A government that does not protect life is a flat failure, no matter what else it may do. Life being almost universally regarded as the most precious possession, its security is the first and highest essential—not the life of him who takes life, but the life which is exposed defenceless to his hateful hand. In no country in the world, civilized or savage, is life so insecure as in this. In no country in the world is murder held in so light reprobation. In no battle of modern times have so many lives been taken as are lost annually in the United States through public indifference to the crime of homicide—through disregard of law, through bad government. If American self-government with its ten thousand homicides a year is good government there is no such thing as bad. Self-government? What monstrous nonsense! Who governs himself needs no government, has no governor, is not governed. If government has any meaning it means the restraint of the many by the few—the subordination of numbers to brains. It means denial to the masses of the right to cut their own throats and ours. It means grasp and control of all social forces and material enginery—a vigilant censorship of the press, a firm hand upon the churches, keen supervision of public meetings and public amusements, command of the railroads, telegraph and all means of communication. It means, in short, ability to make use of all beneficent influences of enlightenment for the general good, and to array all the powers of civilization against civilization’s natural enemies—“the masses.” Government like this has a thousand defects, but it has one merit: it is government. Despotism? Yes. It is the despotisms of the world that have been the conservators of civilization. It is the despot who, most powerful for mischief, is alone powerful for good. It is conceded that government is necessary—even by the “fierce democracies” that madly renounce it. But in so far as government is not despotic it is not government. In Europe for the last one hundred years, the trend of government has been toward liberalization. Sovereign after sovereign has surrendered prerogative after prerogative; the nobility, privilege after privilege. Mark the result: society honeycombed with treason; property menaced with partition; assassination studied as a science and practiced as an art; everywhere powerful secret organizations sworn to demolish the social fabric that the slow centuries have but just erected, and unmindful that themselves will perish in the wreck. No heart can beat tranquilly under clean linen. Such is the gratitude, such is the wisdom, such the virtue of “The Masses.”