is duty, stands on a lower level than that of the
professional lawbreaker.... I ask, then, not only that civic officials
perform their duties, but that you, the people, insist upon their
performing them... . I ask this particularly of the wage-workers, and
employees, and men on strike.... I ask them, not merely passively, but
actively, to aid in restoring order. I ask them to clear their skirts
of all suspicion of sympathizing with disorder, and, above all, the
suspicion of sympathizing with those who commit brutal and cowardly
assaults.... What I have said of the laboring men applies just as
much to the capitalists and the capitalists' representatives.... The
wage-workers and the representatives of the companies should make it
evident that they wish the law absolutely obeyed; that there is no
chance of saying that either the labor organization or the corporation
favors lawbreakers or lawbreaking. But let your public servants trust,
not in the good will of either side, but in the might of the civil arm,
and see that law rules, that order obtains, and that every miscreant,
every scoundrel who seeks brutally to assault any other man--whatever
that man's status--is punished with the utmost severity.... When
you have obtained law and order, remember that it is useless to have
obtained them unless upon them you build a superstructure of justice.
After finding out the facts, see that justice is done; see that
injustice that has been perpetrated in the past is remedied, and see
that the chance of doing injustice in the future is minimized."

Now, any one might in his closet write an essay on Law, Order, and
Justice, which would contain every idea that is here expressed. The
essayist might even feel somewhat ashamed of his production on the
ground that all the ideas that it contained were platitudes. But it is
one thing to write an essay far from the madding crowd, and it was
quite another to face an audience every member of which was probably
a partisan of either the workers, the employers, or the officials, and
give them straight from the shoulder simple platitudinous truths of this
sort applicable to the situation in which they found themselves. Any one
of them would have been delighted to hear these things said about his
opponents; it was when they were addressed to himself and his associates
that they stung. The best part of it, however, was the fact that those
things were precisely what the situation needed. They were the