The Liberty of Parents.

In the following extracts from an editorial in "La Vérité," a daily paper published in Paris, is a lesson for the large number of so-called radicals in America afflicted by the compulsory education craze:-

To make it allowable to render education absolutely compulsory, it is necessary in the first place that the education be useful to the recipient beyond all question, and in the second place that it be under the control of heads of families. The latter may be neither owners nor masters of their children, but, after all, they clearly have as many rights over them as the cabinet ministers and their agents.

Further, instruction in agriculture, stock-raising, carpentry, shoe-making, weaving, and I know not what else, is education quite as truly as that in the rules of grammar, penmanship, and the imperfect chronology called history in the primary schools, though mingled with fabulous fictions and follies. Instruction of the former kind has atleast this advantage over the other, - that it teaches a pupil a trade by which he may live, and which therefore he can not know too soon. Unless it allows pensions to all the children, or teaches them that practicle knowledge of labor which they would acquire at home, the State has no right to waste their precious time as a sacrifice to the academical systems of the cabinet.

There are some radicals who can not tolerate the idea that the children of farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers should learn to read on the knees of their mothers, while aiding in farm and household tasks, instead of under the ferules of official instructors. Parents are entirely willing that others should teach their children to read in their own way and should give them religious instruction, provided they themselves are left free to give to theirs the instruction and especially the education that seems to them good, either by themselves or the co-operation of such teachers as they may choose.

For my part, while regretting that others teach their children notions and ideas that I believe to be false, I yet prefer to leave them to complete liberty in this respect in order to retain my own, not wishing the law to compel me to hand over my children to-day to the education of the present University and to-morrow perhaps to I know not what coterie or religious faction which may chance to step into power in the place of our present masters.

Crumbs From Liberty's Table.

Bob Ingersoll is really logical, and has the best of the argument on the Protestant side. He is carrying out the Protestant principle to its legitimate deductions. If Protestants attack the Catholic Church, they use his principles; if they want to answer him, they fall back on ours. They are utterly irrational. They have started him on his course, and then tell him to halt midway. Why should he listen to them, or obey their dictation? Are they infallible guides of the human mind, after teaching their followers that neither Christ's Church nor any power on earth can prescribe limits to the liberty that Christ has left his followers? Ingersoll only follows out their rule in explaining Scripture by his private spirit against Christianity or against the arbitrary limits these men have prescribed. -Rev. James A. Corcoran

Roscoe Conkling suggests the propriety of attaching more severe penalties to the assassination, or attempts at assassination, of high public officers than are inflicted for a like crime against common people. The sentiment to which Mr. Conkling has given utterance is a sentiment that is unworthy of him as a man, and especially unworthy of him as a constitutional lawyer and a legislator. This last week has been prolitic in conceptions and in utterances that might be natural and regular in Russia or Persia, but degrading to those who have inherited a lot and part in our American commonwealth, and disgusting to persons of sound minds. -New York Sun.

Rev. Dr. Newman of New York tells us that the crime of Guiteau shows three things: first, that ignorant men should not be allowed to vote; second, that foreigners should not be allowed to vote; and third, that there should not be that much religious liberty. It turns out, first, Guiteau is not an ignorant man; second, that he is not a foreigner; and third, that he is a Christian. Now, because an intelligent American Christian tries to murder the president, this parson says that we ought to do something with ignorant foreigners and infidels! This is about the average pulpit logic. -R.G. Ingersoll.

The British aristocracy have decided that it is not at all inconsistent with the character of an English gentleman to commit a felonious assault upon an unprotected young lady in a railway carriage. The Congregationalists church of New York has declared that a convict, a torturer of helpless babes, may be a good Christian and the pastor of a church, and that his trial and conviction are merely "rumors" that church need take no cognizance of. Valentine Baker is a high-toned English gentleman, and Shepard Cowley is a good, pious New York clergymen. -Boston Glob.

The inability to think has always been a characteristic of tyrants, and any evidences given by them of the possession of reasoning faculties never fail to astonish the world. But a certain amount of thinking must be done in this world, and, when a ruler fails to do his share, his subjects invariable do it for him. Then it is time for somebody to prepare for trouble. If the czar could only think, he would understand that, when the king will not use his head, it is right that the people should remove it from his shoulders; but the czar is exhibiting his pitiful inability to even learn the lessons of the past, and, after a few more warnings, the bang of another bomb will, in all probability, gather Alexander to his imperial fathers. -Boston Globe.

Destruction is only a weapon in our hands, not by any means the aim and purpose of our struggle. -Leo Hartmann, Nihilist.

Labor Cutting its Own Throat.

In the columns of "Le Révolté," an excellent Anarchistic journal published at Geneva, occur the following admirable comments on the late riots at Marseilles between French and Italian laborers, ostensibly because of the Tunisian troubles, but really because of the effect of Italian labor on wages, the situation at Marseilles being similar in kind to that produced by the Chinese at San Francisco: -

Our readers abroad already know from the daily journals the particulars of the recent sad occurrences at Marseilles. As the French troops, returning from Tunis, were entering the city, a few people, excited by the rascally opportunists who seek to awaken in France the spirit of exclusive patriotism, rushed upon the Italian club-house under the pretext that hisses for the troops had proceeded therefrom. We can hardly believe that the club-house was the source of the hisses, as there was no one in it at the time. But, even if it was, what right have French workingmen to do with the malice of the Italian bourgeoisie against the French bourgeoisie arising from the act of the latter in depriving the former of a field of exploitation in Tunis. Let the bourgeoisie quarrel among themselves ; it is not for laborers to interfere.

But the altercations, succeeding one another, soon took on quite another character. French laborers rushed upon Italian laborers to drive them from Marseilles, where they come to work at cheap rates and reduce wages. Knife-thrusts, men thrown into the water, dozens severely wounded, a few killed, - these are the results of the sad days during which workingmen, allowing themselves to be excited by the dregs of the bourgeois press, cut one another's throats, instead of going in a body to demolish the presses of the journals that stirred up, by their false stories, a spirit of hatred between laborers of two nationalities.

The scoundrels who wish to achieve an autocratic reign in France desire war; they hope to stifle in a foreign war the revolution which they feel approaching, and which, bursting out in France, would embrace all Europe. That deputy tearing down the Italian escutcheon, does he not show clearly the aim of opportunism ? A war in order to obtain the dictatorship, to drown in the blood and smoke of battle the socialistic movement, - such is their object. And we, workingmen, shall we be stupid enough to become the instruments of their machination, the accomplices of the aspirants for power :

No! It is not by hunting down the starving men that came from Italy that the French laborer will succeed in improving his condition. It is by establishing an international alliance of the exploited of all countries in order to oppose to the international league of the famishers the international league of the famished. Let us not whet our knives for workingmen more wretched than ourselves. Let us whet them for the exploiters, the international bourgeoisie; and let us learn to strike hard that we may kill the venomous beast which feeds on our blood, sowing among us the seeds of hatred in order the better to rule us. Let us raise the flag which is the standard of all the oppressed, without distinction of race or nationality, the banished flag which makes our oppressors tremble, the flag of the International Working-people's Association.

Identity of Liberty and Justice.

"Alceste," the brilliant French writer who, living in Paris, writes "Letters from Paris" to the newspapers of that city, said in a recent communication:

The administration, the army, the courts, the world of finance the various professions learnedly defended at the Garden of the Hesperides where the dragon guards the golden fruit, all are combined to crush the multitude. And we see the laws on the press itself, through the complicity of governments and the treason of the people's elect to their trust, directed against Liberty.

For Liberty is the great enemy of the privileged classes. Liberty is Justice.

It took me many years of study and observation to discover this identity of Justice and Liberty. The idea of this new world came to me as a presentiment before I clearly saw it. Political economy first led me to put my finger on this truth that Liberty is equal to property, and that to attack the first was to attack the second. Those laws, then, professedly protective of social order were both criminal and unjust. The movement of the English Anti-Corn-Law League finished my enlightenment, and my belief in the complete identity was confirmed by Proudhon, who demonstrated that no Liberty can spring from the absolute and at the same time from it can emanate no Justice. Only by the elimination of the absolute, parent of the regime of authority, can Justice and Liberty be achieved. Denial of the latter is denial of the former.

"Who is the Somebody?"

"Somebody gets the surplus wealth that Labor produces and does not consume. Who is the Somebody?" Such is the problem recently posited in the editorial columns of the "New York Truth." Substantially the same question has been asked a great many times before, but, as might have been expected, this new form of putting it has created no small hubbub. "Truth's" columns are full of it; other journals are taking it up; clubs are organizing to discuss it; the people are thinking about it; students are pondering over it. For it is a most momentous question. A correct answer to it is unquestionably the first step in the settlement of the appalling problems of poverty, intemperance, ignorance, and crime. "Truth," in selecting it as a subject on which to harp and hammer - from day to day, shows itself a level-headed, far-sighted newspaper. But, important as it is, it is by no means a difficult question to one who really considers it before giving an answer, though the variety and absurdity of nearly all the replies thus far volunteered certainly tend to give an opposite impression.

What are the ways by which men gain possession of property? Not many. Let us name them: work, gift, discovery, gaming, the various forms of illegal robbery by force or fraud, usury. Can men obtain wealth by any other than one or more of these methods? Clearly, no. Whoever the Somebody may be, then, he must accumulate his riches in one of these ways. We will find him by the process of elimination.

Is the Somebody the laborer? No; at least not as laborer; otherwise the question were absurd. Its premises exclude him. He gains a bare subsistence by his work; no more. We are searching for his surplus product. He has it not.

Is the Somebody the beggar, the invalid, the cripple, the discoverer, the gambler, the highway robber, the burglar, the defaulter, the pickpocket, or the common swindler. None of these, to any extent worth mentioning. The aggregate of wealth absorbed by these classes of our population compared with the vast mass produced is a mere drop in the ocean, unworthy of consideration in studying a fundamental problem of political economy: These people get some wealth, it is true; enough, probably, for their own purposes: but labor can spare them the whole of it, and never know the difference.

Then we have found him. Only the usurer remaining, he must be the Somebody whom we are looking for; he, and none other. But who is the usurer, and whence comes his power? There are three forms of usury: interest on money, rent of land and houses, and profit in exchange. Whoever is in receipt of any of these is a usurer. And who is not? Scarcely any one. The banker is a usurer; the manufacturer is a usurer; the merchant is a usurer; the landlord is a usurer; and the workingman who puts his savings, if he has any, out at interest, or takes rent for his house or lot, if he owns one, or exchanges his labor for more than an equivalent,- he, too, is a usurer. The sin of usury is one under which all are concluded and for which all are responsible. But all do not benefit by it. The vast majority suffer. Only the ablest usurers accumulate: in agricultural and thickly-settled countries, the landlords; in industrial and commercial countries, the bankers. These are the Somebodies who swallow up the surplus wealth.

And where do the Somebodies get their power? From monopoly. Here, as usual, the State is the chief of sinners. Usury rests on two great monopolies, - the monopoly of land and the monopoly of credit. Were it not for these, it would disappear. Ground-rent exists only because the State stands by to collect it and to protect land-titles rooted in force or fraud. Otherwise the land would be free to all and no one could control more than used. Interest and house-rent exist only because the State grants to a certain class of individuals and corporations the exclusive privilege of using its credit and theirs as a basis for the issuance of circulating currency. Otherwise credit would be free to all, and money, brought under the law of competition, would be issued at cost. Interest and rent gone, competition would leave little or no chance for profit in exchange except in business protected by tariff or patent laws. And there again the State has but to step aside to cause the last vestige of usury to disappear.

The usurer is the Somebody, and the State is his protector. Usury is the serpent gnawing at Labor's vitals, and only Liberty can detach and kill it. Give laborers their liberty, and they will keep their wealth; as for the Somebody, he, stripped of his power to steal, must either join their ranks or starve.

The Anatomy of Liberty.

Nine-tenths of life is spent in complaining of wrongs and trying to abolish them. The average man or woman goes to bed with some wrong hanging on the eyelids. He or she awakes, and generally the first thought is of some wrong. The bed is wrong; the breakfast is wrong; somebody's talk or treatment is wrong; some law or custom is wrong; two-thirds of everything is wrong.

The great field of reform deals negatively with nothing but wrongs. The whole of Ireland today is a sad theatre of wrongs. The laborer is complaining of wrongs. The women suffragists are advertising wrongs all over the land. So is the prison reformer, the temperance advocate, the greenbacker, the infidel, and even the politician.

Yet summon the whole army of reformers together and ask them, individually, to define what a wrong is in its essence, and probably not one in a hundred would have an intelligent idea. Restricted suffrage, land monopoly, the wage system, and currency limitations, they say, are wrongs; but until they have analyzed the essential nature of a wrong, their efforts, as is the practical case, are as liable to be aimed against ultimate liberty as for it.

A re-former is one who proposes to construct a new form, or alter an old form, of social practice so as to make it better accord with the conditions of wellbeing. But the majority of reformers are utterly incapable of defining where the old form violates some immutable principle. The average standard of condemning a thing as wrong is that it works injustice to some class of individuals. But this is no valid scientific basis. For the class that is injured perhaps a much larger class is benefited by the social practice complained of. The bulk of reforms come to nothing simply because they represent nothing but wars of classes. It is selfishness in contact with itself. In Ireland they say: "Landlord rights means tenant wrongs." So everywhere capitalist rights means labors wrongs. The real thing that must yet be settled before there will ever be any logical and effectual basis of reform is this: What is a right and what is a wrong in human relations? There are no class rights and no class wrongs. A thing is right, now and forever, because it accords with the immutable law of our being. It is wrong now and forever, because it is opposed to that law. What is that law as it pertains to human relations? Is the problem of Liberty.

But the lamentable inability of reformers to define wrongs is an infinitely less serious matter than their methods of abolishing them. Every wrong, as the reader who follows us in succeeding numbers will discover, is the result of some violation of the law of true liberty, and can generally be directly traced to the said violation. The law of liberty is spontaneous association of natural selection. The first condition of its normal operation is that the basic factor of social existence, the individual, shall be left entirely and absolutely free to regulate his life as experimental contact with other equally free individuals may seem to direct.

Bear in mind that liberty does not preclude regulation. But regulation, under the law of liberty, comes of selection and voluntary assent. Under its operation, security of life and possession, that bogus pretext which is made the chief apology for so-called governments, is as much more firmly assured as are the normal process of Nature more effectual than the artificial expedience of man.

The antipode of liberty is artificial, arbitrary, forma intervention between individuals who are selecting the best results of experimental association. Its concrete expression is Authority. Its organized exercise is known as Government. Now, the most lamentable spectacle to-day, next to rampant despotism itself, is the short- sighted reformer attempting to secure more liberty by advocating the method of more authority, more intervention, more government, in case of Irish landlordism, the greenback movement, suffrage reform, and socialism, the wrong protested against is, in every case an actual one, and the motive of the protestants a noble one, but the method proposed in every case by which to abolish the wrong hinges upon the very despotic elements that created that wrong and perpetuates it. Landlordism in Ireland, so far from being voluntary regulation between the landlord and his victim, is an artificial contrivance of despotism, created by the few who magnates style themselves the government. Left to its merits as a voluntary arrangement of associative life, it could not stand an hour. It is forced upon five million of people by some two thousand absentee thieves. And yet the great deal of Irish land reformers seem to expect that, by a change of engineers, the machine of the future will be run for different and better purposes than the present one.

What is true of land reformers is equally true of the currency and suffrage reformers. And the worst spectacle of all is that of the socialists, who expect to mitigate the deadly power of the government machine by enlarging it and extending its capacity for despotism into the remotest concerns of life. All these misguided propagandists are yet blind to the main spring of the whole scheme of despotism. Curiously enough, the leaders, many of them, are aware of that mischief which that superstitious fiction, the "Government of God," has exercised in stultifying rational progress, but forget that the State is simply the old fiction arranged to play upon men in the practical economies of life.

Theocracy is the original machine invented to enslave the race. It set up a king in the person of God. Two thousand years ago it took on an heir-apparent in the form of Christ, a prince made more in conformity with the intelligence of the age. The powers were subsequently distributed into the hands of other agents, known as popes and graded ecclesiastics. The distributing, segregating process has gone on till we have modern republic. But all forms of government are radiatious from the parent trunk. The reformer who abolished the fiction of God as a factor of authority in human concerns can never stop, if he is logical, till the whole machine of government which grows out of it is also abolished. He then stands on a clean, rational basis. The man who clings to that superstition known as the State, and boasts of having flung away the fetters of theology and preistcraft, does not understand himself. The State is as much a theological superstition as the doctrine of atonement. It is simply the human side of theology. It is only another application of the idea of authority, which is the central idea of theological despotism. All this we propose to illustrate and amplify, as Liberty goes out upon its mission of enlightenment, from issue to issue.

Our Purpose.

LIBERTY enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her, She hears no voice that always champions her; she knows no pen that always writes in her defence; she sees no hand that is always lifted to avenge her wrongs or vindicate her rights. Many claim to speak in her name; but few really understand her. Still fewer have the courage and the opportunity to consistently fight for her. Her battle, then, is her own to wage and win. She accepts it fearlessly, and with a determined spirit.

Her foe, Authority, takes many shapes, but, broadly speaking, her enemies divide themselves into three classes: first, those who abhor her both as a means and as an end of progress, opposing her openly, avowedly, sincerely, consistently, universally; second, those who profess to believe in her as a means of progress, but who accept her only so far as they think she will subserve their own selfish interests, denying her and her blessings to the rest of the world; third, those who distrust her as a means of progress, believing in her only as an end to be obtained by first trampling upon, violating, and outraging her. These three phases of opposition to Liberty are met in almost every sphere of thought and human activity. Good representatives of the first are seen in the Catholic Church and the Russian autocracy; of the second, in the Protestant Church and the Manchester school of polities and political economy; of the third, in the atheism of Gambetta and the socialism of Karl Marx.

Through these forms of authority another line of demarcation runs transversely, separating the divine from the human; or, better still, the religious from the secular. Liberty's victory over the former is well-nigh achieved. Last century Voltaire brought the authority of the supernatural into disrepute. The Church has been declining ever since. Her teeth are drawn, and though she seems still to show here and there vigorous signs of life, she does so in the violence of the death-agony upon her, and soon her power will be felt no more. It is human authority that hereafter is to be dreaded, and the State, its organ, that in the future is to be feared. Those who have lost their faith in gods only to put it in governments; those who have ceased to be Church-worshippers only to become State-worshippers; those who have abandoned pope for king or czar, and priest for president or parliament,-have indeed changed their battle-ground, but none the less are foes of Liberty still. The Church has become an object of derision; the State must be made equally so. The State is said by some to be a "necessary evil;" it must be made unnecessary. This century's battle, then, is with the State: the State, that debases man; the State, that prostitutes woman; the State, that corrupts children; the State, that trammels love; the State, that stifles thought; the State, that monopolizes land; the State, that limits credit; the State, that restricts exchange; the State, that gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.

How the State does these things, and how it can be prevented from doing them, Liberty proposes to show in more detail hereafter in the prosecution of her purpose. Enough to say now that monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and "Down with Authority" her war-cry.

About Progressive People.

Henry George, the author of "Progress and Poverty," has returned to San Francisco.

With the death of his son, Sir Percy Shelley, the poet will, in common with Byron, hare no descendant of his name.

Jefferson Davis denies that he ever uttered or indorsed the sentiment that "slavery is the corner-stone of the Confederacy."

Wendell Phillips is called by the "Boston Post" "the white- haired instigator of assassination, who preaches anarchy even at a literary feast."

Mr. Patrick Egan has purchased the "Dublin Irishman," thus placing all the national journals in Ireland under the control of the Land League.

Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell has two brothers, one of whom is a cotton planter in Georgia and a Land Leaguer, while the other, who owns an estate in Kilkenny, Ireland, is a strong Conservative.

A life-size marble bust of Gerrit Smith has been presented to the Oneida Historical Society of Utica, the late philanthropist's birthplace, by his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth S. Miller of Geneva, N. Y.

General Garibaldi has accepted the honorary presidency of the Cincinnati Unione e Fratellanza Italiana. He is eager for a world's fair in Rome, and almost daily writes a letter urging the project on influential friends.

Jefferson Davis is certainly under obligation to Mr. James C. j Derby of Brooklyn. who suggested his history and went to New Orleans, for the house of D. Appleton & Co., to negotiate with him for it. He will make out of it $100,000

A movement is on foot in England to raise a fund by which Johann Most may be compensated for his imprisonment. The testimonial is to be presented at a banquet on the day the prisoner leaves jail. A portrait of Most was one of the prizes offered for competition by a Chicago shooting club on the 31st ult.

Theodore F. Cuno, a prominent Brooklyn Socialist, member of the Spread-the-Light Club, and attache of the "New York Stoats Zeitung," was assaulted recently in Brooklyn, but only slightly injured, by a German beer-seller, Louis Froelich, one of whose quarrels Mr. Cuno, in his capacity of reporter, was engaged in investigating.

Lord Kimberley has been converted to Land Reform. Speaking recently at Wymondham, he advocated the abolition of all laws impeding the free distribution of landed property, the repeal of the law of primogeniture, and - although on this point he was not very sanguine - additional security for the capital which tenants invest in their holdings.

The Russian ambassador at Berne lately paid a high compliment to Prince Kropotkine in telling an interviewer that he considered him the most dangerous man in Switzerland, adding that he had spent a large fortune in fomenting revolution, and that his sincerity and ability render it highly desirable that he should be closely watched. Prince Kropotkine is one of the editors of "Le Révolté," quoted from in another column.

The first number of a weekly journal called "Victor-Hugo" recently appeared in Paris. To the application of the editors for permission to use his name as a title, the great poet responded as follows :-
Dear Colleague,— Say every day to the fine youth of which you are a part all that you have in your souls — Duty, Conscience, Liberty, desire for the good, love of the beautiful; and if yon think my name a good standard, take it: I give it to you and thank you.
Your friend, Victor Hugo.

In France the expulsion law hangs, like the sword of Damocles, over the heads of foreign agitators. Paule Minck, a Polish lady resident in France, and one of Louise Michel's nearest friends, who spends the major part of her time in socialistic agitation, and recently served a short term in a Marseilles prison for participating in a meeting to protest against the execution of Hessy Helfmann, lately received a polite intimation from the police of Paris, that, if she did not cease disturbing the public order, the law of expulsion would be enforced upon her. Nothing daunted, she has sent a letter to M. Constans, the minister of the interior, announcing that, to baffle her unchivalrous persecutors, she has determined to change her nationality by marrying a Frenchman.

On Picket Duty.

Liberty, Boston Mass., Saturday, August 6, 1881
Vol. I, No. 1.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these three; but the greatest of these is Liberty.

Formerly the price of Liberty was eternal vigilance, but now it can be had for fifty cents a year.

Individuals on becoming adults gain their freedom. Are nations never to attain their majority?

The effect of one-half of our laws is to make criminals; the purpose of the other half is to punish them.

Holding a monopoly, the banker is the worst enemy of the human race, being its chief despoiler; without that monopoly, he is its best friend, being its greatest civilizer.

It is needless to call attention to the style of our head. It was designed by Mr. Ipsen, 18 Post Office Square, Boston, who, catching with artistic insight the true spirit of our purpose, has produced what every epicure in typography must pronounce a triumph of genius and a real work of art, remarkable for its originality, vigor, simplicity, and strange grace.

Liberty takes pleasure and pride in its ability to present to the readers of its first issue the first authentic likeness published in America of the most famous and heroic of that little Russian band styled by the " Pall Mall Gazette" an " army of avenging angels," Sophie Perovskaya. We reproduce it from a photograph privately forwarded to us from a number distributed at the London revolutionary congress, and can answer for its accuracy as a representation of the features of that noble girl. From time to time, as occasion offers, we shall print other portraits of various heroes and heroines of revolution and radicalism.

The arrival of Leo Hartmann in America is a notable event in the history of progress, his mission one with which all friends of Liberty must sympathize, and his self-introduction by a letter to the "New York Herald" giving a true and detailed account of the Moscow mine conspiracy, one of the most thrilling, absorbing, dramatic, and convincing newspaper articles ever printed. The latter shows him as a fine writer, an heroic worker, a grand man. Liberty extends to him its most cordial salutation and right hand of fellowship, and hopes, if he visits Boston, to welcome him in person, when it will do all in its power to aid him and his good cause.

It may be well to state at the outset that this journal will be edited to suit its editor, not its readers. He hopes that what suits him will suit them ; but, if not, it will make no difference. No subscriber, or body of subscribers, will be allowed to govern his course, dictate his policy, or prescribe his methods. Liberty is published for the very definite purpose of spreading certain ideas, and no claim will be admitted, on any pretext of freedom of speech, to waste its limited space in hindering the attainment of that object. We are not afraid of discussion, and shall do what we can to make room for short, serious, and well-considered objections to our views. But propagandism through the press is an expensive luxury, and it costs us too much to strike the many blows we have to give to warrant us in furnishing our opponents the hard-earned facilities of returning them.