Of the ten Nihilists recently sentenced to death the czar pardoned five in response to the appeal of Victor Hugo. Thereupon the French poet — to his shame be it said! — drank to the health of the czar in the presence of a company of Parisian journalists. This so tickled the czar’s vanity that he straightway pardoned four more of them. What playthings are men in the hands of monarche, their lives dependent upon a passing caprice!
- Brown of Boston, aided by other workingmen, has issued an edition of & radical pamphlet, entitled: “Revolution; or, the Reorganization of Our Social System Inevitable,” written by William N. Slocum of San Francisco. Liberty will give it more extended notice hereafter. Meanwhile it may be procured by sending ten cents to H. W. Brown, 7 Kirkland Street, Boston. Special terms will be given for wholesale orders. We hope that the commendable efforts of the publishers will meet with warm encouragement.
The superintendent of the Pacific Mills at Lawrence gets eighty-three dollars a day. The operatives whom he superintends have been getting eighty-three cents a day. The stockholders of the mills have been getting an annual dividend of over twenty per cent, for nearly two decades. In consequent of serious defalcations and mismanagement on the part of the officials the mills are slightly less profitable than they were. The superintendent tells the operatives that, in order to keep the dividends up, they must work for sixty-eight cents a day. The operatives refuse. Thereupon the superintendent sneers at their “ambition to live in luxury,” and priests and parsons are found to upbraid them for being unwilling to work for the same wages paid at other mills. Do such facts as these need comment?
Another era of strikes apparently is upon us. In all trades and in all sections of the country labor is busy with its demands and its protests. Liberty rejoices in them. They give evidence of life and spirit and hope and growing intelligence. They show that the people are beginning to know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain them. Strikes, whenever and wherever inaugurated, deserve encouragement, from all true friends of labor. Not that they can be regarded as a direct instrumentality in obtaining justice. Justice, to be obtained, must first be ascertained, and a strike does little or nothing to ascertain it. But as an indirect instrumentality, as an awakening agent, as an agitating force, the beneficent influence of a strike is immeasurable. Take, for instance, the great strike of 1877. What single event in our history ever did as much to arouse the public to the importance and the urgency of the industrial question? Not one. And this is true, to a greater or less extent, of all strikes. He does not understand the true value of a strike who judges it by its immediate causes, pronouncing this one justifiable and that one inexcusable, this just and that unjust. With our present economic system almost every strike is just. For what is justice in production and distribution ? That labor, which creates all, shall have all. It can ask no more; it can get no more. How, then, can its demands be excessive? As long as a portion of the products of labor are appropriated for the payment of fat salaries to useless officials and big dividends to idle stockholders, labor is entitled to consider itself defrauded, and all just men will sympathize with its protest.
A subscriber sends us his remonstrance against what he terms our “vagueness,” “indefiniteness,” and “looseness of thought.” We should deem his criticism worthier of heed, if the names of the two men whom he charges us to imitate as calm, clear, consistent and close thinkers were other than — heaven save the mark! — Wendell Phillips and Thomas Carlyle.
Well, Cyrus W. Field’s monument to Andre has been blown up, and the millennium is not yet! Freedom of opinion has been struck down at the hands of so-called radicals by the use of dynamite. Upon the explosive which Russians have made holy Americans have committed sacrilege. And our friend Schwab glories in the act, “We have had altogether too much theory,” he says, and so rejoices in a little practice. The real trouble is that we have not had half enough theory. If the true theory of individual Liberty had ever found lodgment in the minds of Mr. Schwab and his friends, the Andre monument would still be standing, and there would be one stain less on the radical record. We are moved by no sentimentalism in this matter, but speak from the standpoint of the severest justice. When extreme measures become necessary, we shall not whine about them; but then they must be serious to be effective, not petty and paltry and childish. If the dynamite policy is ever forced upon American laborers by utterly intolerable trespass upon their rights, it must be used to blow up the Cyrus Fields themselves and not their playthings. But till then, no dynamite at all! We are engaged in serious business, and have no time for child’s play.
Mr. Patrick Ford, editor of the “Irish World,” is in a dilemma. Ho appears not to be aware of it, but his readers are painfully aware of it. We venture to point it out to him. Some weeks ago he announced in large type that, the moment the Catholic church should denounce the doctrines of the “Irish World,” he would renounce them. Since that time a provincial council of the Catholic church has met in Cincinnati, composed of nine bishops and archbishops in five dioceses. That body has issued a pastoral letter to be read from the altar of every Catholic church in five important States. This letter says: ” The “Irish World” is a bad paper, breeding insolence and defiance of authority, teaching communism, assailing the rights of property, and inciting to rebellion that can end but in disaster. We therefore direct pastors to warn their people against this paper, and, as far as in them lies, discourage its circulation among them.” This language is direct and unmistakable, and, unless set aside and rebuked by the pope (as if, is not likely to be), must be considered authoritative. It is the utterance of the power which Mr. Ford acknowledges as the sole source of truth. Now, therefore, he must renounce his faith and condemn his church as a foul instrument of tyranny for the oppression of the many by the few, or he must renounce his reason, keep his pledge, and publicly confess that for the last ten years he has been a servant of the devil. Liberty calls on him to do one or the other, and that promptly, or stand convicted as a hypocrite and time-server. Mr. Ford knows the high estimate which we place upon his services in the past. It is because we value them so highly that we insist that he shall not spoil them.
David Dudley Field has completed his codification of the law of the State of New York, but there is considerable opposition to the adoption of his code. During its discussion before a legislative committee an able lawyer, Mr. Carter, used this language: “What is the common law? Is it contained in any act? No. Is it in any book reports? No. You will find evidences of it there, but the law is not there. Where is it? It rests in those eternal and immutable principles of justice which were enacted before legislators ever sat.” Whereat brother Cyrus W. Field was inexpressibly shocked. To hint even at the existence of justice was horrifying to a man who has heaped up millions by injustice. So, coming to the defence of brother David, he immediately wrote in his organ, the “Mail and Express:” “The wildest Pre-Raphaelite never went so far against the laws of art as Mr. Carter did against the laws of men in this ecstatic and lawless language.” It is admitted, then, by the Fields that, to such as they, justice is an absurdity, love of principle ecstasy and lawlessness, and life a scramble involving no duty but that of trampling on one’s fellows. Is not their own confession a severer condemnation of their lives than that visited upon the class to which they belong in Lysander Spooner’s unanswerable pamphlet on “Natural Law”?
A new number of the revolutionary organ, “Narodnaia Volia,” containing nineteen pages of closely printed matter, is at present in circulation in Russia. The leading article, headed “The Present Position of the Party,” is devoted chiefly to a review of the results which followed tho assassination of a year ago. The writer premises his remarks by the statement that, if only the discontented element of Russian society was able to insist on and obtain the minimum demands put forward by the executive committee, the necessity of resorting to violent measures might be avoided. He then proceeds to review the position of the various parties in Russia, and arrives at the conclusion that there are no elements to be found in Russian society capable of playing historical parts. The national reformers, he says, have hidden their heads in fear and trepidation, lest they should suffer for the actions of the revolutionary party. Our Conservatives find no other weapons of combat than slander, falsehoods, and denunciations, and cherish the hope that something may remain out of the edifice of clay which they are raising. Our Liberals, taken by surprise, are blushing with confusion, and the whole activity of these sorry creatures consists isn plaintively begging for a constitution, and undertaking at the same time to be as obedient as before. The article concludes by referring to the programme of the party and the object it has in view,— the subversion of the present governmental and social order. This object, the writer asserts, the party will pursue, notwithstanding the reprisals of the government. As before, men ready to sacrifice their lives will be forthcoming, and our advice is “Victory or Death.”
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