All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of southeastern Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories of Europe—even of southeastern Europe—may not be a good man; I say only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. Let us not deny him his grievance: he works—when he works—for men no better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part of his pay in “truck” at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay itself is inadequate—hardly more than double what he could get in his own country. Against all this his cry is justified; but his rioting and assassination are not—not even when directed against the property and persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for whom and for what pay they please—when he denies this right, and with it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and his kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this just debt of nature and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual spring rise constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of government under which their country groans. A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people. This “citizen soldiery” business is a ghastly failure. The National Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so? Mostly it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by, the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a republic is without excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are not enforced; if corporations and capital are “tyrannous and strong;” if white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this is our own fault—the fault of those, among others, who seek redress or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people of a republic have always as good government, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of person, property and liberty, as they merit. They can have whatever they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting in the right way. If as citizens of a republic we lack the virtue and intelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it really executes a freeman’s will As lightning does the will of God