In Germany, in the meantime, the movement varied and shifted with each wind of doctrine; one president after another was tried and found wanting, until at last Jean von Schweitzer was chosen, and he guided the party until it was finally swallowed up in the organization perfected by Liebknecht and Bebel. Liebknecht was really but an interpreter of Marx, but he was honest, enthusiastic and devoted, and no man in the whole line of German political energy has left his name more thoroughly impressed upon the time. Out of these conditions and born of these ideas came the Anarchy which hurled the bomb whose crash at the Haymarket Square first aroused us to the work which is being done in our midst. The Anarchists of Chicago are exotics. Discontent here is a German plant transferred from Berlin and Leipsic and thriving to flourish in the west. In our garden it is a weed to be plucked out by the roots and destroyed, for our conditions neither warrant its growth nor excuse its existence. The central idea of all Socialistic and Anarchic systems is the interference with the right of property by society. If we can convince ourselves that society has the right and the duty thus to interfere, then there is to be said nothing more. As long as the American citizen can buy his own land and raise his own crops, as long as average industry and economy will lead a man to competence, Socialism can only be like typhus fever—a growth of the city slums. There is no real danger in it. There is no peril which those charged with the protection of law and order are not ready to face, for every officer of the law that unreasonable discontent may menace is backed by the whole power of the republic; and the republic is founded upon principles which this alien revolt can neither harm nor affright. There is a fact which, before I leave this chapter, I wish to bring home to the mind of every reader, and that is this: The police of Chicago, like the police of every city in the Union, are actuated by no feeling of hostility to these people. We understand the genesis of their movement; we can put ourselves in their places and feel the things which actuate them; we are prepared to make as many excuses for them as they can make for themselves; we are ready to grant everything that they could claim, and more; but we see beyond this, and above this, facts which they forget and forego. We have a government in these United States so firm and so elastic that it has every bulwark against either foreign or domestic attack, and yet it provides every opportunity to adjust itself to the will of the people.