The Week [excerpt]

     Hysteria produces anarchy, and apparently anarchy in turn produces hysteria. Naturally, the attempt to kill President McKinley has provoked countless expressions of horror and of detestation, with many cries for swift and terrible punishment of the assassin. But no indignation at the signal lawlessness of Czolgosz should betray us into forgetting for an instant the fact that the remedy for anarchy is not counter-anarchy, but law. There has not been for years a more opportune moment for every citizen, from Portland to San Francisco, to ponder on this lesson. In the last few months our annals have been blackened by many crimes of violence; and mobs, no longer content with hanging negro ravishers, have begun to burn and torture with a malignity worthy of the veriest savages. The same ferocity has vented itself in shrieks to lynch Czolgosz and every other wretched anarchist; and, unhappily, these hysterical utterances have not been confined to the outcast and desperate classes. “I would have blown the scoundrel to atoms,” said the Rev. R. H. Naylor, who occupied the pulpit in President McKinley’s church in Washington on Sunday. The Rev. T. De Witt Talmage at Ocean Grove was equally strenuous: “I wish with all my heart that the policeman who arrested Czolgosz had, with the butt end of that pistol, dashed his life out.” Moreover, the Rev. John Lloyd Lee, in the Westminster Presbyterian Church in this city, is credited with saying: “Until a better way is found, lynch him on the spot. When an anarchist makes red-flag speeches, then, and not when he has killed a President, be done with him.” If such frantic talk be not anarchism, worthy of Emma Goldman herself, nothing is.