tect each equally in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So the fathers of our country in their Declaration of Independence wrote that: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." Similar declarations were made by the separate colonies. Thus the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights contains these words: "The community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasable right to reform, alter or abolish, government, in such manner as shall be by that community judged most conducive to the public weal." In harmony with these declarations we made laws, such that political offenders, though they had been in open revolt to a tyrannous foreign government, or had slain the minions of the tyrant, they might here find a safe retreat from extradition.

All this has passed away. Formerly it was our truthful boast that we were the freest people on earth. To-day it is our silent shame that among all the tyrannical governments on the face of the earth ours is probably the only one which makes the right of admission depend upon the abstract political opinions of the applicant. Our people denounce the unspeakable tyranny of a bloody Czar, and pass laws here to protect him in the exercise of his brutalities in Russia. Instead of being "the land of the free and the home of the brave" we exclude from our shores those who are brave and seek freedom here, and punish men for expressing unpopular opinions if they already live here. In vain do the afflicted ones appeal to a "liberty loving" populace for help in maintaining liberty.

In this short essay I can discuss specifically only the denial of liberty of conscience, speech, and press, as it affects one class of citizens, and I choose to defend the most despised.

Under our immigration laws no anarchist, that is, "no person who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized governments" is allowed to enter the United States, even though such person be a nonresistant Quaker. In other words, the

person who believes with the signers of the Declaration of Independence that those who create and maintain governments have a right to abolish them, and who also desire to persuade the majority of their fellow-men to exercise this privilege, are denied the admission to our national domain.

66

Of course that and kindred legislation was the outgrowth of the most crass ignorance and hysteria, over the word anarchist." I say most crass ignorance deliberately, because to me it is unthinkable that any sane man with an intelligent conception of what is believed by such non-resistant anarchists as Count Tolstoi, could possibly desire to exclude him from the United States. It almost seems as though most people were still so unenlightened as not to know the difference between socialism, anarchism, and regicide, and so wanting in imagination that they cannot possibly conceive of a case in which the violent resistance or resentment of tyranny might become excusable. Thus it is that the vast multitude whose education is limited to a newspaper intelligence, stupidly assume that no one but an anarchist could commit a political homicide, and that every anarchist of necessity condones every such taking of human life. Nothing of course could be farther from the fact, but out of this ignorance it comes that every attempt at violence upon officials is charged against anarchists even before it is known who the perpetrator was, and without knowing or caring whether he was an anarchist, a socialist, an ordinary democrat, a man with a personal grudge, or a lunatic. From such foundation of ignorance comes the result that we punish those who disagree with the English tyrant of a couple of centuries ago, who said that the worst government imaginable was better than no government at all.

"Doubtless, it is possible to imagine a true 'Civitas Dei,' in which every man's moral faculty shall be such as leads him to control all those desires which run counter to the good of mankind, and to cherish only those which conduce to the welfare of society; and in which every man's native intellect shall be sufficiently strong and his culture sufficiently extensive to enable him to know what he ought to do and to seek after. And in that blessed Stale, police will be as much a superfluity as every other kind of government. Anarchy, as a term of political philosophy, must be taken only in its proper sense, which has nothing to do with disorder or with crimes; but denotes a state of society, in which the rule of each individual by himself is the only government the legitimacy of which is recognized. Anarchy, as thus far defined, is the logical outcome of the form of political theory which, for the last halfcentury and more, has been known under the name of Individualism."

And men who merely believe this beautiful ideal attainable are unfit for residence in a land that boasts of freedom of conscience and press!

If the distinguished and scholarly author of the Life of Jesus, M. Ernest Renan, should be Commissioner of Immigration, he would, under present laws, be compelled to exclude from the United States the founder of Christianity, should He seek admission. In his Life of Jesus, Renan expresses this conclusion: "In one view Jesus was an anarchist for he had no notion of civil government, which seemed to him an abuse, pure and simple. Every magistrate seemed to him a

Christ looked forward. Christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority, but he did seek to write on the hearts of men God's law and make them self-legislating."

Surely people who only ask the liberty of trying to persuade their fellow-men to abolish government, through passive resistance, cannot possibly be a menace to any institution worth maintaining, yet such men we deny admission into the United States. If they chance to be Russians, we send them back, perhaps to end their days as Siberian exiles, and all because they have expressed a mere abstract "disbelief in government," though accompanied only by a desire for passive resistance.

Julian Hawthorne wrote this: "Did you ever notice that all the interesting people you meet are Anarchists?" According to his judgment, "all the interesting people" would, under present laws, be excluded from the United States. An industrious commissioner, zealous to enforce the law to the very letter, could easily take the writings of the world's best and greatest men, and if foreigners, on their own admissions, could exclude them because they had advocated the anarchist ideal of a "disbelief in government." Among such might be named the following: Count Leo Tolstoi, Prince Peter Kropotkin, Michel Montaigne, Thomas Paine, Henry Thoreau, Lord Macaulay, William Lloyd Garrison, Hall Caine, Turgot, Simeon of Durham, Bishop of St. Andrews, Max Stirner, Elisée Reclus, Frederick Nietzsche, Thomas Carlyle, Horace Traubel, Walt. Whitman, Elbert Hubbard, Samuel M. Jones, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Charles O'Conor, and probably also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and-but what's the use? They can 't all be named.

These are the type of men who hold an ideal, only a dream, perhaps, of liberty without the invasion even of government,

"

and therefore we make a law to exclude them from the United States. But that is not all we do in this "free" country. If a resident of this "land of the free' should "connive or conspire" to induce any of these non-resistants, who "disbelieve in governments," to come to the United States, by sending one of them a printed or written, private or public, invitation to visit here, such "conspirer" would be liable to a fine of five thousand dollars, or three years' imprisonment, or both. And yet we boast of our freedom of conscience, of speech and of press!

It is hard for me to believe that there is any sane adult, worthy to be an American, who knows something of our own revolutionary history, who does not believe revolution by force to be morally justifiable under some circumstances, as perhaps in Russia, and who would not defend the revolutionists in the slaughter of the official tyrants of Russia, if no other means for the abolition of their tyranny were available, or who would not be a revolutionist if compelled to live in Russia and denied the right to even agitate for peaceable reform. And yet "free" America, by a congressional enactment, denies admission to the United States of any Russian patriot who agrees with us in this opinion, even though he has no sympathy whatever with anarchist ideals. It is enough that he justifies (even though in open battle for freedom) the "unlawful" killing of any tyrant "officer" of "any civilized nation having an organized government." Here, then, is the final legislative announcement that no tyranny, however heartless or bloody, "of any civilized nation having an organized government" can possibly justify violent resistance. It was a violation of this law to admit Maxim Gorky into this country, though he is not an anarchist.

In the state of New York, although satisfied with American conditions and officials, and although you believe in democratic government, if you should orally, or in print, advocate the cause of

forcible revolution against Russia, or against "any civilized nation having an organized government," organized government," you would be liable, under a state statute, to a fine of $5,000 and ten years' imprisonment besides. Have we, then, freedom of conscience, speech and press? Do we love liberty or know its meaning?

Yes, it may be that a dispassionate and enlightened judge must declare such laws unconstitutional, but such judges are as scarce as the seekers after martyrdom who are willing to make a test case. Hence we all submit to this tyranny. Furthermore, the same hysteria which could make legislators believe they had the power to pass such a law, in all probability would also induce courts to confirm such power. A Western jurist, a member of the highest court of his state, once said to me that it must be a very stupid lawyer who could not write a plausible opinion on either side of any case that ever came to an appellate court. Given the mental predisposition induced by popular panic, together with intense emotions, and it is easy, very easy, to formulate verbal "interpretations" by which the constitutional guarantees are explained away, or exceptions interpolated, a common process for the judicial amendment of laws and constitutions.

If, then, we truly believe in the liberty of conscience, speech and press, we must place ourselves again squarely upon the declaration of rights made by our forefathers, and defend the right of others to disagree with us, even about the beneficence of government.

As when your neighbor's house is on fire your own is in danger, so the protection of your liberty should begin when it is menaced by a precedent which attacks your opponent's equality of opportunity to express his disagreement with you. Let us then unite for the repeal of these iniquitous laws, born of hysteria and popular panic, and maintained in thoughtless disregard of others' intellectual freedom.

THEODORE SCHROEDER.
New York City.

"I have already reached the conclusion that railroads partake so much of the nature of a monopoly that they must ultimately become public property, and be managed by public officials in the interests of the whole community in accordance with the well-defined theory that public ownership is necessary where competition is impossible. I do not know that the country is ready for this change: I do not know that a majority of my own party favor

it, but I believe that an increasing number of the members of all parties see in public ownership the only sure remedy for discrimination between persons and places and for extortionate rates for the carrying of freight and passengers. The highhanded method in which they have violated the laws and ignored authority, together with the corruption discovered in high places has done more to create sentiment in favor of public ownership than all the speeches and arguments of the opponents of private ownership."-William Jennings Bryan, at Madison Square Garden, August 30, 1906.

T

HIS recent utterance of Mr. Bryan, coming as it does from a thoughtful student of American conditions, who has had an opportunity to form his conclusions unbiased by the recent railroad agitation, has created endless comment. The average American citizen, whose interest in great issues often does not extend beyond the front page of the newspaper and who had at least hoped that the railroad problem had been solved, was surprised at this seemingly radical utterance coming as it does from a man of world-wide prominence, but a careful review of the literature of the past agitation already consigned to the rubbish heap of "settled" political questions shows that the thoughtful citizen in every walk of life had already reached kindred conclusions although not clearly expressed as such. There are but three alternatives,-laissez faire, government regulation, government ownership. The failure of regulation leaves a choice of the other two alternatives. Hence the importance of the question, Is regulation a step to ownership? The object of this paper is to review and classify the re

I. The statesman, carefully scrutinizing the trend of public opinion and weighing the expediency of government activity, urges as follows:

(a.) President Roosevelt took pains in his last annual message and on his Southern trip to impress the fact that government regulation was the only safeguard against government ownership. William J. Bryan has for a long time expressed himself in favor of government regulation because it was a step to government ownership, while Mr. Richard Olney, exSecretary of State under Cleveland, opposes regulation because it is a step to government ownership. The views of these worthy men, so much at variance, have been the occasion of much editorial wit, yet they do not differ essentially. Mr. Roosevelt took for granted that the people would be satisfied with his plan of rate-regulation, while Mr. Bryan and Mr. Olney supposed that, like Oliver Twist, they would continually ask for "more." We may judge for ourselves which is the more probable and statesman-like view of the trend of public opinion. One thing is certain, Mr. Roosevelt's ideas of rate-regulation have been considerably tempered by conservatism since his Southern trip, while with increased delay public opinion has traveled in the opposite direction. Senator Clay of Georgia said in his speech in the Senate on January 22d: "Let me say to

you now that public sentiment in favor of government ownership is growing every day. I am not in favor of it, but unless you check it by government regulation you will watch it grow and continue to grow." We cannot expect popular clamor to cease until some relief is granted for present abuses. As Congressman Joseph Goulden stated in the House on February 2d: "Continued failure must lead to the question of government ownership, short of which it does not seem that the matter could be regulated. When all other means are found to be inadequate the country will have to face that question."

(b.) Says a prominent college president: "The only benefit I can see in government control is that it is a step toward government ownership. Under a democratic form of government like our own, the people have to be educated and disciplined before they can appreciate the need of reform. The attempt at government control will be such a discipline." (c.) The movement for government ownership of railroads has already been started in the municipal-ownership of electric car-lines, water-works and street-lighting plants. The general success of the ownership of public utilities in municipalities by the public has done more than anything else to substantiate the more conservative claims of the advocates of such action, and to remove the more extravagant fears of the political pessimist. Municipal-ownership of public utilities is rapidly growing in favor. Doubtless the time will come in this country when under the beneficent results of its successful operation men will wonder how private-ownership was ever tolerated.

(d.) That government regulation is a step to government-ownership is amply evidenced by the experiences of foreign countries. Italy, which in 1885 abandoned government-ownership, again resumed it in 1906 as far the better solution of the problem. Switzerland, which prior to 1898 was almost wholly operated and controlled by five private companies, has gradually assumed complete control.

Germany has recently purchased the few remaining privately-owned roads in that country, this being the last step of a policy of general encroachment inaugurated by Prince Bismarck. France is but waiting the expiration of contracts with private companies. It is the same story of gradual encroachment in Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium. Mexico has distinctly passed through every stage of the proceedings from general supervision to complete ownership in the short period of 1898-1903. As Senator Foraker said in an Ohio speech: "Bryan may well entertain the views for experience of other countries where the two systems have been tried shows that without exception government-ownership has proven less injurious than government rate-making." President Hadley of Yale, in the Boston Evening Transcript of April 1, 1905, says: "I do not know a single instance of successful rate-making by a government which attempted to control roads somebody else operated." Says ex-Governor Larrabee of Iowa in the same newspaper, February 18, 1905: "Congress must provide for efficient government restrictions, or government-ownership is inevitable. Government-ownership is not the bugbear to intelligent people that it was a few years ago. Those who have made a thorough and impartial examination of the subject are surprised to find that the objections to it are far less than are generally supposed. Nearly all foreign governments have adopted government-ownership of railroads to a greater or less extent and their experience of many years has proved it to be entirely practicable, and upon the whole shows much better results than private management."

II. The economist, fearing for competition, urges as follows:

(a.) The railroad is by nature a monopoly. For, according to Professor Richard T. Ely, it possesses all the characteristics of a natural monopoly. It is "a business which controls a peculiarly desirable location, which can increase its service