we are unfit to be citizens of a republic, undeserving of peace, prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions due to our moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way, Messieurs the Masses, to correct public evils: put wise and good men into power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when you submit and shot when you rise. To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, “as the law provides.” Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken, including even those of “innocent bystanders”—though that kind of angel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue judges had permitted officers in command of the “firing lines” to be persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plus those that for a long time to come will be taken. Make your own computation from your own data; I insist only that a rioter shot in time saves the shooting of nine. You know—you, the People—that all this is true. You know that in a republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it cures—that it cures none. You know that even the “money power” is powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that nobody can bribe nor intimidate a legislator or voter who will not take a bribe nor suffer himself to be intimidated—that there can be no “money power” in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know that “bosses” and “machines” can not control you if you will not suffer them to divide you into “parties” by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions. You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has the courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in your hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don’t consider you dangerous—not very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces for confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confess his own. From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that you rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he who echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think, and flatters you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well of newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your dis-esteem they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well of one another. WRITERS OF DIALECT I