model for humanity, with just room enough by its side for the scaffold
upon which to hang those who do not accept it.
Now, when, by any coincidence, the representatives of any two of
these species meet in the mistaken supposition that there is any
disagreement between them, there is bound to be trouble of course, and
whenever say a Socialist of the impossibilist wing of the party, and
a policeman--and all good policemen are impossibilists--meet, we have
posited the old problem in physics of an irresistible body meeting an
impenetrable substance.
This phenomenon occurred on two or three occasions when policemen
interfered with Socialists speaking in the streets. I am sure the
Socialists in question could have regretted the circumstance no
more than I, for if there was one right which I tried to induce the
police to respect, it was the right of free speech. On the whole they
did fairly well, and at a time when there seemed to be an epidemic
of ferocity among municipal officials in the land that led them to
all sorts of unwarranted interferences with human and constitutional
rights, we had folk of all sorts preaching their strange doctrines
in our streets--Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, of their several
sorts, I. W. W.’s, evangelists, anarchists, suffragists, Mormons,
Salvationists, to say nothing of all the religious sects; wisdom was
veritably crying in the streets. Emma Goldman, during that period of
hysteria when the advent of that little woman in a city precipitated a
siege of fear, delivered her course of lectures in Toledo to audiences
that were very small, since there were no police to insure the
attendance of those who were interested more in sensations than in her
philosophic discussions of the German drama. And we tried to respect
the rights of all.
But it is one thing to give orders, and another to have them implicitly
obeyed. Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all
life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority
the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing,
that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc.,
etc. After they had been in power a while they would grow humble,
if not discouraged, and, like me, be gratified if they succeeded in
accomplishing about one-third of what they had hoped and planned
to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of
free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that someone had been
interfered with for preaching some new heresy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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