On Picket Duty.

Boston, Mass., Saturday, October 1, 1881
Vol. I, No. 5

Legislation is usurpation.

Those who would abolish poverty by reducing the hours of labor put the cart before the horse.

The people are poor, not because of they receive low wages, but because they give their credit away and buy it back.

Liberty owes her readers an apology for the slight delay in the appearance of this number. Hereafter our mailing day will be Friday, one day later than heretofore.

One of our Greenback exchanges says that "every man who has a ballot and fails to use it in defense of American liberty is responsible if those liberties are abridged." Every man who casts a ballot necessarily uses it in offense against American liberty. It being the chief instrument of American slavery.

"Bullion" speaks the truth by saying that "the benefit of credit is overbalanced by the disadvantage of debt." But to a capable and honest person the only disadvantage of any debt that he is liable to contract consists in the steady drain of usury. Make credit gratuitous by organizing it, and its blessings will be unmixed.

The New Bedford "News" was the victim of the worst case of gush developed by the death of the president. Its words are not before us as we write, but out quotation of them does not differ materially or literal, if at all. "The nation now has in heaven a holy trinity, - Washington, Lincoln, Garfield, - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." What rot!

The outcry against middlemen is senseless. As E. H. Heywood puts it, "middlemen are as important as end men." And they are as truly producers. Distribution is part of production. Nothing is wholley produced until it is ready for use, and nothing is ready for use until it has reached there place where it is to be used. Whoever brings it to that place is a producer, and as such entitled to charge for his work. The trouble with middlemen is that they charge consumers not only for their work, but for the use of their invested capital. As it is, they are useful members of society. Eliminate usury from their methods, and they will become respectable members also.

"The hanging of Guiteau is a pleasure and duty which belongs solely and exclusively to the people of the United States." The brutal barbarian who says this is named S. F. Norton. He edits a paper in Chicago called "The Sentinel," and desires to entrust the rulers of this people of peculiar "pleasure" with the exclusive power to manufacture the tool by which all products are distributed. All the monopolies go together, of which we have fresh proof in this claim of the would-be monopolists of money to a monopoly of murder. This same editor has the shamelessness to admit that the tool referred to, i. e., the greenback, is a "forced loan," and to attempt to justify it as such; yet he complains in the same column of the act of a band of robbers who recently contracted a forced loan with the passengers of a Western railway train by presenting pistol at their heads and commanding them to deliver. All these things are to be expected from a member of a party that relies on the law for the accomplishment of everything. Law is its God, and makes its morality. Robbery through the instrumentality of a legal tender note is right; robbery through the instrumentality of a revolver is wrong. Murder unsanctioned by statue finds no favor in this Greenbacker's eyes, but murder done on the scaffold is to him, not only right, but sweet.

A faint idea of the state of thing that engenders Nihilism is conveyed by the statement of the Russian delegates to the International Literary Congress at Vienna, who, in combating a motion of a French delegate to petition the czar for the pardon of the Russian novelist who has been in exile in Siberia for eight years for tinging his writing him socialism, declared that, if the petition should be adopted, it would be impossible for them to return to Russia. We commend this fact to D. A. Wasson and all other slanderers of the Nihilists. After hearing of it, he will doubtless be moved to write another article for the "Free Religion Index," glorifying the Alexanders as apostles of liberty.

Liberty congratulates herself and Anarchists generally on the rapidity with which our principles are obtaining a foothold. An indication of their progress is seen in the following editorial comments of so prominent a newspaper as the Boston "Daily Globe" on the long-continued disability of the president: "The Republic is not a failure. The great governmental experiment of the new world has demonstrated that men do not need rulers; that they can govern themselves. It has passed through a crisis unforeseen by its founders and unprovided for in its Constitution, - and it still lives, the world's grand beacon of light on the way to Liberty... The only real strength of the government is the cohesive power of the masses and the confidence of the people in their ability to govern themselves in the absence of all official representatives of authority and power. This strength the Republican possesses, and it is a success. It shows the world that a measure of self-government is a thousand times better than all the military power and 'divine right' that ever existed, and more powerful for good, for peace, for the maintenance of human rights. The attitude of the American people in the face of what would have been a crisis in any other country has advanced the cause of humanity, proved the expedience as well as the justice of popular government, and ought to silence those who have expressed the belief, father by the wish, that the great American experiment must ultimately fail through lack of strength. The American people have shown the grandeur of their power, the permanency of their principles, and their unwavering loyalty to liberty and justice in this period of doubt and uncertainty, and given hope and courage to oppressed humanity to struggle onward and upward toward the light, in the footsteps of the nation that has lead the march of human progress, and will be, a hundred years hence, as far in advance of the present as the present is in advance of the ideas of a hundred years ago, if it only remains true to 'government by the people' and resist every effort to it with a strong government of centralized power and exaggerated official authority." Well said, the "Daily Globe"!