Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators — John Shaqi
Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the ConspiratorsSchaack, Michael J.
History
Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators
The majority must rule, and does rule; but under our Constitution
it rules only along lines decreed by the fathers long ago for the
protection of the minority. There is a legal and constitutional means
provided for every man to carry his theories of good government into
actual practice. Every citizen has the right to vote, and to have his
vote counted, and this right belongs to Anarchist and conservative,
to radical and reactionist. There is no man can stand before the
American people and say we have refused him his right: if it were
done, the whole power of the Government would be marshaled to do
him justice. When, then, we have provided every man with a means to
impress his convictions upon the government of the country—when we
have done everything that human ingenuity can do to secure a full and
free expression of the popular will, as the final and supreme test
upon every public question, we may be excused for refusing to let the
Anarchists have their way. They are a minority of a minority, yet
they would impose their system and their doctrine upon the majority.
They would substitute for the ballot-box the dynamite bomb—for the
will of the people the will of a contemptible rabble of discontents,
un-American in birth, training, education and idea, few in numbers and
ridiculous in power.
Thus, while the police entertain no animosity against these men, we
feel—I feel and every officer under my command feels—that we are
bound by our oaths and by our loyalty to the State and to society
to meet force with force, and cunning with cunning. We are the
conservators of the law and the preservers of the peace, and the law
will be vindicated and the peace preserved in spite of any and all
attacks.
If our system is wrong, which I do not believe; if the principle that
the majority of the citizens is to be ruled by an alien minority is
to be accepted, which I do not accept, still there is the orderly and
well-protected means provided by law, and guaranteed by the Government,
to transform that idea into a governing fact. There is the ballot,
free to every citizen, safe, satisfying, final. The men who try
other methods are rushing to their own destruction. We pity them, we
sympathize with them; but our duty is clear and manifest. We have a
government worth fighting for, and even worth dying for, and the police
feel that truth as keenly as any class in the community.
CHAPTER II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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