Anarchism

     We have ceased to speculate as to the place of the Anarchist in the world’s economy. When the serpent in Eden was envious of man’s happiness he tempted Eve to revolt against the only prohibitive law then promulgated by the Almighty. The punishment of the wily serpent was nothing in comparison with the banishment of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the eternal labor and suffering that followed.
     The Anarchist is born in Russia or Italy. He is stimulated by conditions that are found nowhere else. He is utterly without a reason for existence in any other land. And yet his fiendish plots have been laid in England and in America. His blows at existing governments have been absolutely futile, even in Russia, where the best of that empire’s rulers was assassinated twenty years ago—his life devoted to his people, his death a martyr’s. Elizabeth of Austria, President Carnot of France, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley—what a roll of innocent victims of the serpent’s fang! And Humbert of Italy was “every inch a king,” seeking the peace of his people—and his bereaved widow unites so plaintively in Mrs. McKinley’s sorrow!
     The whole world is kin. All mankind mourns with our nation. If ever the Anarchist—if he reason at all—committed a crime wholly inexcusable on any Anarchistic pretext, it was when he cast satanic eyes upon this happy Republic, glorious in its realization of liberty, equality, and prosperity.
     This is no time for hysterical manifestations. The world must settle with Anarchism. It is a question of morality, of education, as well as of repressive and punitive law. So far as this Republic is concerned, Congress will deal with the question in due season, and intelligently. England and America must, however, consider the subject in another aspect. It is of international interest. The native American who probably attended a public or parochial school at Detroit, and whose intense self-exaltation led him to the crime of the century, could not have been excluded by any immigration law. But he and any associates who sympathized in his views and did not check his outbreak into lawlessness, must be, by international obligations, placed in a class such as were the pirates of the Mediterranean at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are outlaws—and, like Cain, entitled to universal execration and segregation that they may be forever harmless.