal theoretician. His work was unified by a passionate and resolute commitment to a libertarianism that may be characterized as ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and which implied a belief that even the legal system may be provided privately without the need for a coercive collective authority. Hence, anarcho-capitalists envisage a society where the traditional role of government is wholly subsumed by private, profit-making enterprises and all social relationships are ultimately founded upon consent.
