Civil strife

“ The strife for wealth and desperation of want kept in quenchless blaze a hell of greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion of the pit. To keep this general frenzy in some restraint, so that the entire social system should not resolve itself into a general massacre, required an army of soldiers, police, judges, and jailers, and endless law-making to settle the quarrels. ”

“ To justify rebellion, the injustice or failure of a government must be so great, that it cannot be endured,—so great, that it will manifestly be better on the whole, to run all the risks of a bloody conflict, of civil war, than to endure the execution of the governmental laws.
3. To justify rebellion, there must be little or no prospect that the government can be peaceably altered, as ours may be, or that the injustice or oppression of the government can be made to cease by any peaceable means. Violence against government, rebellion, civil war, are no small matters. ”

“ But while this process is going on, must we be distracted and tortured by the baleful passions and wicked works that unrestrained party-spirit and ungoverned factions will bring upon us, under such a government as ours? Must we rush on to disunion, and civil wars, and servile wars, till all their train of horrors pass over us like devouring fire? ”

“ It is true that the artful practice and cunning instigation of the purchased friends and bribed advocates of oppression, joined to the interest which the thieves and pick-pockets of a great city always have in civil tumult and confusion, may now and then succeed in exciting the young, the ignorant, the thoughtless, and the depraved, to acts of violence in favor of tyranny. ”

“ That we will, on every occasion, exert ourselves, on the first appearance of Tumult, or Disorder, to maintain the public peace, and to act in support of the civil authority, for suppressing all Riots, and for bringing the promoters of them to legal punishment. ”

“ Are we to be told of the dissolution of the Union, of civil war, and seas of blood? And yet, with such awful threatenings before us, do gentlemen in the same breath insist upon the encouragement of this evil — upon the extension of this monstrous scourge of the human race? An evil so fraught with such dire calamities to us as individuals, and to our nation, and threatening, in its progress, to overwhelm the civil and religious institutions of the country, with the liberties of the nation, ought at once to be met, and to be controlled. ”

“ These feuds too, however embarrassing in their effects, ought to be rather matter of regret, than surprise, to those who reflect that no nation has ever yet attained any reasonable portion of civil liberty without them. They are a part of that fearful process, by which it appears that, while human nature remains what it is, abuses, even when past endurance, can alone be corrected. ”

“ A civil war breaks the bands of society and government, or at least suspends their force and effect; it produces in the nation two independent parties, which consider each other as enemies, and acknowledge no common judge. ”

“ Should your Country call, or should you perceive the restless tools of faction at work in their dark cabals, and ‘stealing upon the secure hour of Liberty;’ should you see the corruptors, or the corrupted, imposing upon the public with specious names,—undermining 369the civil and religious principles of their country, and gradually paving the way to certain Slavery, by spreading destructive notions of Government;—then, Oh! ”

“ The battle that remained to be fought, and at once commenced, was between the Commons and the nobles; that is, between people doomed to poverty by the operation of law, and people who were prosperous at their expense. And as there were men who would perish from want while the laws remained unchanged, and others who would be ruined by their repeal, the strife was deadly. ”

“ It should seem, to my way of conceiving such matters, that there is a very wide difference in reason and policy between the mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of bands of men, who disturb order within the State, and the civil dissensions which may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities which compose a great empire. ”

“ They disclaim every idea of imbruing their bands in the blood of their fellow-citizens, or entering into a civil war among themselves, at all times; but more especially at so critical a period as the present, conceiving such a step to be highly impolitic and dangerous. ”

“ Ten persons were accused “of an attempt to upset the present constitution of the kingdom, to excite the citizens or inhabitants of the state to sedition, to arm themselves against the royal authority, and to bring about a civil war by arming the citizens or inhabitants of the state against one another, or by inciting them so to arm themselves.” ”

“ Then again the citizens will have all things in common, in having common property they will have common pleasures and pains.
Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one mind; or lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their bodies which they call their own; or suits about violence when every one is bound to defend himself? The permission to strike when insulted will be an ‘antidote’ to the knife and will prevent disturbances in the State. But no younger man will strike an elder ”

“ The freedom from arrest and trial by the civil authorities for petty offenses, or even for murder, and the right to go on a strike if in any way interfered with, were but beginnings in independence in an age when such independence seemed important. ”

“ The doubts and defections that accompany a civil war, the conversion of the great body of cowards and the still larger majority of indifferent men, the claims of regular domestic life, the absence of a commissariat, the near presence of women and children, the contrast which the return of quiet after the blow presents to the pain and terror of a renewed struggle, make it, as it were, impossible for a defeated mob to return, after an interval, against the regular force which has repelled it ”

“ Charvát.—However, as a punishment for the spilling of blood and for incendiarism, I announce in the name of the district government: From each insurrectionist estate and land-holding, one mature man must be enrolled in the army. The plotters of the rebellion will, it is true, have their life, estate and liberty assured them, but as a fine and as a humiliation as well and a punishment for their crime they shall be publicly flogged here in the presence of their lords and of their people whom they stirred up to rebel. ”

“ Not only is our constitutional Government to be stricken down; not only is our flag to be blotted out; but the very foundations of social order are to be undermined and destroyed; the demon of destruction is to be let loose over the face of the land, a reign of terror and mob law is to prevail in each section of the Union, and the man who dares to plead for the cause of justice and moderation in either section is to be marked down as a traitor to his section. ”

“ I hope that the civil power will be sufficient to repress this tumult without, otherwise it will be my duty to send for a guard of military, and then bloodshed may be the consequence, from which those who create this riot alone will be in any way answerable. ”

“ Wherever men and women lived, there they embodied a living submission to slaveholders. Resistance, or insurrection against them, in any relation, in thought, feeling, word or deed, was counted a felony against the peace of society, against the Union, and its sovereign power. ”

“ Social dissolution is accelerated by provincial revolts against central authority; by survival struggle between the empires which were coordinated and consolidated into the civilization; by revolt in the subordinate and dependent segments of the civilization; by rivalry and conflict between racial, cultural and political sub-groups forced into the civilization, held there by coercion, policed by armed force and taking the first opportunity to win political independence and self determination. ”

“ No—the General Strike, as it has been pictured here, entirely changes the situation.
As before, it would be the duty of the military forces to-day to protect the Government buildings and the palaces of the wealthy from the hatred of the masses, because all the central stations of government, such as police stations, court houses, prisons, national banks and ministeries of finances might be threatened by the masses. Also single persons, prominently hated by the masses, might run the risk of suffering injury to life or limb. ”

“ Every dynastic and political feud, all the executions resulting from such feuds, the crushing of rebellions, the use of the military in dispersing mobs, in putting down strikes, all extortionate taxation, the injustice of land ownership and the limitations of freedom of labor,—all this is done, if not directly by the troops, then by the police supported by the troops. He who performs his military duty becomes a participant in all these acts, about which he often feels more than dubious, and which are in most cases directly opposed to his conscience. ”

“ Founded in violence, sustained only by violence, such a wrong must by a sure law of compensation blast the master as well as the slave; blast the lands on which they live; blast the community of which they area part; blast the Government which does not forbid the outrage; and the longer it exists and the more completely it prevails, must its blasting influences penetrate the whole social system. ”

“ In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none. ”

“ In this encouraging condition of things, a small number of the citizens composing the minority, (for I will not impute to the great body of the minority any such violent purposes,) threaten the employment of force, and the dissolution of the union! Can any principle be more subversive of all government, or of a tendency more exceptionable and alarming. ”

“ A territory of our government is now convulsed with violence and discord, and the whole family of our nation is in a state of exitement and anxiety. The national executive power is put in motion, the army in requisition, and congress is invoked for interference. ”

“ We shall probably encounter more appeals to the multiplied power of assembly, more determination to find a short cut in lawlessness towards attainment, more passive and active resistance in attempts at government by violence rather than government by reason. Others, besides the unemployed or the women, will make this visible protest before all men by exhibition of their willingness to face ridicule, discomfort, physical injury, and even martyrdom in their ardour for the triumph of their cause. ”

“ These abuses roused the indignation of the citizens. The principal object of the Revolution was to destroy all privileges; to abolish signorial jurisdictions, justice being an inseparable attribute of sovereign authority; to suppress feudal rights, as being a remnant of the old slavery of the people; to subject alike all citizens and all property, to the burdens of the state. ”

“ If a glance is cast over the assemblage called to the ordeal, how mean and trivial are the vociferations in defence of property, the threats of revenge for light, the boast of physical force, the appeal to the compromises which constitute the defects of human law! How low and how sad appear the mercenary interests, the social fears, the clerical blindness or cowardice, the morbid fastidiousness of those who, professing the same principles with the abolitionists, are bent upon keeping those principles for ever an abstraction! ”

“ If we look at the condition of the country at the time, we find it in a state of almost incessant agitation, disorder, and revolution-controlled in rapid succession by men either themselves directly and violently seizing upon power, or becoming the instruments of those who had practised such irregularities-men whose position was created or maintained by no regular or constitutional authority, but simply by force, and continuing only until overthrown by superior violence. ”

“ As one of the first, undoubtedly unconscious, apostles of the General Strike, we can consider Mirabeau, when he in 1789, in the National Convention of the Privileged, thundered towards them: "Look out! Do not enrage the common people who produce everything; who only need to fold their arms to terrify you!" ”

“ Believing with all honorable men, that whenever that fatal hour shall arrive that the poorest citizen's person, property, or rights and privileges, shall be trampled upon by a lawless mob with impunity, that moment a dagger is plunged into the heart of the constitution, and the union must tremble! ”

“ No man insisted more strenuously that the participants in the rebellion must be punished and stripped of all political power and social influence, and that the government of the States, as well as of the Nation, must be confided exclusively to the tried and ever-faithful friends of the Republic. ”

“ So it is with those whose lives and fortunes and earthly interests are under the protection of the same civil institutions; if they become divided into angry and adverse factions, under the dominion of unrestrained passions, they invite the spoiler to undermine the foundations of the fortress which shelters and protects them. ”

“ Amongst all these nations there unceasingly proceeds a strife between the destitute, exasperated working people and the Government and wealthy, a strife which is restrained only by coercion on the part of deceived men who constitute the Army ”