ed to a full
sense of the wrongs inflicted upon them, will strike down their
oppressors in a rage of desperation born of despair.

Modern tyrannies are far more insidious than the military despotisms
of the past. These modern engines which crush society destroy the
energy and vitality of the people by the slow process of starvation,
sanctioned by the law, and in a majority of instances, are patiently
borne by the victims. It is only when human nature can endure no more
that protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy.
Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with
the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The
heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne
without excruciating pain and without earnest protest.

If in their desperate conflict with the serpent that has coiled its
slimy length about the body of the people the latter resort to
dynamite, and seek by savage warfare to right their wrongs, they are
to be condemned and controlled, for they confound the innocent with
the guilty and work ruin rather than reform. Yet there is another side
to be considered, for when injustice wraps itself in the robes of
virtue and of law, and calls in the assistance of armies and all the
destructive machinery of modern warfare to enforce its right to
enslave and starve mankind, what counter warfare can be too savage,
too destructive in its operations, to compel attention to the wrong?
The difficulty is that vengeance should discriminate, but that is a
refinement which blind rage can hardly compass.

I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent,
that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure
and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice;
if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written _injustice_, men are
not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. There is no law,
on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly
upon the people, which should be permitted to stand one hour. It is
through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is
by the prostitution of the rights of the masses, by men who pretend to
be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and
death fill the largest space in the news channels of every land.

In New York City--where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth
and the christianized humanity of