It is true that the press lords are forever wailing about an alleged government menace to press freedom. The conflict of press and government does not contradict, however, the charge that the press is an instrument of the State. The common notion that State and government are two names for one thing, makes a few words on theory advisable at this point. A hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, there would have been less likelihood of similar confusion. In the great political strife that attended and immediately followed the adoption of the United States Constitution, political theory was treated with more respect than it is today. Federalists and Jeffersonians agreed that the State was an instrument of class rule. Jeffersonian John Taylor saw revolution and “order” as “two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich ... sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal.” Summarizing Taylor’s views, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. says: “The succession of privileged orders through history--the priesthood, the nobility, now the banking system--showed how every age had known its own form of institutionalized robbery by a minority operating through the State.” Lenin later put it scientifically: “The State is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ‘order’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression.” The American State Classes do not march in a straight line to their goals. Sometimes the executive arm of government is completely responsive to the views of the most reactionary section of capitalism, as when Hoover, Harding, Coolidge were President. Sometimes the President is not fully “manageable,” as in the case of President Roosevelt. But he then finds himself pretty well invested by “trustworthy” men; he must accept a John Garner for Vice-President; he must put men like Jesse Jones in his Cabinet. In the same way, Congress may be an easy tool of reactionary interests one term, curbed by public pressure the next. Note the speed with which the last few Congresses have enacted drastic anti-labor legislation and tax bills pouring billions into the coffers of Big Business. If an active public conscience restricts the freedom of executive departments and legislative departments otherwise favorable to Big Business, there are always the courts. When the democrats, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, held the presidency, Martin Van Buren noted that the party of rich-man’s-rule fled to “the judicial department of the government, as to an ark of future safety which the Constitution placed beyond the reach of public opinion.” So today the courts readily grant anti-picketing injunctions to employers despite laws expressly designed to halt such use of the injunction. Below the Federal level, government is even more easily dominated by big capital. The local police are always at hand for strike duty.