s all wrong. Let them resort to legal
methods and to no other. I have not the slightest sympathy with
the methods that have been pursued by Anarchists, or by Socialists,
or by any other class that has resorted to force or intimidation.
The ballot-box is the place to assemble. The will of the people
can be made known in that way, and their will can be executed. At
the same time, I think I understand what has produced the Anarchist,
the Socialist, and the agitator. In the old country, a laboring
man, poorly clad, without quite enough to eat, with a wife in rags,
with a few children asking for bread--this laboring man sees the
idle enjoying every luxury of this life; he sees on the breast of
"my lady" a bonfire of diamonds; he sees "my lord" riding in his
park; he sees thousands of people who from the cradle to the grave
do no useful act; add nothing to the intellectual or the physical
wealth of the world; he sees labor living in the tenement house,
in the hut; idleness and nobility in the mansion and the palace;
the poor man a trespasser everywhere except upon the street, where
he is told to "move on," and in the dusty highways of the country.
That man naturally hates the government--the government of the few,
the government that lives on the unpaid labor of the many, the
government that takes the child from the parents, and puts him in
the army to fight the child of another poor man and woman in some
other country. These Anarchists, these Socialists, these agitators,
have been naturally produced. All the things of which I have spoken
sow in the breast of poverty the seeds of hatred and revolution.
These poor men, hunted by the officers of the law, cornered,
captured, imprisoned, excite the sympathy of other poor men, and
if some are dragged to the gallows and hanged, or beheaded by the
guillotine, they become saints and martyrs, and those who sympathize
with them feel that they have the power, and only the power of
hatred--the power of riot, of destruction--the power of the torch,
of revolution, that is to say, of chaos and anarchy. The injustice
of the higher classes makes the lower criminal. Then there is
another thing. The misery of the poor excites in many noble breasts
sympathy, and the men who thus sympathize wish to better the
condition of their fellows. At first they depend upon reason, upon
calling the attention of the educated and powerful to the miseries
of the poor. Nothing happens, no result foll