Liberty's Weapons.

Our methods are methods of peace. Liberty is not the advocate of force. Speaking for itself, it hates murderous weapons of all descriptions. It enters into no planning, plotting, or dark and secret measure of assassination or revolution. The French were to call their statue in New York harbor, "Liberty enlightening the world." And that is Liberty's proper function. Compared with the light that is to come, the world sits in darkness. Liberty is the torch we bear aloft, convinced that Liberty's light is to lead the world to heights and into a fullness of life beyond the heart of man now to conceive.

With old, dead, and decaying ideas; with shows and shams; with half-heartedness, hypocrisy, and pious, moralistic, pharisaic pretension; with all the hinders, cripples, dwarfs the human intellect and the robust heart of mankind, - Liberty fights; but with the ploughshare of thought and the lance of freest criticism, disbelieving in all other weapons - those that are death-dealing and not life-giving.

And yet Liberty finds words of approval for the Hartsmanns and the tyrant-slayers who in secrecy plot the revenges of fate. Why? Because Liberty is forced to choose between one class that slays to oppress and another that slays to free.

Is there not a difference?

You know there is, you editors who mouth about assassination, and, if you say there isn't, why, we take the Liberty to say the truth is not in you.

Some of our friends are in a great hurry for a full and systematic explanation of Liberty's philosophy and purposes. They are very anxious to know "just what we are driving at." Patience, good friend, patience! You will get it all in due season. But Liberty's philosophy is a comprehensive one, and cannot be compressed in a day or in a column. The contents of a a little fortnightly journal like this, hastly put together as they are in a few spare moments of an otherwise busy life, must perforce present it in driblets, a little here and a little there. Only follow it closely, in all its applications, and you will finally find that it fits everywhere and is deeply rooted. But to a certain extent Liberty, like the rest of the world, floats with the tide, and the development of her philosophy is governed by progress of affairs. Where we shall next branch out, we can no more tell than could John Ruskin, who answered a similar criticism for his "Fors Clavigera" in these words: "As well please with a birch-tree growing out of a crag to arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods will arrange them according to their wild liking; all that the tree has to do, or can do, is to grow gaily, if it may be; sadly, if gaiety be impossible; and let the black jags scar rend the rose-white of its trunk whee Fors shall choose." Meanwhile, we are scoring one point, and for the present the most important one, in arousing people to the fact that we are driving at something.