This feeling of despondent suspicion is constantly being voiced by the middle-class newspapers and by groups of prominent citizens, by committees of fifty, of one hundred, etc., in circular appeals distributed by the ten thousand to all men of any standing in the community, urging them to “fight” as it is called, day and night, to save the town, city, county, state and nation from disaster. A stranger reading one of these urgent calls would naturally ask with curiosity for the names of the enemies to be thus attacked; are they Huns, Bolsheviki, hoodlums, gunmen, rioters or what? The grotesquely pathetic answer is that they are all our neighbors, our fellow citizens, nay, our “Honorable” fellow citizens; elected by ourselves by large majorities last year, last month, or yesterday perhaps, or appointed by men whom we have ourselves recently elected; they are his honor the mayor; honorable members of the city or state legislature; of boards of supervisors; of Congress; of this and that public commission; of the state governments; officials of every class, both elective and appointed, county, city, state, and federal. It is not against hostile outsiders or natural adversaries, but against our own manhood suffrage officials that we have to “fight”; it is these officials and their associates, agents, and party superiors or “bosses” who we are told by press and pulpit, in newspaper, book and magazine, in private conversation and in public address, and above all at the meetings of independent citizens and reformers, are the actual or potential enemies, furtive or open, conscious or unconscious, of good government, of our pocket-books, our health, our comfort, and our lives. We are urgently reminded that our manhood suffrage government is by no means to be trusted; that the only hope of tolerable government is to arouse every good citizen to an attitude and a habit of constant distrust of our chosen representatives and rulers and to regard them with sleepless jealousy and suspicion. It is not enough to vote; you must attend primaries; nay more, you must anticipate the primaries and plan to elect certain primary candidates and to defeat others; even when your own men are chosen, you cannot safely trust them; you must doubt every member of Congress, every legislator and every official, including those just seated by your own vote; you must suspect every new proposal, every legislative bill, every municipal ordinance; a good citizen will watch them all; he will at private expense procure advance copies of all of them; he will if he can employ a lawyer to study them; he will join all kinds of political organizations and attend all their meetings, and will use constant vigilance to see that these organizations are not “captured” or purchased by the politicians, and that he himself is not captured without suspecting it, so wily are these political experts and so cunning and numerous are the snares and temptations of political life.