Men and women whose crime was that they could not find work had assembled at Hull House. After the meeting, it was suggested that a parade would impress their needs upon the city. Immediately they were attacked by the police, some of whom had been disguised in the tatters of unemployed men and scattered into the crowd. Young girls were beaten, women were knocked down, men were assaulted, and all in the name of law. The assistant chief of police, Herman F. Schuettler, directed the official lawlessness. This exponent of anarchy detailed fifty mounted police to charge the assemblage of hungry men and women. And here is the explanation given by Schuettler: “We expected something like this to happen. We had refused these people a permit and they took it upon themselves to violate the law. I have no fault to find with the conduct of the policemen. Of course they may have been a bit rough but I am sure they acted within their rights. They were obeying orders.” And then, poltroon fashion, the anarchistic police attempted to conceal their stupid crimes and cruelties by stressing the fact that Mrs. Lucy Parsons, one of the philosophical anarchists of Chicago, was a speaker at the Hull House meeting! Could bureaucracy go further? The episode is important because it is typical of what is going on all over the United States. It is a by-product of our undigested industrial order and also a promise of what the future has in store for us; it is the prophecy of a future feudalism which is rising like a flood and which will sweep us into impotency if we are not wise enough and strong enough to plan a sound reconstruction. From San Diego to Portland, from Los Angeles to New York, the fight is raging. In places the people have definitely lost all the rights and privileges of a supposed democracy. In Lead, S. D., in the Colorado coal fields, in parts of Montana, in parts of the Michigan copper country, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania, and in Massachusetts, whole sections of the population have been degraded by forces too strong for them to a condition of servility. A servile people is not a threat of the future; it is a comment upon the present. And among the servile peoples, the liberties have perished. The question which now remains is only: “Is the remnant strong enough or disciplined sufficiently to regain the fundamentals of freedom which slipped away while we slept?”