[untitled]

     Now that President Roosevelt has got beyond the reach of the brother of the assassin of McKinley, it may be no longer lese majeste to note and comment upon the action of the authorities in southern California with reference to this unfortunate man. John Czolgosz is not known to have committed any crime. Nothing is known against him except that his father and mother were also the father and mother of the Czolgosz who killed McKinley. He is an American by birth, by education, by association, and by continuous residence. Yet, he was arrested, when President Roosevelt came into California, not for any crime he had committed or was suspected of intending to commit, but solely as a “precautionary measure” for the protection of the President. The only difference between this sort of thing and what they used to do in France just before the great revolution is in the number of victims. When the police can arrest American citizens without any other cause than that a dead brother was once a criminal, and simply as a “precautionary measure,” it is evident that we are getting perilously near to a state of affairs calculated not to suppress anarchy but to produce it.