An Enemy of the People

“ All, even the moral and physical ruin of an enemy country, even the betrayal of one’s native land and the making on its living body of social experiments, the failure of which threatens it with paralysis and death. ”

“ Before they destroy us, let us face them and conquer them, face them fraternally if they come to reason and to the folds of the law, and face them as our worst enemy in time of national peril, if they don’t. ”

“ But war with thee deserves not to be named!
And still, insatiate monster! thy dread jaws
Are daily filled—being unrestrained by laws!
When will the day, the happy day, arrive,
When thee the injured nations forth shall drive?
Beware, Apprentices! In time beware!
Flee from those places which would you insnare;
Regard that man as your real enemy,
Who, tempting, leads to inebriety! ”

“ You have found this out little by little in our own country, and seeing the tares in the wheat, you want to throw yourselves against your governments with the same fury that made you see incarnate evil in the person of the enemy. ”

“ The licentiousness of various classes and denominations of villains, desolate this country, impoverish all who attempt to live by other means and destroy the strength and resources of the country, which ought to be collected and united, against a common enemy. ”

“ The only plots against us are within our own walls,—the danger is within,—the enemy is within. We must war with luxury, with madness, with wickedness. For this war, O citizens, I offer myself as the general. I take on myself the enmity of profligate men. What can be cured, I will cure, by whatever means it may be possible. What must be cut away, I will not suffer to spread, to the ruin of the republic. Let them depart, or let them stay quiet; or if they remain in the city and in the same disposition as at present, let them expect what they deserve. ”

“ Listen to that fat tanner cursing the Councillors of the Realm and the miserable war! Feel the blood in those fresh cheeks burning with hatred - 31 - of the enemy who brings the horrors of war, horrors that youth has already lived through in imagination! How they roar with rage at their own fancied impotence, and God in heaven, what prayers! ”

“ While in this state of ignorance, far from trying to conciliate them, assure them of our good intentions, disarm their suspicions of us—men of a different race, language, and religion, of whom they had only recently heard—we issued one of the most contemptuous and insulting proclamations a conqueror has ever issued, announcing to them that their most hated and secular enemy had sold them to us, and that if they did not submit quietly to the sale we should kill them freely. ”

“ You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you—my enemy. With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, or even your parents—which God forbid—and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders. ”

“ For if they, who ought to stop up the passes to evil, turn their weapons of war against the bulwarks of practical righteousness, the common enemy will meet with an ally where he ought to find a foe, and the capital and its dependencies will soon be taken. ”

“ All these men were enemies to liberty, truth, and peace; the plagues and scourges of the earth: But they deceived and destroyed their people with their own consent, and by the highest wickedness gained the highest popularity. ”

“ For the present it is sufficient to record the fact, mortifying, it must be confessed, to poor human nature, that all our quondam friends, without so many as half a dozen exceptions in a whole nation—I speak, of course, of prominent men—went over to the common enemy. ”

“ I used to hate your people, and look upon them as enemies and intruders, till I awoke to the fact that in this world of change matters were altering—that our old superstitions and follies must pass away before the spread of European civilisation. ”

“ But consider that man is over [105] against his enemy, with a mind like unto a walled city filled with armed men. Consider how in life's conflicts, thoughts become the swords of anger, the clubs of envy, stings for hissing hatred. ”

“ Ye, the old masters of the land, are now the servants of the oppressor. And yet the oppressors are few, and the fear of you is in their hearts. They feast in their great cities, but they see the writing on the wall, and their eyes are anxiously turning lest the enemy be at their gates.' I cannot hope in my prosaic words to reproduce that amazing discourse. ”

“ In these days, however, such odours of jealousy are diffused, that—I swear by the Educator of all beings, visible and invisible—from the beginning of the foundation of the world—though it hath no beginning—until the present day, such malice, envy, and hate have in no wise appeared, nor will they ever be witnessed in the future. For a number of people who have never inhaled the fragrance of justice, have raised the standard of sedition, and have leagued themselves against Us. On every side We witness the menace of their spears, and in all directions We recognize the shafts of their arrows. ”

“ We prefer solid dragons of evil to flitting butterflies of sin. We are ever in search of the enemy in our schemes of reform, our political wrangles, our moral crusades. The growth of individuality is indissolubly bound up with cognizance of the enemy. ”

“ And when I hear the publicists trying to rouse the energies of the nation by all the stimulants at their disposal for this one object, the total crushing of the enemy nation, I think it my duty to rise in opposition to what I believe to be at once a moral and a political error. ”

“ Why should I regard as my enemies the inhabitants of a neighboring country, with whom up to the present day I have lived, and still wish to live, in peace and amity,—why should I go myself, or pay for soldiers, to murder and ruin them? ”

“ Are the enemies within not the allies of those who attack us from without? The murderers who rend the flesh of their country at home; the intriguers who seek to purchase the conscience of the representatives of the people; the traitors who sell themselves; the pamphleteers who besmirch us and are preparing for a political counter-revolution by means of a moral counter-revolution;—are all these individuals any less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve? ”

“ For your Business did not lie among Mushrooms and Poppies, but armed Men. What do you think is a more unhappy Way of living, for a poor Pay, to murder a Fellow Christian, who never did you Harm, and to run yourself Body and Soul into eternal Damnation?
Sol. Why, it is lawful to kill an Enemy.
Cart. Perhaps it may be so, if he invades your native Country: Nay, and it is pious too, to fight for your Wife, Children, your Parents and Friends, your Religion and Liberties, and the publick Peace. But what is all that to your fighting for Money? ”

“ Shall an enemy, wholly unacquainted with military evolutions, and who rely more for victory on their grim visages, and hideous yells, than upon their bravery or their weapons—shall such an enemy ever drive before them, the well-trained youths of our country, whose bosoms pant for glory, and a desire to avenge the wrongs they have received? Your general will not live to behold such a spectacle ”

“ It was a lesson which they would all need in the great world, where many a race is run, and where the conqueror is not always gentle towards the conquered—where defeat generates ill-will, envy, and hatred. ”

“ This world is ours, and all that appears on the face of it; and when we do attack, we attack with irresistible force.
104. When a tyrant oppresses and insults a nation, we disdain to degrade ourselves by submitting to his will. ”

“ Should we have likewise wily foes, murderous, prowling, savage allies with that enemy behind our borders, — apt for all stratagems, haunting the woods, burning our inner settlements, and inflaming rebellion with untold horrors? ”

“ Your adversaries are composed of wretches who laugh at the rights of humanity, who turn religion into derision, and would, for higher wages, direct their swords against their leaders or their country. ”

“ They take it for a Disparagement to Sort themselves with any Other then the Enemies of the Publique Peace: But Men that Live upon Rapine, are set up for a Marque, as the Common Enemy; and all Heads and Hands are at Work to Destroy them. ”

“ Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant ”

“ I am no social reformer to speak of ways and means. All I can say with certainty is that I have seen them come in by hundreds, by thousands—these men of our country now fighting in every corner of the globe—resentful, suspicious, intolerant of authority. ”

“ But don’t you trifle with it, for it comes from the enemy’s country—it is in league with the enemy—repel it at the outset—have nothing to do with it—it has surprised and slain millions of immortal beings—never taste, and then you will never crave. ”

“ They are perils against which we must be particularly watchful because they work insidiously, undermining the character and spirit of our people, and producing their peculiar form of destruction without force and violence. ”

“ We have challenged oppression to show us its might;
We have strutted for years through the world as a race
That for God and for country, earth’s tyrants would face;
Now the gage is flung down, hate is loosed in the world. ”

“ Already the mutterings of that great trouble which was a few years later to separate a united country, had begun to spread; into the midst of these people had come a man from the centre of the opposition country, who had proclaimed his beliefs and fought for them, killing his opponent in the difficulty. The feeling of the masses centred against this stranger. ”

“ But it should be considered that if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will; and that the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves. ”

“ One observes this peculiarity often enough; it reminds one how savage the social conflict is, in which those little groups of people stand serried against their common enemies; relentless to all others, among themselves only the more tender and zealous because of the ever-impending danger. ”

“ The one, as I believe, supplies a noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory; the other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light-infantry of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds of men and is a destructive intestine enemy to genius. ”

“ The paid politicians, the ambitious statesmen, who exploit the evil passions of the populace, and the imbeciles who are deluded by fine-sounding phrases, have so embittered national feuds that the existence of a whole race will be at stake in the war of tomorrow. ”

“ Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him so, is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war. They consider themselves as connected with a great continent, deeply interested in their patient sufferings. They had rather, therefore, forego the gratification of revenging affronts and indignities, than prejudice that all important cause which they have so much at heart, by precipitating a crisis. When they are pushed by clear necessity for the defence of their liberties to the trial of arms, I trust in God, they will convince their friends and their enemies, of their military skill and valor. ”

“ In the same spirit they make it even matter of complaint, as comparatively a far greater evil, that they have not fallen by the brute violence of open war, but by deceit and perfidy, by a subtle undermining, or contemptuous overthrow of those principles of good faith, through prevalence of which, in some degree, or under some modification or other, families, communities, a people, or any frame of human society, even destroying armies themselves can exist. ”

“ When the mighty nations of the earth oppress the feeble, they nerve the arms and fire the hearts of God's instruments for the restoration of justice; and when one section of a country oppresses and insults another, the result is the pervasive malady,—war! ”

“ Oh, for the days when our race was young, when its women slew themselves rather than be shamed rid when its men, trampling a rotten empire down, feared neither God nor man and held each other brothers and hated, each one, the tyrant as the common foe of all! ”

“ If a man had a political enemy, what could do him better service than to make the populace believe that a house had been crushed by a thunder-bolt, or that a woman had given birth to a pig instead of a child, because Jupiter had been offended by that enemy's devices? ”

“ You will feel it in that sad, haughty anger which will drive the blood to your brow when you hear insults to your country from the mouth of a stranger. You will feel it in more proud and vigorous measure on the day when the menace of a hostile race shall call forth a tempest of fire upon your country, and when you shall behold arms raging on every side, youths thronging in legions, fathers kissing their children and saying, “Courage!” ”

“ From war results that other great evil, seen in the administration of the internal concerns of each country; the government being of necessity entrusted, [Pg 85] for the defence of the people, with the power of the sword, the people are governed by the sword of power. Hostile prejudices, the strife of interests ill understood, false judgments, and the jargon of languages mutually unintelligible, fears, suspicions, and precautions perpetuate the evil of disunion when the work of havoc and desolation is suspended. ”

“ 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. ”