The Stampers Out

     Whenever a great crime is committed, like the assassination of President McKinley, the stamper-outs are heard from in their full strength and [5][6] weakness, and it is proposed to “stamp out Anarchy” in short order. Educating or cultivating it out is too slow and too uninteresting and expensive. “Stamping it out” has a sound of power which befits the powerful minds that propose it. Quick! Lynch it! Down with it! B-z-z-z!
     And Anarchy is gone.
     It is so easy to stamp out things. Nihilism was so easily stamped out in Russia, and Anarchy in Italy, Austria and France. For Russia has always been a great stamper out, with her press censor, her prohibition of radical foreign books, her system of government spies, and her Siberia. Anarchy and Nihilism had to go before such vigorous measures.
     And the liquor traffic, for instance, how easily that has been stamped out in Kansas and Maine. Wiped completely out, long, long, ago. And so extremely easy and quick. What sense would there have been in trying to educate or cultivate the liquor habit out of people when the “traffic” would be “stamped out” quickly?
     Great are the stampers out. They have some honorables and reverends among them, and they sometimes fill the Sunday newspaper with their tremendous stamping.
     There is another class of people, however, who believe in a different method of eliminating the evil from society. They believe that better food and shelter make stronger, wiser, and better men, that education and leisure to think and read also improves them, that lectures, music, museums of art, history, etc., libraries, public parks and other places of innocent amusement and instruction, compete with the liquor saloon and the Anarchist club, and win followers away from them.
     The class, whose belief this is, do not get into print so quickly as the stampers-out. They at first attract no attention, whatever, because the stampers out always arrive first on the field and raise a great storm of dust with their terrific stamping, and nothing can be seen till it settles. When it settles, the stampers-out have retired from the field to rest and get ready for the next stamp. And the quiet workers remain in possession, and they resume their work with the same slow method, seemingly unconscious that the evils they oppose have already been stamped out by the mighty and energetic tribe of the Stampers-Out.