“Them Anarchists is like rattlesnakes; fust they rattle dangerous warnin’s and then they strike a deadly blow. No civilized community ez safe while they’re about. It’s high time they waz exterminated; jes’ make it high treason when they rattle on’ about removin’ rulers; an’ let ther strong arm of ther law grasp ’em around th’ neck an’ strangle ’em tew death before they hev time tew coil an’ strike. Naow ye see th’ danger ov ’lowin’ ther scum of Europe tew cum inter th’ country. Yer quarantine yaller fever, but ye never think ov quarantinin red anarchy, which is a sight more dangerous diseese. . . .”

“Anarchy has nothing to gain, it has all to lose, by acts like this. It has been tolerated; it may be, and deserves to be, proscribed. If there is to be no security, for either good man or bad, from its fatalistic hand, the time will surely come when the anarchist will be hunted with the implacable resentment that the man-eating tiger is now followed, the hunt being unremitting until the last assassin of them all is swept from the earth.”

“The point and pith of the offence of anarchists is that they teach the doctrine that the pistol, the dagger, and dynamite may be used to destroy rulers.”

“William McKinley’s kindly heart and generous spirit, his enormous public services, resulting in countless benefits to the poor man, his unswerving devotion to the principle that no minority is without rights, his purity and power are permanent forces and realities which have been exalted upon an altar of martyrdom. The assassin supposed he could slay them from the high and heavenly place in which the citizens of the republic behold them. They will organize into a knightly personality and William McKinley will be the slayer of anarchy in America. From this time forward, whatever makes for anarchy must hide its treacherous face away from the light of him whom we loved.”

There must be law to give redress
Against such men as anarchists.

“It is not enough for us to stamp out the anarchy of deed; we must also stamp out the anarchy of the printed and spoken word. It is not sufficient for us to imprison or hang the anarchist who resorts to force; we must suppress in every legitimate way the demagoguery which inspires him. It is of no use to brush away the web, and leave the spider which is weaving it.”

“Anarchy is simply the hand-maiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism.”

“If we are to escape further attack upon our peace and security, we must boldly and constantly grapple with the monster anarchy. It is not a thing that we can safely leave to be dealt with by party or partisanship. Nothing can guarantee us against its menace except the teachings and practice of the best citizenship, the exposure of the ends and aims of the gospel of discontent and hatred of social order, and the brave enactment and execution of repressive laws.”

“Let it be understood once for all that the authorities are determined to crush the serpent of anarchy whenever it lifts its venomous head.”

“The American republic has only three things that legitimately belong to anarchy and anarchists, and these three things are the insane asylum, the prison and the gallows.”

“We cannot avoid the presence of these vain, misguided men in our midst, and we will not be harried into hysterical efforts for their suppression, which would give them an importance and influence in our land unwarranted by their power and numbers.”

          But let us also swear
To hunt the mad beast, Anarchy, where’er
He burrows, venomous with lust of blood,
          Treading to mud
All holy things, befouling humankind,
Unclean, corrupt, with hate and envy blind—
          Anathema on him declare—
          So, brothers, let us swear.

“All crime lives despite law, and anarchy will prove no exception.”

“But one duty now remains—the enactment of such Federal legislation as will forever stamp out anarchism. The adherents of this doctrine—if doctrine it may be termed—are Ishmaelites whose hands are against everyone and who cannot justly complain should the hand of everyone be raised against them. They are outlaws and should as such be driven from the precincts of every civilized state. The first action of the next Congress should be directed to this end.”

“The most rigid measures against instigating or in any way counseling or encouraging assassination or other crime committed in the cause of anarchy, whether such instigation or advocacy is given by book or by speech, would not violate any constitutional rights. On the other hand, laws against believing or teaching that anarchy as a philosophical or political system is an ideal condition of things would be as obnoxious to all true principles of any desirable society as they would be to our existing constitutions.”

“. . . anarchy is seeking to undermine every moral principle and precept which we have been taught to love, honor and respect as a sacred birthright handed down to us by the founders of this nation.”

“Whatever merit may be claimed for the doctrine of anarchy, the shooting down of President McKinley can serve it no purpose. . . .”

“Whatever merit may be claimed for the doctrine of anarchy, the shooting down of President McKinley can serve it no purpose. . . .”

“The very name anarchist excites a terror something like the fear of a venomous snake.”

“Anarchy, the plague of social life, must find no fit soil for development. In a healthy mind such infection is not possible.”

“. . . the President’s death will not assist the anarchists for there are millions of people ready and willing to continue the good fight for American principle.”

“Liberty does not and never did mean license. These so-called anarchists have too long abused the freedom of our constitutional privileges. The scum of decaying European feudalism, they must be taught that there is no place for them among our free institutions and law-abiding citizens. They are enemies of public order, and must be banished from the society of the freemen they contaminate even by their presence. Toleration of their vile creed has emboldened them to presume on the patience of the nation. The hour for their total extirpation has come.”

“Anarchy is a disease; why is not the law justified in stamping it out as it does anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow jack or any other dangerous disease?”

“How to deal adequately with these enemies of the human race who follow the red flag of anarchy is a problem baffling to the mind of man.”

“There is no room in America for such creatures, and there is not one of them who is worthy of freedom.”

“. . . men who profess or proclaim doctrines of which such unspeakable crimes are the issue should be made to understand and to feel that they cannot teach them in this country, nor can they themselves enjoy this country’s hospitality.”

“Anarchy is treason.”

“Anarchism is crankism nowadays. When a man becomes a real crank he calls himself an anarchist. Anarchism now embraces all the cranks in crankdom.”

“The horror that fills the civilised world at the murderous outrage on President McKinley ought to give rise to a feeling of the profoundest detestation and most undying hostility to Anarchism, whatever form it may assume.”

“Punishment administered to the would-be assassin and to his co-conspirators, if he has any, should be such as to warn all inclined to anarchy that, while this is an asylum for those who love liberty, it is an inhospitable place for those who raise their hands against all forms of government.”

“Mr. McKinley was the last man whom one would think would become the victim of the bloodthirsty anarchist. Beloved by the people, respected and admired by every nation, the head of the most free and liberal government in the world, a man of exemplary and lovable character, it is hard to see how he can have excited the enmity of these social fanatics.”

“The Secretary of War will drive anarchists from the country, will he? Ha! Bah! Let him try! How will he do it? How will he know them? Would any one take me for an anarchist? Certainly no one would suspect the little, fat German, with his white hair and beard, of being a bloodthirsty ‘red.’”

“The shooting of President McKinley by an anarchist should convince all Americans of the danger to life and liberty by allowing such dastardly fiends to exist in this country. . . .”

“A special Anarchistic Secret Service Department should be organized in every city, town and hamlet in the United States for the detection and apprehension of this class of criminal Anarchists, and as each one thousand is corralled, tow them five hundred miles to sea and then scuttle the ship. . . .”

“The law of God requires the maintenance of civil order and the repression of anarchism.”

“How evil must be the teachings and sentiment that should prompt in a sane mind so heinous a crime.”

“The fact that anarchy is rampant in the United States today is due to the parsimony of the government. It is a notorious fact among police officers that the secret service department is so badly handicapped by lack of funds that it can not even keep track of counterfeiters, to say nothing of watching anarchists.”

“It is a cancer eating into the breast of society at large.”

“A fleck of foam from the chops of a mad dog, if introduced into one’s veins, will not bring on the horrors of hydrophobia more quickly than the frothings of these maniacs will madden cowards into the perpetration of deeds whose boldness and wantonness fill the prince of devils with envious rage.”

“No sane man can imagine any good that could come to any one from any theory of nihilism or anarchism.”

“They are atheists, having no fear of God or a future life, and are swallowed up by the conceit of their own folly, and think they make themselves heroes for all the ages if they sacrifice their own lives to slay the tyrants of the world.”

“When one-half of the creed of philosophical anarchism—that, namely, which denies the rightfulness of government—is adopted by fanatics, neurotics, and instinctive criminals, while the other half—namely, the gospel of non-resistance—is ignored or discarded, the result is an exceedingly dangerous product which, by its very nature, is bound to assume a criminal character, and, unless watched and restrained by the community, to grow into murder and revolution.”

“We cannot have our country polluted by the presence of these venomous vermin.”

“Organized anarchy in this free country must be declared a capital crime. There is no occasion for its existence here. Immigration laws must be made more strict and be more rigidly enforced, and keep out the murderous, fanatical dregs of Europe, who seek our shores only because there is greater opportunity to carry out their dark and bloody designs.”

“The day may come yet when it will be a question whether the Anarchists are to destroy society or whether society is to destroy the Anarchists.”

“. . . every right-minded citizen shares a deep sense of shame and disgrace that our country harbors a class of men of whom Leon Czolgosz is a representative. . . .”

“The peril that assails men in great place from the attacks of lunatics and fanatics cannot be absolutely eliminated from any civilization, but no theory of personal liberty compels us to tolerate the utterances of men and women who incite their followers to the murder of rulers or the existence of societies for the purpose of instigating to crime.”

“As long as the state tolerates within itself schools where such doctrines are taught we have no ground for surprise that the doctrines are occasionally put into practice.”

“Emma Goldman, Mrs. Parsons, Johann Most and their confreres and disciples ought to be banished from the society that is so hateful to them and given an island by themselves and an opportunity to construct a social and economic system to suit themselves. The rest of us could get along without them very easily.”

“It certainly is mistaken kindness, if not the height of folly, to permit Anarchists to congregate in this country—men who are hostes humani generis!—for it is the nature of such ingrates to return evil for good.”

“Why should anarchists condemn Czolgosz when the American government is the real teacher of violence?”

“If there were no saloons, there would be no anarchists.”

“It is time to attack these creatures as one would attack a nest of rattlesnakes. Let them be arrested wherever found—and put into some place where they will never again see God’s sunlight or hear the voice of human being.”

“As we now are no more exempt from having these reptilian doctrines advocated and carried out here, and as this democratic country is no more proof against the anarchistic brood than the monarchies of the other world, probably it would be well that an International Congress should meet and agree upon some drastic plan which would rid all the lands of every advocate of the vicious doctrines of Anarchy.”

“The anarchist respects no law and is opposed to all laws, and is therefore entitled to no protection.”

“It is a curious condition of mind into which the Anarchist deludes himself, and it is not easy for sane men to understand how anybody but a maniac could be persuaded that he has a mission to murder the heads of organised society, the representatives of law and order in whatever form they may exist.”

Banded in wickedness, spurning the right;
     Scorning all rule with a low-born despite;
Patience to those as a virtue should cease.
     Who with such conscienceless brutes would make peace?

“The doors of America have always stood ajar for the emigrant who can appreciate a free government and who seeks to become a reputable citizen of that government, but it is high time we should not be further cursed by the anarchistic off-scourings of all Europe. Such should be shown that they can not come here and teach America how to live.”

“The anarchists are all idealists. They ignore completely the fundamental factor in progress, the economic factor. They think the world is moved by ideas and brave deeds of isolated human beings. They usually wish to be different and are only absurd. In last analysis the anarchist is a capitalist without capital. The capitalist class, instead of hounding them down, should sprinkle them with cologne water and make a pretense at tolerating them, as they are the best friends of the capitalist system. They are the most vigorous defenders of Morgan and Rockefeller. Atavism drives them to use the knife on the government officials, just as Morgan and Rockefeller would use it if the government officials were not their servants.”

“When foreigners conspire to take the lives of men high in authority, or to throw bombs and destroy life of the regular constituted authorities, they are called Anarchists, but when men are hanged, burned, and shot to death, and even innocent women are murdered in their homes, it is called lynch law, and the men who partake in this innocent amusement are called ‘Our Best Citizens.’ In this instance as in all others, it depends greatly upon ‘whose ox is gored.’”

“. . . their absurd and contradictory tactics prove that the theories that they wish to impress on the people are equally as unreasonable and senseless.”

“So long as the assassin is a hero or a martyr, even to a small group of sympathizers, exactly so long will political assassination be repeated.”

“These venomous anarchists have sounded their note of alarm quite too long. They may disown complicity with the would-be murderer of the President. But it is such pernicious and insensate talk as theirs which incited him to the deed. They say they have no dislike to Mr. McKinley, but that the trouble is with the conditions of society. We bear no malice against these misguided men and women, but present conditions of society should not permit them to remain in the country whose protection and hospitality they have so shamefully abused. They should be summarily sent back to the lands they came from, or if that cannot be done they should be allowed no place here except in a safe prison, or in some colony by themselves, where they could experience the coveted privilege of living without government.”

“. . . the time is ripe for the American people to grind their heel relentlessly and unpityingly upon the head of this viper. It must be throttled.”

“We are too apt to despise the Anarchist as a self-glorifying mountebank, whose sweeping doctrines are in equal degree the offspring of ignorance and an insane thirst for notoriety. Unluckily all his hearers do not take him so lightly. A few on listening to the contumely heaped on all rulers, begin really to believe that by killing one of them they will not only perform a meritorious act, but win what is, in their eyes, eternal fame.”

“The Christlike utterance of our beloved President, ‘May God forgive him!’ which he spoke when pierced by an assassin’s bullet, will disarm more Anarchists than all that man’s vengeance or gibbets can deter.”

“The anarchist is not only the vermin of the human race, but he is guided, if it is proper to speak of guidance in respect of one so wholly unrestrained as he, by the same moods, passions, whims, caprices, vanities, and poor ambitions that govern despots and all absolute rulers who are not of the impossible good kind of which modern political philosophers are wont to talk. The anarchist thinks that he wants liberty; but he really wants what the tyrant wants—license for his own passions and desires, a community where he and his kind may live as they please, unhampered by any government, or by their fellows, even to the offence of those fellows whom they would constrain to adopt and follow their notions, and to obey their decrees.”

“Providence, as we have often been reminded, moves in mysterious ways; and one result of this tragedy will be to fill all honest men’s minds with detestation for the dangerous and senseless doctrines of anarchy. . . .”

“When a mad dog runs amuck in a community he is shot down. When pioneers settle in a country they first kill the rattle-snakes. Anarchists deserve no better fate.”

“If a society of Anarchists had caused the assassination of Mr. McKinley that act would do more harm to their cause than to the cause of governmentalism.”

“We believe that our so-termed yellow journals are responsible in large part in keeping alive and introducing into men’s minds the seditious principles of anarchy which bear such rotten fruits.”

“The police may spread their nets over the face of the earth, they may resort to the most cruel and despotic methods to wipe out all trace of the sect that believes in assassination, but anarchy will not disappear until the rising sun of Socialism dispels the darkness in which anarchy thrives.”

“What should be done with anarchists? That is a question too difficult to answer without consideration. To my mind it is a question of what to do with lunatics—a question of finding them and segregating them from the rest of mankind.”

“It is true that there is a body of Anarchists in this country who have brought their Old World hatreds with them, and whose acts and utterances are so wholly irrational as to suggest that they should be classified among the intellectually degenerate if not absolutely among the insane.”

“All that laws for the ‘suppression’ of anarchy can accomplish is to interfere with the legitimate activities of persons who are not assassins, and have nothing in common with them.”

“We believe the truth to be that there are very few anarchists in this country who expect to resort to violence against American public servants, or who either directly or indirectly advocate such violence. There may be more who believe that a violent revolution will come in time, even here; but this is not a programme with them, it is a prophecy. There are many who talk loosely, but their speeches would attract no more attention than the speeches of any other stump speaker, if their ideas were not already labeled ‘dangerous.’ But with that label the Lord’s prayer or the declaration of independence, repeated by them, has a sanguinary sound to the ignorant.”

“. . . you can kill all the anarchists, but you can’t kill their idea.”

“The professional anarchists in this country have almost without exception been of foreign birth. If the family history of the individuals forming this body of malcontents could be traced, it is probable that they would prove to belong to a class of unfortunates who have passed through generations of poverty, depravity, and perhaps oppression, with the result that they have, perhaps, inherited a bent of mind which is distinctly abnormal.”

“Anarchism is the child of the bourgeoisie—its youngest child, its ‘enfant terrible,’ in a certain sense also its favorite child, of which one easily becomes convinced upon reading the bourgeois fin de siecle authors of the nineteenth century—but for that very reason the Anarchists will never exert any serious influence upon the proletariat.”

“It is not a boon but a curse to accord freedom of action, and even of expression to these members of murderous and secret organizations. They are a perpetual menace to mankind; they are the enemies of God and man; they possess perverted natures that cannot be tamed, not even as much as the nature of a tiger, or a serpent.”

“It will be a fatal day to the sympathizers with Czolgosz and the approvers of his deed when the logic of homicidal anarchy becomes clear to the community; for in that day the professed advocate of murder will be lynched offhand. And his reflections, if he is given time for thought, will be akin to those of the eagie [sic] killed by an arrow winged with his own feathers.”

“Anarchism is the cancerous growth, the excrescence of our modern civilisation. The futility and sheer insanity of its methods of endeavouring to redress grievances, fancied or real, against society, might excite some feeling akin to pity, did not the horror and brutality of such methods repel every right minded man.”

“Anarchists should not only not be permitted to promulgate their doctrines, but they should not be allowed to live in this country and enjoy its freedom and its privileges, when their whole lives are devoted to the destruction of its very best principles and its leaders.”

“One is tempted at this moment to recommend any measures, however severe, to keep these shores clean of the foul brood of anarchy, but it is a serious problem, and one with which Congress has wrestled in the past and will have to wrestle with in the immediate future. The horror and indignation which have resulted from the striking down of a man of the noble character of our President will, I am sure, find immediate results in concerted and decisive legislative action against anarchy.”

“One-half of the world is terrorized by anarchism; the other half pooh-poohs it with contempt. But too often contempt is only another name for blindness or insanity. However we look at it, the spectacle of anarchy springing at the throat of government and of the rulers of the most democratic countries in the world being afraid to grip it and grapple with it is not a pleasant one.”

“Predominance of the imaginative faculty, inaction, and mutual excitation are the three fundamentals of anarchical conspirators. And thus from the gatherings of these generally half-mad, half-imbecile, half-criminal individuals, from obscure clubs met for drinking and chatting there arises a continuous misty cloud of terribly grandiose plots against society, grotesquely impracticable, perhaps, but beside which the most sensational revelations of the police seem insipid.”

“Anarchistic crimes are invariably manifestations of a perverted conscience.”

“The assassination of Mr. McKinley has shown us too plainly that though they talk of peaceful changes and of philosophical anarchy they are ready at any time to startle the world with most horrible crimes against society.”

“Anarchism as an intellectual theory is beneath contempt; but as an intellectual theory it is also the mildest, most optimistic creed ever enunciated by man. It is a curious phenomenon that it is the exponents of this milk-and-water theory who have made their name a terror to society.”

“Our right to punish anarchistic crimes cannot be questioned; it is founded upon the necessity to defend society against its enemies.”

When anarchy’s malign and poisoned sting,
     Like Erynnis’ destructive venom spread,
More feared than war or pestilence, will ring
     A nation’s lamentation for its dead.

“If there were no socialists, there would be no anarchists.”

Give to fiends anarchistic
Death with trimmings most artistic.

“Anarchy is the legitimate child of Capitalism. It is individualism carried to its logical extreme.”

“For every Anarchist you hang, a score of others will spring forward to be hung—so long as you leave untouched the subsoil of injustice, from which alone they derive their sustenance.”

And here, but hid ’neath many a crafty guise,
The immortal foe of God and man doth view
With gloating eyes the horrid work of this
His last and greatest falsehood, Anarchy.
Again he strikes at laws from Heaven given,
At Order, Office, Justice, Government;
Again he proudly mocks the law Divine,
While his curs’d angels with their voice malign,
Applaud his deep and damnable design.

“It is our imperative duty to stamp out the evil.”

“If the assassination of President McKinley has taught no other lesson, it has taught 70,000,000 people that anarchy is worse than treason and must be driven forever from the country.”

“No punishment, however severe, will stop their bloody deeds. They must be expelled—banished—from the continent; yea, from the face of the earth.”

“I am of the belief that every man who announces himself as an Anarchist should be confined in an insane asylum.”

“Emanating from low conditions of birth and surroundings, influenced by ignorance and baseness, fostered in the saloon and nurtured by idleness, it is a shame and a disgrace that this nation should be terrorized, threatened or disturbed by the ravings and outbreaks of anarchism.”

“Summary justice properly executed will do the work. Drive the anarchists out of America. Hang every one of them caught in these crimes without delay. Let the movement begin with vigorous action on the part of the community and they will disappear when they find we mean business. Every anarchist arriving in this country should be sent back by the next steamer. The European police will attend to them. They are shadowed everywhere, and they should be kept over there, and hunted down and promptly exterminated.”

“Whether or not the lion will ever lie down with the lamb, capital with labour, the rulers with the ruled, in peace and contentment, we must leave for future centuries to see, but if these marvels ever come to pass, the cure for anarchy will have been found, as its causes will have been removed and the symptoms will therefore disappear. If this happy state be ever reached any stray creature then professing the dread doctrines of anarchism, will be but a pitiable homicidal maniac, who upon developing the symptoms of his disease, will be humanely confined and treated by the latest scientific means for the alleviation and cure of that disease. Of the anarchists of to-day even, there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of many and the sanity of some. For their number and the extent and ferocity of their alleged intentions, they accomplish remarkably little, the majority of them having evidently a wholesome dread of incurring any risk to their own precious skins, evidently preferring the melodrama of denunciation to the tragedy of execution.”

“Anarchy is an agency for the obstruction of repentance and the perdition of souls.”

“There is no good anarchist except one who dangles from a gibbet or is shut up for life.”

“The flaming appeal of the anarchist is not necessary to vitalize the arm which wields the destroying weapon of the assassin. In this country there are smooth statesmen who have wrought the English language into all fantastic shapes in depicting other men whom they declare to be enemies of the people and bent upon using every device to enslave and tyrannize over them and rob them of their rights. They do not say these should be taken out of the way. They do not call for blood. But they use language for all it is worth and expression for all it is worth to prompt others to cultivate the spirit which in its blossoming spells assassination.”

“It could not be expected that such as these should discriminate. Lincoln and McKinley, in their minds, are in the same category with Nero and Caligula.”

“In God’s name, when shall we get up sense to fire out bodily this vermin that is ever plotting and preaching against the society we are trying to prop? What business have they here and what business have we to let them stay here?”

Red-handed Anarchy, a victim sought;
     Red-handed Anarchy, a victim found;
A nation’s loss, a widow’s grief is nought
     To ruthless beasts of prey who lurk around.

“We look in the wrong direction when we seek for a remedy, for a preventive of the evil in the exclusion of anarchists or the revision of the criminal code. Anarchists and nihilists were exotics once but we are beginning to breed them now, and no closed door, no punishment for crime, can safeguard us from this ill. When contempt for law sits in the high places of a metropolitan city, when reverence is weakening for that parental rule, and that authority of law, which are the very representatives of God, when prosperity awakens not the sense of responsibility but the instinct of self-gratification, then the country is in danger, for this, far more than the reign of tyranny, is the environment in which is nurtured, not that revolt against evil rule which is a nation’s safeguard, but that rebellion against all rule which is its destruction. The one safeguard which our country needs, that all potent safeguard, is the revival of true religion; a new recognition of the character of God and our relations to him as children, owing his therefore love and obedience wherever he manifests himself, a new recognition of our relations to men as fellow children of God, brothers by that bond, and by it entitled to our love and our self-sacrificing service. McKinley will not have died in vain if his death awakens his country to this need, and if that Christianity which as a nation we profess becomes a potent influence in our institutions through its influence upon individual lives.”

“The gates of schools and libraries and of churches and every needed institution for individual advancement stand wide open, and yet there are men—what shall I call them?—haters of humanity, assassins of society, plotters against church and state and society, who would undermine the structure of everything, hoping that in the universal chaos something may turn up which they may clutch and so better themselves.”

“The selfishness and cruelty of anarchy come out to sight. The vileness of the sentiments that are sown under the guise of friendship and good will for the people, is fully exposed. Let there be an end. Toleration can no further go.”

“Probably nothing can be done to preclude the possibility of such attacks upon the heads of nations, but the preaching if not the mad practise of anarchy can be stopped, and it doubtless will be until we again grow careless of the safety of our highest state officials.”

“We would suggest that the most efficient legislation against the so-called Reds would be legislation imposing a little wholesome and much needed restraint upon the robbing proclivities of consolidated corporations.”

“When socialism spreads anarchy grows. One is the forerunner of the other.”

“Stealing can and should be suppressed by law; but stealing cannot be eradicated until people are convinced that it is wrong to steal. So, anarchy can and should be suppressed by law, but it cannot be entirely eradicated until all are convinced that anarchy is wrong.”

“The nation is called upon to deal with this destructive force. Stringent repressive political enactments should be introduced to make anarchism less likely to rear its python head. But as a nation we should endeavor to nullify the possibilities of anarchism by lives devoted to justice, mercy and humility.”

“If I had my way I would take Herr Most and all of his stripe, put them on a derelict, tow them out to sea and let them shift for themselves.”

“There is no use of our hugging the delusion that there is no soil in this country fit to sprout the germ of anarchy. The facts are stronger than any theory. The anarchist is here and is a force to be reckoned with. That it is to the interest of society that he be suppressed, both capitalist and Socialist are for the once in agreement.”

“The Socialist lecturer is the only antidote the slums ever have for anarchism. . . .”

“Nothing has been accomplished by the idiot Czolgasz [sic] except to inspire with new life the forces of reaction, and if for no other reason than this he and his kind are enemies of mankind.”

“Like snakes, they crawl around till a good opportunity comes to strike. In all the world there is no more complicated and difficult problem than this of eradicating anarchism; and there can be no more hopeless theory than the one that we dare not lift a finger lest we stir the snakes to greater activity.”

“In these latter days it seems that a body of beings has been evolved, out of what conditions it is needless to say, among whom even the semblance of what is known as good is so far absent that they have bid farewell to hope, farewell to fear, farewell to remorse, and by a strange metamorphism have made evil their good.”

“The Anarchists are not only lawless, but extremely stupid, if they hope to produce revolution by any such means. The death of Mr. McKinley is absolutely of no advantage to them, and the manner of its occurrence, and the way in which he met his fate, will enshrine his name henceforth as a popular hero, while it will not be mentioned without exciting hatred and detestation of the unnatural gang who have warred against their fellow-men with the weapons of the hired bravo—the infernal machine, the pistol, and the dagger. Instead of advancing their cause, the crime will make them execrated throughout the length and breadth of Christendom.”

“The foul murder by an anarchist of a man so universally beloved would have justified serious perturbation in trade and industry, but the very occurrence has only served to show how free our people, as a whole, are from acceptance of the villainous doctrines of those who see in social chaos a regeneration of mankind.”

Upon the altar where our leader fell
Let us together swear, and keep it well,
For righteous vengeance and for public weal,
To crush the Serpent ’neath Law’s iron heel!

“The only full and final protection against the moral and mental insanity which makes Anarchism possible is the complete cleansing of society to the very bottom.”

“This whole cankerous process of nihilism and anarchy is a disease—social and political infection.”

“Their infernal hearts are reeking with blood sucked from the veins of God-loving and God-fearing people.”

“Czolgosz acted as the exponent of a theory, founded upon a degree of truth quite extensively admitted, that large classes of the people are oppressed by existing conditions, social and political, for which there is no remedy except force. Whatever may be said for or against such a conclusion, no doubt there are rational views on each side held by sane persons—honest people, and good citizens. Opinions cannot be successfully combatted by force. But when the exponents of a theory individually resort to force and commit crime, they should and must suffer punishment.”

Must anarchy strike virtue down, in terror,
     In land redeemed by patriotic blood?
How can we purify our land from error
     And make it strong in Christian brotherhood?

Columbia weeps,
And as her tears fall fast
She maketh this decree:
In her broad land, where’er ’tis found,
Down, down with anarchy!

“There are a few editors of daily papers in this country who are not very far from being out and out anarchists.”

“Their wickedness is so cold-blooded and purposeless that it exhausts human capacity for fierce loathing.”

“Drive them out of the country and keep them out.”

“I respectfully suggest that the individuals who are now crying loudly for the enactment of repressive laws to suppress the anarchists should first study their literature, in order that they may discover that there is no call for this bloodthirsty cry of extermination that is being so pitilessly urged against unoffending men, women and children. It is true, anarchy aims to abolish government, not by killing rulers, but by developing the thought in the minds of men that government is not necessary; that there is room enough on the earth for men to dwell in peace and plenty without standing armies, police, jails and scaffolds. The anarchist propaganda is not a message of blood, but of peace; it appeals to reason, to human sympathy. Study their literature, and it will be found that there is no connection between Czolgosz’s act and the philosophy of anarchy.”

“An avowed anarchist is more dangerous than a wild beast and should no more be allowed to roam at large than a tiger from the jungle.”

“. . . these revolutionary anarchists, the anarchists of the pistol, the poniard, and the running noose; the anarchists who are opposed to government because it uses force, but whose entire programme consists in the use of force in the most cowardly and infernal ways—these are the people who are outside the pale of reason and humanity; their words and deeds prove them impervious to all rational and humane motives; they are the sworn foes of society, and it is absurd for society to harbor and protect combinations of men whose only purpose in life is the destruction of the order which protects them.”

“Education is the only force capable of wiping Anarchy from the face of the earth.”

“Before he has hatched his plots of foul conspiracy against earthly government; before he has defiled the air of heaven with the bombast and bitterness of his contempt of human authority; before he has lifted his treacherous hand against the civil magistrate, or laid his underground mines to break up social order, he has dethroned God. He is an atheist before he is an Anarchist; he is an Anarchist because he is an atheist.”

“We picture to ourselves an Anarchist in the unlovely personality of man or woman plotting, scheming, conspiring in the dark, or blatant and bitter in their denunciation of all government; cruel and stealthy and deadly, with the trail of a serpent and the tread of a tiger, and the snapping and snarling of a mad dog—unsexed women and dehumanized men; and such he is, such she is, in the finished development of their rabies.”

“. . . a review of the public statements made by good citizens under the stress of passion provoked by the lamentable tragedy at Buffalo will indicate that there is good reason for the reminder that all efforts for the suppression of anarchy must be strictly within the law.”

“Beneath the orderly and divinely appointed procession of the stars there is no place for anarchy.”

What think you of a flag whose folds protect
The fetid anarchy of brainless clods
Whose dogmas reek of carnage, blood and death?
It ought to make all crawling things rejoice
Their inability to stand erect,
When creatures upright, made in God’s own form,
Perform such deeds of rage and violence
As make brutes blush by mean comparison.

“So long as the causes of anarchy continue—deep seated, widespread, upheld and promoted by governments, excused and lauded in the press and the pulpit, tolerated and trifled with by the people—anarchists will continue to appear. For every one hung, or electrocuted, or beheaded, or lynched, two will arise.”

“[The assassination] gave startling proof that republics no less than monarchies, democracies no less than despotisms, the land of the free no less than the government of tyranny and oppression, will sooner or later be the victim of these indolent, conscienceless, vindictive and unspeakably brutal wretches who seem to see nothing in industry, right living and frugality but an opportunity for them to divide and despoil, who see nothing in honest accumulations of wealth but organized crime; that in these Anarchists whom we have foolishly permitted to enter this country for years unchecked, we have been nursing nests of vipers who have now turned upon their protector and buried their deadly fangs in its heart.”

“. . . anarchists are not more but less dangerous if they are given an opportunity to blow off steam in vapid discussion of their crazy doctrines than in being suppressed by inquisitional police measures that have no place in our polity.”

“. . . it is our duty to stamp out anarchy’s fiendish and unholy cult, and not only to make an example of the misguided and infatuated assassin, but also to bring to just retribution those who incite him to his hideous crime against society.”

“Most of these anarchists are simply criminals, whose perverted instincts lead them to prefer confusion and chaos to social order and beneficent institutions. Their pretense of concern for workingmen is as impudent as it is false; for the political institutions of this country afford the greatest hope and reliance of all honest and intelligent sons of labor. The anarchists everywhere are enemies of society and of progress. They are deadly foes of real liberty.”

“It can doubtless to some extent be hunted down as essentially treasonable and criminal; but it must not for a moment be forgotten that a very large measure of freedom of speech and general liberty is the best safeguard against the dangerous plotting of anarchists.”

“The only permanently effective weapon against anarchy, in a self-governing republic, is respect for law.”

“Anarchy is the science of getting along without any Government. It is in an academic sense a purely utopian idea, which could only become practical were it possible to so train the physical and moral nature of each individual that each could exist and thrive and exercise all desirable rights without ever trenching or seeming to trench in thought, word or aim on the rights of any other. In other words, under ideal anarchy each individual would simply govern himself. There would be no disputes or differences of opinion, in fact a sort of governmental Nirvana, heavenly only to those who could enjoy a perfect stagnancy of mind and body, and utterly unattainable by beings having the characteristics of men and women. Unluckily, this ideal of moon-struck philosophers has been taken up by people either half educated or wholly ignorant, who do not possess the faculty of detecting impracticability.”

“Anarchy, and fads, and fools cannot be suppressed by law.”

“The cruel murder of William McKinley reminds us that Anarchy is still a living and a working terror. Not only was it cruel—it was purposeless, even for an anarchistic outrage.”

“But we shall never find a proper remedy for Anarchism until we understand what an Anarchist is, and what he wants. He is an indolent monster, diseased with vanity, whose first and last desire is advertisement. He has no practical aim, no definite ambition. He knows that when he has slain one ruler, good or bad, another will arise; he knows also that so long as he and his friends live policemen will be a patent necessity. He knows all this, or he would know it, if thirst for publicity had left any space for knowledge in his narrow brain. It is not wrong that goads him to revenge, for he is as often as not well supplied with the things which make life pleasant, and the money which shall purchase the instruments of his crime are seldom lacking to him. He travels at will from one end of the earth to the other, generally accompanied by a mistress, and when he has driven home his dagger, thrown his bomb, or pulled the trigger of his pistol, he is aureoled with glory, in whose reflected light his companions proudly bask.”

“Anarchy can be neither excused nor tolerated here.”

Our glorious country shall no longer breed
A pestilentious crop from spurious seed;
Columbia must purge out her threshing floor
And anarchy swift winnowed from her door.

“Reasoning with anarchy is like reasoning with the inmates of Bedlam.”

Anarchy’s irreligion failing God, fails mankind.
Christ’s are the only ethics potent to draw and bind
Men unto men as brothers, striving for human good,—
Sons free and equal under God’s common Fatherhood!

“The flaunting of great wealth, ground from the blood and bones of the toiling masses, in the face of the struggling, honest, industrious poor breeds discontent and is largely responsible for the dangerous anarchist.”

“They took the life of the President of the United States—what is their gain? Contempt, antipathy and utter dislike for them and theirs.”

“The anarchist (not the socialist) is a perverted being, supremely egotistic, whose hand is against all the world except his few fellow cranks and criminals. ‘Beer and blood’ are his motto, and when the moon is wrong he is apt to develop a sort of hydrophobia, directed specially against those individuals whom accident or merit has placed in high station.”

“Anarchy has taken root in this country since Americans began listening to the gospel of despair. The old Puritan spirit knew no despair. It may have feared God over much [sic], but it did not despair of His mercy. That spirit endured all things in the way of physical hardship and privation, and from it issued the courage of the pioneers who moved the country’s frontier westward until it was lost in the Pacific. Then came a decline in the pioneer spirit, and with it departed some of the independence and self-dependence of the people. Then came the evangelist of despair to deposit in mental conditions the soil on which anarchy feeds, as the germs of the pestilence feed upon the feculence of cities.”

“So far as the preaching of anarchy is concerned,—whether it be ‘philosophical’ anarchy or plain, ordinary, murderous anarchy,—there need be no difficulty. Some things are settled forever, and one of those things is the necessity for law and organized government. It is not guaranteeing freedom of speech, but licensing lunacy, to permit the public discussion of the contrary view. Society owes no protection to men and women who believe and who teach that there should be no society at all.”

“. . . but for the gross abuses festering the earth—abuses of power, wealth, position, commerce—abuses patent to all but their blind and hardened purveyors—there would be no militant Anarchists.”

“We cannot silence the anarchist without endangering the freedom of patriotic citizens, departing from our high theory, forgetting of what country we are inheritors, and disregarding our mission to our successors. That thought and word and printing-press shall be free is so clearly of the essence of our system, that, if anarchists shall ever provoke us in sudden heat to exchange freedom for repression, then they will indeed have wrought a revolution, and will have destroyed—as in no other way can they destroy—the present government of the United States.”

“The anarchists will not be in the least daunted by Czolgosz’s fate; they will glory in it and plan fresh assaults; so that the one thing of crucial importance now does not relate to the past, it is to safeguard the future.”

“In driving out anarchism, we must not erect into law a policy and methods which later and in other directions can be perverted into instruments of oppression.”

“. . . the nation should put itself on a tentative war basis, as it were, with reference to the anarchist propaganda.”

“There is no political, social, economic or moral reason why known anarchists should be permitted at large in modern society.”

“It would be a most interesting subject for thought to endeavor to determine the mental constitution of those who style themselves anarchists, and to trace out the line of reasoning by which, starting out with the demand for absolute personal liberty of thought, word and deed for every one as their fundamental principle, they come to regard it as a duty to remove by death those who merely represent views differing from their own. Surely this is in itself enough to prove an obliquity of mental vision incompatible with a sound mind.”

“Anarchy, which has so recently and signally reared its horrid head in our country, is, indeed, a foreign product, but yellow journalism is doing much to render it indigenous to our soil.”

“. . . the gospel of individualism gone mad.”

“. . . we need to purge ourselves somewhat of the spirit of lawlessless [sic] . . . before we can expect anything nobler or better of ignorant immigrants in whom anarchy, bad as it is, is in part an hereditary manifestation of the ills endured by their ancestors for several generations.”

“That the devilish ideas of the anarchist have been allowed too long to flourish, not only in America, but in Continental Europe, is but too self-evident, but the death of President William McKinley, our beloved idol, has but freshened, with great force, the knowledge that anarchy is rampant throughout the civilized world, and that its advocates but await an opportunity to plunge the dagger or speed the leaden bullet into the vitals of any representative of a righteous government.”

“. . . the real cure for the evil must wait for the slow process of assimilation and education of alien and untutored races pouring in an ever increasing deluge on our shores.”

“It is an anti-social force of slow and insidious growth developing in the untrained intellects and undernourished brains of the half-starved laboring and peasant classes of southern and eastern Europe. Driven from its natural habitat by the wisely repressive laws of European governments it takes refuge in free America, only to turn its blood-stained hand against our institutions and the highest person in our government.”

“. . . we must by legislation close up the American saloon which is the school of anarchism, the breeding place of anarchists, where murderous deeds are hatched.”

“Wholesome missionary effort is certainly as applicable to these misguided vipers on the bosom of our national life as to the heathen at the antipodes.”

“It would seem that no anarchist should be allowed to pollute this free soil by his presence.”

“Anarchy is the creed, not of madmen, but of human fiends.”

“. . . the lover of liberty is perplexed at the problem of how to deal with those unruly elements who prefer the bullet to the ballot, who spread their doctrines not by argument but by sowing hatred and inciting to murder, and whose idea of progress is slaughter and destruction.”

“The world would gladly accept the gospel of freedom were it not for the skeleton in the closet, the grinning sham freedom of violent anarchism, with its gospel of hatred, its bloody deeds of darkness, its contemptible treachery, its narrow-minded and stupid logic, and its insanity-begotten aspirations.”

“The time has come when the Constitution of the United States must be so altered as to give to the country and its political workers some definite protection from the free hand of anarchy. . . .”

“. . . the red flag of anarchy should never again be permitted to float under the same sky with the Stars and Stripes.”

“Of the stability of our government we need not doubt for no anarchist bullet can kill the strong life of our free institutions.”

“. . . this viperous brood has to be crushed and stamped out as a pestilence is.”

“The trial was conducted by Justice White with dignity and dispatch, and the solemn lesson taught to all of Czolgosz’s way of thinking that they may expect nothing more of the American people than a short shrift and a tight rope, or a sufficient electric voltage, as the lex loci may provide.”

“[Czolgosz’s] crime is the most foolish . . . as well as the most cowardly in the annals of anarchy.”

“The slaying of men in sovereign place is no rare thing in history, but until the fell era of anarchism came upon the stage of human action, it was possible to find some motive more or less plausible on the part of the assassin.”

“To fall upon and exterminate the whole viperous brood of anarchists now domiciled in the United States would not crush out anarchy, but would rather give new madness and inspire to more awful purposes the hordes of lawlessness throughout the world.”

“Anarchist murder is not a conspiracy. It is a contagion. Methods of police can always break the backbone of an organisation, but they can no more grapple alone with the infection of perverted thought and sinister example, than smallpox can be fought with a bludgeon.”

“. . . there is no essential difference between the teachings of Anarchists and Socialists. Both are in antagonism to the existing social order, both propose to overthrow all the institutions of society by violence, both mark out rich men and rulers as enemies who are to be destroyed, and both deliberately use outrage and murder as instruments to accomplish their ends. The harvest which we are now reaping has grown from seed which was sown during the French Revolution, of which Socialism in its modern manifestation is the offspring. The Reign of Terror has in a sense never ended; it has but assumed a different form and spread to other countries.”

“Anarchy can not be suppressed any more than the school-boy’s belief that arithmetic is all a mistake. . . .”

“‘Anarchy’ may be looked at psychologically or physiologically, as a mental disease or a physical degeneration, and it may be regarded philosophically as a systemless system, being utterly reprehensible from either point of view.”

Ye men of America, rise in your power,
And sweep from our Country the Anarchist band,
As vengeance, in part, for the grief of this hour,
The stain that now darkens our fair native land.

“There is no use in hanging anarchists. Go to the hot bed of anarchy—plutocracy.”

“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.”

“There is no excuse for anarchy in the United States. There is no room for anarchy in the United States. The anarchists must go.”

“In these days when the Anarchist hunt is on at full cry, there should be some way of distinguishing the Anarchist from his neighbor. Who is the Anarchist? Is it he who criticises existing institutions? Who has not done so? Is it he who advocates violent, illegal methods of punishing wrong-doing? Then are there few, indeed, who are not Anarchists, and those making the loudest outcry against Anarchists are the most lawless.”

“. . . Anarchy is the only cult that leaves to all the right to ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’. . . .”

“We can no longer doubt the existence and growth of a spirit of anarchy in our midst. It seems to need no especial exciting cause to rouse it to deadly activity, but deliberately plans murder in high places—senseless and useless except to indulge its love for blood and its hatred of every agency of human government. Though of foreign parentage it has been permitted to pass our gates, and has been too long allowed to construe American freedom of speech and action as meaning unbridled and destructive license to disseminate the doctrines of hate and social disorder, and to teach assassination.”

“The anarchist is a noisome fungous growth flourishing in the dark places of civilisation. He is a savage lacking all the savage virtues.”

“The theory of Anarchy, as represented in this assassin, has grown up and taken root in society, not at all because human nature is evil and bad, but because of the abuses of government and because the institutions of civilized life have everywhere subordinated human life to material interests, because government has been in many places nothing but organized robbery and murder.”

“The words spoken by a leader of the anarchists, Herr Most, are full of meaning. ‘Czolgosz,’ he said, ‘is not a Pole: the Poles are Catholics,’—the perfectly correct inference being that no Catholic can be an anarchist.”

“. . . I am afraid that for Anarchist assassination there is no infallible remedy. When all reasonable precaution shall have been taken, and all penalties consistent with humanity shall be in readiness, then all that is left to those in high places is to make their wills and do their duty.”

“The anarchistic doctrines are made because people have been imposed upon for so many generations and for this greatest imposition the church has to answer. Not true religion—but the church—theology.”

“Happily there are not enough degenerates of the Czolgosz type or sentimentalists of the pseudo-scientific type to make protection from anarchy anything more than one of the ordinary police duties.”

“. . . while anarchism is, to some extent, respectable in Russia, there is no place for it or any part of it in the United States. . . .”

“As we do not extirpate a church community because a murderer develops in its midst, so we should not seek the extirpation of those peaceful Anarchists who in word and deed show their abhorrence of blood.”

“It is cruel and inhuman to hold all Anarchists responsible for the act of one of their number. The slayer of Garfield claimed he had a mission from God to kill the President, but did the world at large hold Christianity responsible for that bloody act? No. Yet it is common for Christian men and women to declare they are doing God’s work.”

“Emma Goldman bears a share of the crime; so do the publishers of anarchist papers and documents. The men who lecture in favor of anarchism share the crime of Czolgosz. The New York conclaves, the Chicago societies, the Cleveland clubs, the anarchists in Boston, Philadelphia and other places—they all bear a share in the great crime. They aided and stimulated the weak-minded Czolgosz.”

“But for the spirit of Christ and the precepts of Christianity, every group of anarchists in this country would be landed in eternity before the setting of another sun, and solely for the commission of the dastardly crime committed by their unrepentant and incorrigible satellite, Czolgosz. . . .”

“This festering sore in our body politic calls for and should receive drastic treatment.”

“They who preach or advocate assassination are the most efficient allies of despotism.”

“There is just one force mighty enough to cope with anarchy and lawlessness. That is the gospel. It is the power of God.”

“There is a wholesome appreciation . . . at the present crisis, of the fact that professed anarchists are not the only promoters of anarchical sentiment in America. The sordid and assumed friendship of ‘yellow journalism’ with the working-man whom it deceives and deludes has led to utterances which may prove as dangerous as any emanating from the convinced, or demented, or solely criminal advocates of anarchy.”

“Approval of lynch law, the killing and burning of negroes, the unbridled license of campaign speakers and partisan organs, the use of physical force by strikers—these and other phenomena, by no means exceptional with us, are breeders of anarchy.”

“Wherever any man, be he dressed in homespun or in the finest fabric of the looms, be he the poor wretch upon the street without a penny in his pocket or the millionaire in his office, wherever any man, by any means whatsoever under the sun, defies law, seeks to evade or break it, that man manifests the spirit of anarchy, and in the best definition of anarchy he is an anarchist, be he preacher, lawyer, business man, or politician.”

“As regards anarchism, one of two things must be true. Either some nefarious divinity has surreptitiously imparted it in the minds of its devotees, or else it is the creature of circumstances. Now the first hypothesis is inexpressibly silly to anyone who will take a moment to think; for, with the theory of origins now prevailing, it is inconceivable that an idea or an object should be created out of nothing; that it should be thrust extraneously into a given environment and be expected to live there and find a home. The only possible belief is that anarchy, somehow or other, is the expression of a certain set of circumstances; and if this is so, how can anarchy be condemned? The conditions out of which it grows may seem to those who are not anarchists to be horrid, dark and abnormal, but are they not, nevertheless, rather sacred and solemn? If we trace out their genesis we shall find that they are connected with other circumstances, and these circumstances, in turn, with still other circumstances, until, by an infinite process, we have included the whole universe. Anarchy, indeed, is a universe-production: it is of human nature.”

“If there is that implanted within our borders, which would, by force or otherwise, undermine and destroy the government of these states, it is the duty of the American people to rise up in the dignity of their manhood and womanhood and, asserting the rights of Eternal Providence, banish it from our shores forever.”

“The anarchists themselves are of two classes, the idealist and the criminal. The first have been properly termed the ‘opium-eaters of politics’; they are dreamers, who see visions of a Utopia where man is so highly developed, his ethereal quality so cultivated, there will be no government, because there will be no need of government. There will be no laws, because there will be no wrongs to right or crimes to punish, the conduct of every individual being regulated always by an exalted conscience. This was the theory of Proudhon, who has been called ‘the father of anarchists.’ From such gentle doctrine has grown the modern monster that threatens society.”

“. . . the most certain way of eradicating anarchy, and perhaps the only way to do it completely and permanently, is to make government what it ought to be.”

“We value greatly the right to the free utterance of our opinions in this country; but it may be questioned whether ‘free speech’ should carry with it liberty to attack in public places the foundations of society, marriage, the family, government, the Church, and religion.”

“There is no intention of, in any way, impugning the present Chief of the United States Secret Service, who, although not having been previously engaged in Police or Detective Service, has proven his capability for the position he holds, but the department of which he is the head has had but very little to do with anarchists, and, as at present organized, I do not believe it would be in a condition to handle this important problem. It would require a thorough reorganization, a large increase in the present force, no little legislation, and a large additional appropriation before much could be done toward controlling or eradicating the dangerous anarchists we have here now as well as those who are coming here in greater or less numbers at all times, and who, of late years, have seemed to do most of their plotting in this country.”

“It is a matter of course to put mad dogs out of existence, and no less does common sense dictate drastic measures against the plague of Anarchy.”

“Theosophy alone contains the solution of this problem of anarchy.”

“There is no anarchy in nature, there must be no anarchy in society.”

“Anarchy instead of being strengthened by this murder has been crippled and its loathsome head has hidden from sight fearful of the righteous vengence [sic] of a people who will not permit such a sentiment to exist in this country.”

“Anarchists are the enemies of the human race, and the civilization against which they war has a right to suppress them like venomous snakes.”

“. . . let us not be possessed of the idea that it is only the degenerate and congenitally criminal who are in danger from anarchistic propaganda. More than one Czolgosz is being made to-day through environment and opportunity.”

“. . . we have nothing to fear from the Czolgosz type of anarchist. The dangerous anarchist is one who undermines the constitution; who defeats the ends of law, and who uses the instruments of the constitution to defeat the objects of the constitution.”

“Methinks that Anarchy is the philosophy of life, and as such it includes every branch of human knowledge pertaining to life. If this be so, and I know of no Anarchists who would deny it, Anarchists ought to be students of psychology and honestly endeavor to explain certain phenomena, not only from a politico-economic but also from a psychological standpoint. Had they done so, they would not have joined the thoughtless rabble in its superficial denunciation of Leon Czolgosz as a lunatic and a villain.”

“Anarchy, or absence of direct government, does not mean that its upholders shall ‘do as they please’ when they please to invade other people’s liberty, but it means the union of order with the liberty to govern one’s self. Owing, however, to the way the human race has brought itself up—fooled by priests and kings, swayed by passions inherited from savage ancestors but a grade higher than beasts—the social theory called Anarchy is impracticable and impossible. It is an iridescent dream. The big fish eat the little fish, the strong animals prey upon the weak, and man is no exception.”

“. . . it would appear that we have been free to the present time from anarchists and their crimes, because, being so unlike foreign powers, they have felt heretofore that they had nothing to fear from the United States; but, since our recent development and expansion has placed us in the foremost ranks of the powers of the world, these individuals feel that they are not now quite so sure of their ground with America. Consequently, they begin to look upon us as a new enemy, more powerful than any of their old, which they must immediately destroy, or be themselves, by it, destroyed; hence the assassination of President McKinley, under whose administration these great changes have been wrought.”

“It may be too much to claim that [McKinley’s] death will prove a deathblow to anarchy, but it will tend more than anything else to lessen its power, and to redeem men from its cruel grasp.”

“The final condition of success in ridding our country of Anarchism in practice is that American public opinion should recognize the utter emptiness, the inherent folly of its theory and of all the kindred ready-made, furnished-while-you-wait schemes for the social regeneration of mankind.”

“. . . for, after all, the man who fired the shot at the President was the least of the criminals. The men and women who egged him on by their teaching and preaching were far more guilty than he. Without them he would never have been inspired with his mad design. President McKinley would be alive to-day had these others, who have not even been molested, but permitted to continue their teachings, been dealt with in the first instance as their criminality deserves.”

“Anarchism is most prevalent and deeply rooted among people where governments have been most oppressive to the peasant or lower class. It is said not to be American, and it is not a plant indiginous [sic] to this country, and for the reason that here is greater individual freedom, and there has never been such oppression in the United States as to develop the feeling that relief can only come from obliteration of governmental authority.”

“It is unquestionable that the speedy trial, conviction and execution of Czolgosz for the crime charged against him, will have a more potent effect and a more deterrent influence upon others of his class,—Anarchists, Socialists,—what you will, than whole libraries of theory for the suppression of Anarchy and Socialism.”

“There can be no trifling with anarchists hereafter in this country. The assassination of President McKinley drew the dead-line against these murderous conspirators.”

“It is a well-recognized fact that this crime [presidential assassination] is not likely to be committed—as an Anarchical crime at least—except by persons whose unbalanced and morbid minds are so inflamed by the spectacular features of the act that the legal punishment is rather an incentive than a deterrent.”

“. . . the word ‘anarchy’ should ring out as a battle cry, calling to these mighty free-born men of ours to avenge our wrong.”

“At the rate of improvement the race has made since history first recorded its struggles toward civilization, it will be some hundreds if not thousands of years before anarchy as a practical social polity is worth discussing.”

“. . . in order to show their hatred of Anarchism and their love and reverence for the victim of Anarchism, the loyal and patriotic citizens of this country—Democrats no less than Republicans, will now do their utmost to carry out the policy inaugurated by the fallen political chief.”

“The probability is that the man who slew President McKinley, and his deed, are more revolting to most Anarchists than to most non-Anarchists, for intelligent Anarchists, like all other intelligent people, have grown out of the barbarism of deeds of violence.”

“The anarchist must slay seventy-five million Americans before he can slay the Republic.”

“William McKinley’s martyrdom will not have been in vain when cursed, hateful, cowardly, damnable anarchy is crushed under the heel of the republic.”

“In dealing with the wild beast or the deadly rattlesnake we consider, that the right to inflict death, as to an enemy of our race is an inherent right. Measured by every standard available to human reason, the Anarchist who decides to prevent the organization of human government by the assassination of him who has been chosen to act as the head of the government becomes the deadly enemy of the race, far more terrible than the hyena, the tiger or the rattlesnake.”

“All possible precautions should be taken both against the sources as well as the substance of anarchy. But such laws, and such laws only, as are strictly consistent with our constitution and form of government will be found most efficient. Any laws or procedure going beyond these ancient and defined boundaries will be found inefficient, and in the end retroactive and injurious.”

“If anarchism confined its operation to the breaking down of political despotism and military absolutism where the voice of the common people is not heard in the counsels of the nation, and where oppressive taxation is crushing the life-blood out of the dependent masses, then a measure of sympathy might be evoked in any constitutional, or, if need be, revolutionary effort for emancipation and freedom. But to import from Europe a secret propaganda of political assassination and social annihilation to the free democratic soil of America, where the poorest man in the land has the same voice as the richest in electing the rulers of the people, is an anachronism wholly inexplicable upon any other hypothesis than that of the gravest mental deficiency and unbridled passion.”

“. . . the day has come when it must be expressed that we have no place in this country for those who come with the view of promulgating principles that are so much at variance with the principles upon which this Government is founded, and that there is no longer a place in this country for such spirits to come and concoct their damnable schemes.”

“The almost incredible iniquity of the bands who cultivate the art of political assassination, who seek to invert the whole moral scheme of the universe, saying, with the arch-fiend, ‘Evil be thou my good,’ aspiring to crimes that not only darken homes and fill the hearts of families and friends with sorrow and mourning, but which also plunge whole communities into grief and distress, is only equalled [sic] by the folly and madness of their hopes.”

“Anarchists have no fear of any laws Roosevelt may enact for the suppression of Anarchy. For they know only too well, if he and Congress do not, the utter futility of attempting to legislate ideas out of the country.”

“The germ of anarchy is in every wrongdoer, in every lawbreaker.”

“There is just one way to ‘stamp out’ anarchy, and that is, to discourage violence in all its forms. I know perfectly well that this cannot be done speedily. We all have much of the savage in us, and it will be the task of generations to extricate ourselves completely. But the direction of our efforts should be clear. We must push in the direction of less violence.”

“For philosophic anarchy there is just one cure, a free government providing equity for all its citizens. So long as our government presents the spectacle in many places, of corruption at the bottom and incompetence at the top, for just so long will ill-balanced persons, dwelling alone upon its crying evils and forgetful of its many great though silent blessings, revolt against government in any form. A purer administration and more equitable legislation in city, state and nation, is the only possible answer to philosophic anarchy.”

“It is not hard to define insanity in a legal sense in a way that might easily be made to include the modern anarchists; they are certainly out of harmony with their environment in any decently organized society, and if we credit them with any sort of sincerity, they are the most deluded of individuals. No one is inclined, however, to believe them irresponsible. . . .”

“If there were nothing else in the world that ought everlastingly to damn Anarchy it would be, and ought to be, the fact that it put Roosterpelter in the Presidential chair of the United States. . . .”

“It is worth remembering that we are dealing with a philosophy of social life, and not simply with a few criminals.”

“A loud demand is going up just now from various quarters for a re-enactment of the Chinese exclusion act, and we hear again the old cry that ‘the Chinese must go.’ But much better will it be for the country to insist that the anarchist crowd ‘must go,’ and to stand not on the order of their going. The Chinese may possibly be a menace to free labor, but the assassin breed are a menace to what is dearer still, to peace, order, and the lives of our chosen rulers.”

“As all reasonable people expected, the anarchists are now burning incense before the portraits of Saint Czolgosz, and bringing up their children to court similar sanctification.”

“It is more than a program of reform: it is a creed, passionately held and often heroically lived up to.”

“There is thus some truth in the anarchist idea, especially in the criticism of government and in the spur given to individual initiative, but the means suggested for carrying out the improvements are absurd.”

“. . . Anarchism is the noblest ideal of man.”

“I do not know whether Czolgosz was an Anarchist or not. And I do not know whether his act can be reconciled with the philosophy of Anarchism, because I am not sure that that philosophy, in its last analysis, does not imply non-resistance.”

“Anarchism . . . is a disease which besets a mind too weak to overcome difficulties, unduly amenable to suggestion, and prone to futile expedients; and it depends for its existence upon intercourse with like minds. In all probability if it were recognised as a disease it would materially diminish.”

“While it is probably true that some who call themselves Anarchists believe in opposing force by force, violence by violence, murder by murder, there is also a large proportion of these people, perhaps a majority, who prefer peaceful means; who would depend upon the cultivation of a public sentiment, a public conscience, that will, in time, rectify all social and civil evils without resort to the methods of rulers, that is, of war, of assassination, of robbery and murder—as now practiced by every so-called government on earth.”

“Our law-makers, both at Washington and Albany, have discovered that an effective measure, directed specifically against anarchism, is as hard to frame as a law compelling men to like summer better than winter. The root of the trouble is that you cannot legislate against a state of mind.”

“The present danger is not so much from anarchistic conspiracies hatched by any of the known groups of anarchists as from some morbid individual who feels that he must become the executioner of anarchy—the most dangerous criminal known to history.”

“. . . anarchism is a strong presumption of insanity. . . .”

“There is a class of men to whom the authority of God makes no appeal. They are moral degenerates who fear neither God nor man. Out of such material anarchists are made. It is little use to preach the fear of God to an anarchist. The only thing to do with a fully developed anarchist is to deal with him in a way that will best conserve the peace of society.”

“It is not liberty that anarchism demands, but license—license to disregard and defile every right sacred to civilized man. It has respect for neither home, church, nor State. All those ties which hold society together—ties of marriage, or morality, of religion, of patriotism—it seeks to tear asunder. The tender home affections, the sacred consolations of religion, the inspiring love of country and of flag, must all go, because all are grounded in reverence for authority. Anarchism preaches progress by a leap backward into the degradation of primeval savagery, where brutish appetites alone held sway.”

“Anarchists are insurgents against civilization, would-be assassins of society, enemies of the human race. By the concurrent actions of civilized nations they ought to be placed under the ban of universal law. The red flag of anarchy should be driven from the land, as the black flag of piracy has been driven from the sea.”

“If . . . kings, presidents, money-grubs, hoc genus omne, want to increase the frequency with which they will be made targets by persons calling themselves Anarchists, they can do no better than adopt the Gary-Roosevelt platform, and assume that every Anarchist is already guilty of making some one a target.”

“The anarchists claim that they are the real reformers of economic conditions for Labor. The best answer to that claim would be to leave no wrong unrighted to which they could point.”

“It is said that Czolgosz’ [sic] act was a bad deed, a foolish one, which it behooves us to condemn, for it does harm to the cause. So much prejudice is aroused; the propaganda is disturbed; and persecutions are the result. But the logic of revolutionary thought demands that we accept them, these theoretical protests transformed into action. No propaganda that has achieved anything has been without all of them—persecutions and abuse, rebels and philosophers.”

“The fault of the Anarchist lies in that he wishes to begin an ideal society before the human race has evolved into a fit state to receive it. He wishes to take the last step first; and, although the millennium can never be begun with the imperfect education of to-day, he would begin an earthly paradise with an unfit human nature, which would wear its wings as awkwardly as the Tsar holds out his olive-branch to the nations. The average man does not view Anarchism and Anarchists with a kindly eye. Their philosophy is above him, and he views with horror the bad logic of those men who preach peace and yet commit outrage, and he absolutely refuses to be terrorized into perfection. Whatever progress is made by Anarchist philosophy among thinkers will be nullified, and a feeling of horror against deeds such as those of Lucchini and Czolgotz [sic] will take its place in their hearts.”

“There is no room in this Republic, great and splendid as it is, for anarchy! The red flag must go down in the face of the Stars and Stripes!”

“The anarchist assassin is, to all intents and purposes, insane, and he is doing all he can to injure his own cause. Longing for a world good enough to dispense with policemen, prisons and electric chairs, he does his best to prove by his act the impracticability of his dream.”

“But allowing, for the sake of argument, that Czolgosz WAS an Anarchist. What then? Booth was a Democrat. Guiteau was a Republican. Why not hound and defame all other Democrats and Republicans? It would be just as reasonable as to do the same with Anarchists. If we lay claim to the least particle of fair-mindedness and love of justice we must treat the advocates of the Anarchistic doctrine of social philosophy as we do other people and judge them by the lives and acts of the majority of their number and not by those of an isolated and degenerate alleged adherent.”

God’s will be done in anarchy’s surcease,
In law’s survival, liberty’s increase.

“More especially to the English-speaking nations are they repugnant, not because they have suffered more from their nefarious practices, but from the fact that liberty and law being their birthright, and as necessary to them as the air they breathe, the Anglo-Saxons can find no language strong enough to condemn those who would demolish their most cherished institutions and make the liberty of the subject an impossibility.”

“This problem of anarchy is dark and intricate, but it ought to be within the compass of democratic government—although no sane mind can fathom the mysteries of these untracked and orbitless natures—to guard against their aberrations, to take away from them the hope of escape, the long luxury of scandalous days in court, the unwholesome sympathy of hysterical degenerates, and so by degrees to make the crime not worth committing, even to these abnormal and distorted souls.”

“If all the anarchists in the world were slain, assassins of crowned heads and presidents would still be at hand. The name by which each would be known would matter but little, either to society at large or to our large army of degenerates. Elnikoff, who slew the Czar, Alexander II., was styled a nihilist. He would have fitted the rôle of anarchist equally well.”

“It will be seen . . . that the atrocious act was not part of a conspiracy and was in no way chargeable to anarchists as a class.”

“To those who wish to know what the Anarchists have to say, these words are addressed. We have to say that not Anarchism, but the state of society which creates men of power and greed and the victims of power and greed, is responsible for the death of both McKinley and Czolgosz.”

’T is there, in Freedom’s very home,
     That anarchy has maimed its host;
There ’t is that it has turned to bite
     The hand that fed it; there repaid
A country’s welcome with black spite;
     There, Judas-like, that land betrayed.

“The anarchists are the enemies of all who believe in law or order or government of any kind, and they promulgate their views by assassination and the fear of assassination. If ordinary society desires to protect itself, these worse than wild beasts must be properly dealt with, and our best legal minds should grapple with the problem how this is practically to be done.”

“Any law which establishes government as a protectorate over the sources of vice and crime is itself a breeder of anarchy.”

“Every plot that was ever hatched against our flag, and every anarchist plot against the government and law, was born and bred, and crawled out of the grogshop to damn this country.”

“The realization of the fact that such a viper as anarchy exists within our territorial limits will arouse the American people to greater vigilance, and to a determination that down must come the red flag of anarchy; that its altar must be demolished, and that its pernicious creed must be obliterated.”

“Henceforth the symbol of the anarchist will be an outstretched hand of friendship grasping, under the pure white cloak of loyalty and patriotism, an assassin’s weapon.”