We give below another report of the progress made in collecting contributions for the aid of the Russian sufferers in Siberia. During the month to elapse before the next issue of Liberty subscriptions to the fund should pour in with redoubled velocity that the friends of Liberty in Europe may have substantial proof of American solidarity with them. Let all give who can!
Receipts to April 11, 1882.
Remitted to Nicolas Tchaikovsky, London.
March 31, Draft for £10, costing ... $49.60
April 5, Draft for £10, costing ... 49.60
April 11, On hand, ... 38.63
The following are the names of the Providence people who gave the seven dollars acknowledged in our last issue:
Wm. Foster, Jr, ... $2.00L. K. Joslin, ... 1.00
Louis Kranz, ... 1.00
C. Heimberger, ... 1.00
Dr. Wm. Barker, ... 1.00
Henry Appleton, ... 1.00
From Cooper, Colorado.
Benj. R. Tucker:
Dear Sir,— I enclose one dollar for the Siberian exiles. I very much wish it were ten or a hundred times as much, but it is all that I feel myself able to spare at this time. I am on the shady side of fifty, and have always been in the frost ranks of the reformers. Consequently I have not been engaged to money making. Twenty-eight years ago I saw that traffic in land was equivalent to traffic in man. Sixteen years ago I saw that all external government was an invasion of individual rights; that government by the State, or collectivity, is based on the assumption that the individual is not capable of self government. At that time, and until I commenced reading Liberty, I was not aware of the fact that I had any sympathizers in these views. I had the misfortune (or was it the good fortune?) to be brought up on the frontier, and without any of the advantages of what goes by the name of education. There, most of the time since I came to man’s estate, I have been on the wing, in the Western wilds between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. Consequently my reading and study have been more or less desultory. As a ” kid” of six or seven years I was a sceptic as to the religious notions taught me in “the little log schoolhouse,” and ever since then I have been a rebel to authority.
From Fall River, Mass.
Benj. R. Tucker:
Dear Friend,— I will try to do something for the very worchy cause. My great regret is that I cannot give hundreds of thousands. Poor Siberian exiles! poor Irish helots! how my heart goes out to them! may human hearts and human purses be opened unto them! I am glad you are delivering sledge-hammer blows at the infernal systems and governments of the day. I think the signs of a not very remote revolution are rapidly multiplying. The awakening of the people, the weight, the expense, and the menace to life and liberty of the standing armies, and their contingent in Europe, are in themselves forces sufficient to destroy the powers that be, ere long, by sapping the vitality of the producers. But thought travels unseen and swiftly, and when the soldiers, and the men who support them, think, bayonets, cannon, and missiles may be turned against thrones and oppressors! God speed the day! Of late my attention has been more than ever turned toward the absurdities of the State. A clergyman in this city has been delivering a series of sermons to young people. This evening he lectured on marriege. I wished to ask him how he reconciled his views of marriage, and his advice to young ladies to make marriage their objective, with his endorsement and support of the State, which confronts the to be, or the already married with laws and customs that menace their success and mar their happiness at every turn. It is no wonder that this State has sixty-five or seventy thousand more marriageable females than males, or that, east of a line drawn perpendicuiarly through the State of New York, from Lake Ontario to the State of Maryland, there are not far from five hundred thousand more females than males. What wonder that, with legislation for the rich and against the poor, men drown care in the flowing bowl, and become degraded and commit crime; or that sickly children are born, or that women prostitute themselves! And the religion of the day,— what is it but a conglomeration of hypocrisy, fraud, and grievous exaction, the sanctimonious pretence of arrant scoundrels? Pardon the expression, but I say, damn the State, damn the religion of the hour! Success to Liberty!
From Hoosick Falls, N. Y.
Benj. R. Tucker:
Comrade,— Enclosed find fifty cents to help the noble and brave defenders of true Liberty, who have sacrificed their all that the cringing, cowardly helots of to-day may enjoy Liberty to-morrow.
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