“We shall not, this year,” said my rich friend—a Lady—“while the people of Europe are starving and fighting—we shall not this year have our large annual banquet.” But had she walked not a mile from her home, she would have seen in her own city men starving, and fighting because of the terrible dread of starving. And not this year alone had they been doing it, but for many years of large banquets. However, if all Ladies and Gentlemen felt acutely all these matters, what would become of our institution of Large Banquets—or, indeed, of the Divine Privileges of Monarchs! What a Veneer Is Civilization “War,” wrote the journalists, “reveals what a veneer is civilization. Man’s real emotions, instinctive, primitive, brutal, leap to ascendency.” But I did not believe the journalists, because I knew better men’s emotions. Indeed, what tore asunder my heart was the depth and beauty of the emotions of men and women. There was nothing—at least very little—the matter with their emotions. But with their thinking apparatus—ah, that is a different story! Lawson, Caplan, Schmidt ALEXANDER BERKMAN I don’t know of anything more tragic and pitiful than the superstition that “Justice will triumph.” What this metaphysical conception of “justice” really signifies, how it is to be expressed in applicable terms, is impossible to determine in view of the multiplicity of individual antagonisms and class interests. But somehow we all believe in “justice”; yet the criterion of each is the degree of the attainment of his own purpose. From time immemorial we humans have been clamoring for “justice,” divine and earthly. Hence our slavery. And Kaiser and Czar both claim justice on their side, and millions are slaughtering each other to attain the particular justice of their respective masters. In this blessed land of ours, justice is ranked high, and labor is constantly basing its appeals and demands on justice. But perhaps—let us hope—the John Lawson case has somewhat jolted the popular faith in the metaphysical conception, at least so far as it manifests itself in the Colorado courts. It is safe to say that there is no intelligent man in that state who does not know that the stage for Lawson’s conviction had been set long before his trial. He was an intelligent, active agitator. He sought to crystallize the rebellious dissatisfaction of the miners into effective action:—sufficient reason for the Rockefeller-controlled state to eliminate, most emphatically, such an undesirable element.