Henry Standish Coverdale

“ Henry George’s opinions have spread like wildfire, and taught millions to believe that private property in land is against the laws of nature and of God. Hyndman, in England, and other writers are spreading the notion that capital is the enemy of labor, eating up all the profits and keeping the working-man on starvation-wages. Others follow Prudhon, and declare that ‘all property is robbery.’ Others argue that religion, morality, government are all tricks of the oppressor, designed to keep the people down and out of their rights.”—Editorial in The Atlanta, Ga., Constitution, March, 1885. ”

“ Considerable sympathy had been felt for the first day’s movement, which was rightly regarded as a protest against the stupid inefficiency of the courts, rather than an outbreak against the established order. But when the awful anarchy of the succeeding days came to be understood, and the true nature of the plot against society to be appreciated, there was something like a panic among men who had stakes in the prosperity of the nation, and whose wealth or homes depended upon the maintenance of order. ”

“ Others were fanatics,—honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously, however, in the common direction of social anarchy. ”

“ The maniacs who had secured control of affairs in the western hemisphere had practically declared war against the whole world and against civilization itself. It was found that the other European Powers sympathized with England, Germany, and France in their feeling that the revolution must be crushed out at any cost, and so completely that there should be no danger of its reviving. Hardly a Government in Europe but had had experience with the men now in power in America. ”

“ Fielden was asked, ‘Do you believe in dynamite as a means of warfare?’
“‘We will not hesitate to use anything when the time arrives. A revolution is near at hand. It must come. We want to abolish the present system of government. Some one must suffer in every reform, and lives must be sacrificed. I am in favor of the quickest means for the accomplishment of our purpose.’”—Despatch from Pittsburg, Pa., to the New York World, Feb. ”

“ Composed of men whose grievance was against all law and order, and whose dream was of untrammelled personal liberty and license, the socialistic organizations had yet been gathered together, at this time, into a certain union. They aspired after anarchy, but had reason enough left to see that if they would destroy an organized government, they must themselves organize. They had a head, a mysterious centre known among outsiders and to the most of the socialists themselves as “The Council of Seven,” but whom the few fully initiated knew to be a single individual. ”

“ As has been said, they grasped with insatiate greed every political right and privilege which the laws afforded them, but refused to become any the less Irishmen. They stubbornly persisted in putting loyalty to the land they had abandoned above loyalty to the land they had adopted and which had opened its hospitality to them. Instead of becoming in reality as well as name American citizens, they remained Irish citizens, an imperium in imperio, and spoke of their life in the United States, even while they were exercising the franchise or sharing in the emoluments of office there, as an “exile.” ”

“ They felt the need of more men. Relying upon the freedom of the institutions they bequeathed and upon the virtue and vigor with which they endowed their heirs, they invited immigration from Europe. They took it for granted that the immigrants would be few in comparison with the native population, and that they would be absorbed and assimilated by the majority as snow-flakes falling in the ocean are absorbed by the great waters and made a part of them. ”

“ If these signs continue and increase, there is the possibility that the Great Republic of the206 past may at some future time arise once more from the ashes in which its memory now sleeps, and on a purer, nobler, more enduring foundation than that on which the men of 1776–1888 builded. But it will hardly come in our time. The mills of the gods grind slowly when their task is to grind into perfect flour the grist of a corrupt and ignorant humanity. ”

“ Individual rights are respected, protected, and enforced; the law is justly administered; crime is punished as surely and as severely when committed by men of rank and station as when committed by less intelligent, and therefore less responsible, men. There are signs that the popular mind is beginning to feel aspirations after honesty and fairness for their own sakes, and to regard successful dishonesty and corruption with less respect than were common during the existence of the Republic. ”

“ The moment they had gone, Herr Liest, with his voice rising to a shriek, in a frenzy of anger demanded that they both be treated as the English minister had been. Kopf seconded the demand with a vehemence as great as Liest’s. O’Halloran attempted to calm their passion and point out to them the impolicy of angering at the same moment three of the strongest Powers of the world. They would not listen to him. Instead, they taunted him with showing weakness in the common cause. Wagner sided with them, though less violently. ”

“ The socialist leaders took to heart and profited by the lesson which the Cincinnati riots of 1884 had taught. Those disturbances began in the indignation of an outraged public, angered beyond endurance by the shameful, repeated, and demoralizing defeats to which justice had been subjected in the local courts of law. But they soon took on a different cast. What had at first been the protest of good citizenship was transformed into a saturnalia of crime and ruffianism. ”

“ To the fight, working-men! up, proletariat!... Among the friends of freedom, socialists, and other revolutionists, the fixed idea is still met with, that the good must in the nature of things certainly prevail sooner or later. This, too, is a remnant of religious superstition. For the idea can only be maintained on the assumption of a certain conformity to a purpose in the course of history; and this in turn pre-supposes the existence of a higher conscious being. That this idea must enfeeble and narcotize the energy is evident. It is the most dangerous opiate that there is for revolutionists. ”

“ For the whole of the preceding day and evening impassioned socialistic and Irish agitators had been passing around the revolutionary camp, inciting their hearers to wilder and fiercer fanaticism. So successful had they been that even the camp followers who had fled in panic out of New York to escape the allied guns, became clamorous for an opportunity to meet their victors once more in open fight. ”

“ The Chicago regiment threw down its arms and refused to fight, a considerable portion of its men going over to the revolutionists. The others fought desperately, seeing that it was for their lives. Their struggle was in vain. The enemy was as brave as they, four times more numerous, and better armed. Many of the troops had been summoned in such haste that they had not donned their uniforms, but appeared in the ranks in their ordinary dress. These, by throwing down their guns and mingling with the mob, escaped. Of those in uniform not a corporal’s guard survived. ”

“ It was seen that the revolutionists had waited till a large proportion of those citizens bound together for the defence of law and the maintenance of order had been massed in another direction. They had then, in accordance with a thoroughly understood plan, risen in every city and begun the work of destruction for which their souls had long thirsted. ”

“ The revolutionists made no stop at Jersey City on their retreat. They knew that in a very short time it would be under the guns of the allied fleet. They had been compelled to abandon all their artillery except a few batteries of field-pieces, and could make no reply that would be felt within the iron sides of the armored vessels. Picking up the detachments which had been left along the west shore to watch the loyalists at Newburg, they pushed on towards Philadelphia. ”

“ Whether eventually successful or not, there always has been a part of the land involved in which the friends of existing government were in the majority, and which could be relied upon as a base for operations against insurgents. But this revolt was at every man’s door. Except in a few rural and sparsely populated districts, all forms of government were disrupted or blocked. The law-abiding citizens found themselves suddenly without organization and at the mercy of predatory bands, which fell upon them one after another. ”

“ Their common pleas were, either that they were invariably out-manœuvred in the political battle by these veteran strategists, and that they could do no real good at the primaries and the polls, or that the solid good sense and honesty of the country could be relied upon to come out and assume control whenever things passed beyond endurance, and that, meantime, all effort was simply thrown away. It is a natural assumption, now that the end has been seen of all men, that those who used these arguments must have been either fools or selfish knaves. ”

“ She spoke of love for Ireland, of hate for England, and pictured the misery of her native land in the past and in the present. “The Irishmen of America demand vengeance. The opportunity has come in England’s present difficulty, and advantage will be taken of that fact. The sappers and miners, who blow the people up, are as necessary to the Irish army as are dashing cavalry or steady infantry. [Applause.] Every man to his like in this respect,” said she. [And voices cried out “Dynamite!”] ”

“ The heterogeneous elements which made up the population of the United States had suffered a great and wholly unfortunate race-change since the foundation of the Government. At the close of the Revolution which separated the colonies from England the country was populated with a sparse but homogeneous people, possessing in an eminent degree the sterling virtues and the robust common-sense which characterize the Anglo-Saxon race. ”

“ How much influence did they possess with their own compatriots and with the revolutionary leaders? That was the question which the Cabinet determined to settle. They were summoned to the White House, and their good offices besought by the President in person.
In other times, the spectacle of the President of the United States begging a dozen Irish politicians to intercede with a mob for the safety of the Republic would have been received with derision. But the people never heard of this last shame upon them. ”

“ In the cities, where their increase by steady immigration and by their own amazing procreative fertility gave them the majority, their power was invariably signalized by a corruption and local tyranny greater than that against which Adams and Jefferson and Washington revolted. ”

“ It was taken for granted that men cared more for their wealth than for their honor or the public weal. Even such embezzlers as were actually imprisoned seldom failed to secure from pliant pardoning boards such commutations as rendered their punishment farcical. It came to be a common saying that it was safer to rob a bank of a million dollars than to steal five dollars from a merchant’s till to buy food for a starving wife or child. ”

“ When the winter opened it found Boston turned into a British fortress, without a trace of self-government left, with its streets guarded by detachments of British soldiers, and all its public affairs administered by a board of British officers. Nevertheless, there was better order and less suffering under the management of these foreign invaders than were experienced in any of the cities in which the revolutionists retained control. ”

“ There were not experienced gunners enough in the entire revolutionary army to man completely and to work efficiently the guns in half the forts along the coast, such as they were.
It was naturally assumed that New York, the richest city of the country and the real centre of the revolution, would be the first object of British attack. There were already about one hundred and fifty thousand men in or about the city. They were hastily sent to the forts of the harbor. Orders from Washington set a hundred thousand more in motion towards the metropolis from Western cities. ”

“ And so idealists of noble but impracticable aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one common end, and that end revolution and destruction. ”