The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since, owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause, and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches, why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no human way of dealing with him. And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call personality, is always there--that element which makes impossible any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in advance exactly how they will work at any given instant and under any exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists. These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist speaker standing on his soap box, in the course of his remarks, indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution. His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create _esprit de corps_ in the police department, and the policeman on that beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would “knock his block off.” He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private and not in his official capacity.