Ross Winn

“ That crime is the crime of being king. All kings are criminals. Leopold has been taken to task for his private peccadilloes. But society declines to impeach him for his real crime against humanity. This is a part of that natural sequence in social order we term the fitness of things. It is the small wrongs that stir up indignant outcry. The big crimes triumph in successful security. ”

“ But in our civilized communities the chief of the nation is usually more stupid than one half of his subjects, and is king merely because he was borned of a king and a queen. Not even in a republic do the wisest and best rule. ”

“ When two men do the same thing, it is not the same thing, if one happens to call himself an Anarchist. The police and political officials and the newspapers urge that Rubini represented a conspiracy; that the entire Anarchist movement is a gigantic conspiracy against government; and, therefore, Rubini's act, being directed against government, was in furtherance of the general Anarchist conspiracy: consequently all Anarchists were participants in Rubini's crime. ”

“ A man wearing a crown and wielding a scepter may butcher twenty thousand men for his personal gain, and they call it glorious war. Another man stops short with one victim, and they call it murder. There is something wrong with the human conscience when it makes such discriminations. ”

“ Because of the fact of the world's ethical development being at a very low stage, Leopold is king of Belgium for no other cause than that he happened to be Leopold. Among the savage and noble red men of America, the chief was selected because of his superior wisdom, or sagacity, or because he was more brave and daring than his fellows. ”

“ Rubini was a police spy, and fired his three shots in furtherance of a police conspiracy to bring odium upon the Anarchists and create public prejudice against them. The public should know that a conspiracy exists, the purpose of which is the suppression, by the concerted action of the world's governments, of the Anarchist propaganda. ”

“ So, you see, the Italian government hired a man to become an Anarchist, and provided him with funds with which to publish an Anarchist journal in London which was to advocate assassination and other deeds of violence, and thus afford the authorities an excuse for persecuting the real Anarchists. ”

“ The facts relating to Rubini's deed, insofar as made public by the newspaper reports, a source certainly not friendly to Anarchy, not only do not indicate an Anarchist conspiracy, but squint very directly towards a conspiracy of quite another kind. ”

“ And with this puril pretext they seek to make palatable to the public conscience an infamous crusade against cartain men and women on account of a certain political idea they hold, viz, the idea of Anarchy, which, as defined by the Century Dictionary, is "a social theory which regards the union of order with the absence of all direct government of man by man as the political ideal." ”