and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the
unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with
their operations. The community that by concert, open or secret, among
its citizens denies to a portion of its members their plain rights
under the law has severed the only safe bond of social order and
prosperity. The evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes
those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by
it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector. The man in whose
breast that faith has been darkened is naturally the subject of
dangerous and uncanny suggestions. Those who use unlawful methods, if
moved by no higher motive than the selfishness that prompted them, may
well stop and inquire what is to be the end of this.

An unlawful expedient can not become a permanent condition of
government. If the educated and influential classes in a community
either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that
seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the
lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient
cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes?
A community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not
mobs, execute its penalties is the only attractive field for business
investments and honest labor.

Our naturalization laws should be so amended as to make the inquiry
into the character and good disposition of persons applying for
citizenship more careful and searching. Our existing laws have been in
their administration an unimpressive and often an unintelligible form.
We accept the man as a citizen without any knowledge of his fitness,
and he assumes the duties of citizenship without any knowledge as to
what they are. The privileges of American citizenship are so great and
its duties so grave that we may well insist upon a good knowledge of
every person applying for citizenship and a good knowledge by him of
our institutions. We should not cease to be hospitable to immigration,
but we should cease to be careless as to the character of it. There are
men of all races, even the best, whose coming is necessarily a burden
upon our public revenues or a threat to social order. These should be
identified and excluded.

We have happily maintained a policy of avoiding all interference with
European affairs. We have been only interested spectators of their
contentions in diplom