Brazen Anarchists

     The police of Cleveland are to be commended for their action yesterday in preventing the holding of a meeting of the “Liberty Association,” an organization of avowed anarchists. It was this band of reds that taught Leon Czolgosz the doctrines which later led him to assassinate the President. It is considered a dangerous body and has been watched closely by the police since the tragedy of September. Its effrontery in seeking to hold public meetings is, perhaps, to be accounted for by the fact that thus far the law has been unable to reach the reds in any city, save in New York, where John Most was sentenced to a short prison term for publishing an inflammatory editorial in his journal. Chicago was impotent to hold Emma Goldman and her associates, and since their release they have participated in more than one meeting at which the radical beliefs of the anarchists were freely expressed. The climax of this impudent defiance of the public patience was reached the other night, when at a meeting of the central body of Chicago anarchists the man Isaaks, who was arrested with Goldman after the assassination, declared that he held himself below Czolgosz, whereat there were cheers for the assassin.
     If the law is so lax as to permit such an exhibition of exultation over a deed which has horrified humanity, its amendment is a matter of the most urgent necessity. If on the other hand there are laws and ordinances in force in Chicago to prohibit disorderly assemblage, or utterances calculated to incite riot or crime, as surely there must be, why were they not applied instantly upon the utterance of these sentiments, which called forth the clamor of praise for Czolgosz? The leaders of the meeting were all notorious anarchists. To permit them to continue unmolested to defy public decency and the principles of order is to encourage them to more flagrant outbursts of contempt for government, perhaps even to sow the seeds of murder in many hearts. Chicago’s mayor is the son of a man who, holding the same office, was killed by a “crank,” a man without respect for authority, whose dastardly inspiration came, in all probability, from the “red” company he had been keeping. This country would respect Carter Harrison far more than it does today if, at the first whisper of treasonable applause for the assassin of the President, he had caused the arrest of the leaders in the demonstration and their immediate prosecution under any applicable statute or ordinance.