Czolgosz the Product of a Materialistic, Greed-Crazed World

     J. Bruce Wallace, M. A., the well-known English writer and editor of Brotherhood, has contributed an editorial to a recent issue of his publication, suggested by the assassination of President McKinley, and entitled “Czolgosz and the Mad World,” which is so pregnant with truths that are frequently overlooked or discreetly left unsaid by pulpit and press that it stands out in bold relief from the wild, feverish, and oftentimes insanely frantic cries of puppet voices which have recently rung throughout the New World and which have echoed and re-echoed sentiments against wholesome freedom and progress which monarchical and imperial powers cherished before the American Revolution. So sane are the utterances of Mr. Wallace and so fundamentally true are his conclusions that I give them below as a message that should be heeded by the heart and brain of all people who are strong-minded enough to be uninfluenced by the greed-inspired utterances of a sensational press and who are clear-visioned enough to see that human happiness and permanent progress are found only by following the glory-swathed form of Freedom over the highway of justice. Says Mr. Wallace:

     “Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, is no doubt a madman. Madmen are not accidents, any more than smallpox patients are. They are products of certain malign influences at work;—they are outward, visible, and active signs of some interior constitutional social disorder. ‘It is a mad world.’ Czolgosz is a member of human society in general, of American society in particular, and of the most despised and crushed section of American society, the poor exploited foreign immigrant, most specifically. He is a significant product and a revelation of an insane, unkind, spurious civilization. [100][101]
     “President McKinley—personally a very estimable and amiable specimen of humanity—stood on his continent, probably without realizing his position, as the head and most conspicuous representative of a world-order which, despite all its decencies and handshakings, does not recognize that all men are brethren—a world-order that is a struggle of men to live upon each other and make themselves rich out of each other. Though never a rich man himself, he was the nominee and elect of the unjust Mammon that, quite unconsciously for the most part, rides booted and spurred astride of unjust poverty;—the unjust Mammon that the hypnotized people believe themselves to be dependent upon for their ‘full dinner-pail’ and for all good gifts. It is an insanely-deluded world-order. The multi-millionaire that said, ‘The people be damned’; even kind-hearted, regally-munificent Andrew Carnegie; and finally poor, ill-balanced, wretched Czolgosz;—these all and others, in their various ways, are children and members of this world-order. Its disease comes out in one man in the form of an insane accumulating of riches, beyond all possible utility—an insane gathering of tribute rights over his brethren; in another in an insane desire to kill somebody that happens to have his head high. The disease, the insanity, is lovelessness; it is the denying or ignoring of human brotherhood, of human unity.
     “The cure is certainly not in murdering emperors, kings, presidents of republics, and prominent statesmen; that is one symptom of the disease. Quite as little is the cure to be found in executing or otherwise taking vengeance on anarchist homicidal lunatics—though of course these cannot be left at large. Such vengeance is another symptom of the disease. The cure is not in any forcible despoiling of millionaires and minor landlords and capitalists. It is in the recognizing, the realizing, of the truth of human brotherhood and unity by a sufficient and growing number of the people, in the practising and organizing of the truth, in the doing of the utmost possible good by all who love good, in the widest reaching positive coöperation and massing of forces for the building up of a new order in which there shall be no victims.
     “Good-will is the only real sanity; good-will, without respect of persons, to emperors, kings, millionaires, sweaters, and paupers; good-will like sunshine upon the evil and the good. The dawn of sanity in any mind shows itself in love.”

     Measured by these last words, which we believe are as true as any that ever fell from inspired lips, how many of our clergymen, editors, statesmen, and teachers, and others who assume to mold the thought of the age, would not be found wanting? And yet the time will come when the good of all the world will say with this prophet of progress that “the dawn of sanity in any mind shows itself in love.”