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Source: Lucifer, the Light-Bearer
Source type: magazine
Document type: editorial
Document title: none
Author(s): Harman, Lillian
Date of publication: 14 November 1901
Volume number: 5
Issue number: 44
Series: third series
Pagination: 353

 
Citation
Harman, Lillian. [untitled]. Lucifer, the Light-Bearer 14 Nov. 1901 v5n44 (3rd series): p. 353.
 
Transcription
full text
 
Keywords
McKinley assassination (personal response); Emma Goldman; John Hay (poetry); John Hay; the press (criticism).
 
Named persons
Leon Czolgosz; Emma Goldman; John Hay; William McKinley.
 
Notes

The editorial (below) is preceded on the same page by Secretary of State John Hay’s “Liberty,” which was originally published in 1875. The poem is given here as presented in the magazine:

What man is there so bold that he should say
“Thus and thus only, would I have the sea?”
For whether lying calm and beautiful,
Clasping the earth in love, and throwing back
The smile of heaven from waves of amethyst;
Or whether freshened by the busy winds,
It bears the trade and navies of the world
To ends of use or stern activity;
Or whether, lashed by tempests, it gives way
To elemental fury, howls and roars
At all its rocky barriers, in wild lust
Of ruin drinks the blood of living things,
And strews its wrecks o’er leagues of desolate shore,—
Always it is the sea, and men bow down
Before its vast and varied majesty.

So all in vain will timorous ones essay
To set the metes and bounds of Liberty.
For Freedom is its own eternal law;
It makes its own conditions, and in storm
Or calm alike fulfills the unerring Will.
Let us not then despise it when it lies
Still as a sleeping lion, while a swarm
Of gnat-like evils hover round its head;
Nor doubt it when in mad, disjointed times
It shakes the Torch of Terror, and its cry
Shrills o’er the quaking earth, and in the flame
Of Riot and War we see its awful form
Rise by the scaffold, where the crimson axe
Rings down its grooves, the knell of shuddering kings,

FOR EVER IN THINE EYES, O LIBERTY,
SHINES THAT HIGH LIGHT WHEREBY THE WORLD IS SAVED,
AND THOUGH THOU SLAY US WE WILL TRUST IN THEE.

The date of publication provided by the magazine is November 14, E. M. 301.

Whole No. 891.

Alternate magazine title: Lucifer, the Lightbearer.
 
Document

 

[untitled]

     If it is just to punish the author of arguments which may incite to violence; if Emma Goldman was justly hounded by the police and imprisoned because it was at first reported that Czolgosz said he was influenced by her words to kill McKinley, why is McKinley’s Secretary of State exempt? The foreging [sic] lines from his pen are infinitely more revolutionary than anything in Emma Goldman’s lecture, “Modern Phases of Anarchism,” which it is asserted was heard by Czolgosz. The last three lines have appeared as the motto of “Liberty,” a pioneer Anarchist paper, for seventeen or eighteen years. Perhaps Czolgosz read and was “fired” by these lines. It is but fair to add that Hay would now disavow the sentiments here expressed. But such disavowal would be no protection from tactics such as those used against Emma Goldman. In her case the newspapers resurrected sentences alleged to have been used by her which if she ever uttered were spoken nearly ten years ago in the heat of a big strike in New York. No allowance was made for the time which had elapsed, nor the possible change of view, nor was the explanatory context given. If such tactics are justifiable in dealing with one, why not with the other? If the jail is the proper place for Emma Goldman, why not for John Hay? Will our Secretary of State be deported to the proposed island along with the rest of the propagators of Anarchism?

 

 


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