Obstructionism

“ Let reason mount the Despot’s mouldering throne,
And bid an injured nation cease to moan.
Why then, since justice petty crimes can thrall,
Should not its power extend to each, to all?
If he who murders one to death is due,
Should not the great destroyer perish too?
The wretch beneath whose influence millions bleed?
And yet encomium is the villain’s meed.
His crime the smooth-tongued flatterers conquest name,
Loud in his praises swell the notes of Fame. ”

“ Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. ”

“ While, therefore, we contemplate with horror the outrages committed by the insurgent people, with still greater horror must we contemplate the outrages perpetrated by proud oppressors during long ages, consigning the people to ignorance and degradation. They who brutalize a people should be the last to complain that, when these people rise in the terribleness of their might, they behave like brutes. There is no safety for any nation but in the education, piety, and liberty of its masses. ”

“ In fact, gentlemen, it has been doubted whether this grave offence of obstruction is not always being committed by everybody, as a corollary to the well-known axiom in physics that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at one and the same time. So much, gentlemen, for the lesser accusation. As to the far more serious one, I scarcely know in what words to impress upon you the gravity of the accusation. The crime is an attack on the public safety, gentlemen; if it has been committed, gentlemen—if it has been committed. ”

“ As all our hope depends on brutal force on quick destruction, misery and death; soon may we see dark ruin stalk around, with murder, rapine, and inflicted pains, estates confiscate, slav'ry and despair, wrecks, halters, axes, gibbeting and chains, all the dread ills that wait on civil war;---how I could glut my vengeful eyes to see the weeping maid thrown helpless on the world. Her sire cut off.---Her orphan brothers stand while the big tear rools down the manly cheek. ”

“ The injury and oppression have been none the less, because their operation has been silent, attended with no physical force or legal restraint, but reaching only the mind and heart of the sufferer, crushing them with the moral weight of unjust opprobrium, and torturing them with all the ingenious appliances of social tyranny. ”

“ Now a scene of persecution and cruelty began which far exceeds in atrocity anything which history has related. Every tie of nature and society was broken, every duty and every relation violated, and torture forced from all alike false accusations, betrayal of friends, confession of impossible crimes ”

“ Based upon the boiling anger of those who put this ball in motion—reason is dethroned—reflection paralyzed—justice unheeded—mercy banished—the laws disregarded—power defied. It is the volcano of human society—the earthquake of social order—the whirlpool of brutality—the vortex of destruction. ”

“ Humanity shudders at the remembrance of such deeds; not alone because they were bloody, but at the horrid frivolities with which they were accompanied. It appears as if the love of destruction had seized like a mania upon all the nation with a power ungovernable, had taken the place of every better feeling, and left every weakness and every defect in more than original force. ”

“ At length indignation stirred in the vasty courts of heaven; and overburdened human nature rose in universal revolt on earth.
By the very instruments which their own wickedness had created they perished; and here they lie, sepulchred in stone, and heaped around explosives as destructive as their own lives. We execrate their vices, while we weep for their misfortunes. They were the culmination of centuries of misgovernment; and they paid an awful penalty for the sins of generations of short-sighted
and selfish ancestors, as well as for their own cruelty and wickedness. ”

“ How is it, then, that one weak and often despicable and hateful man can acquire and retain such an ascendency over those that stand around him, that they shall all be ready to draw their swords instantaneously at his bidding, and seize and destroy, without hesitation and without mercy, whomsoever he may choose to designate as the object of his rage and vengeance? ”

“ Corruption in civic or national government, inhumanity in the treatment of the criminal and the unfortunate, the oppression of the poor, the brutal disregard of the rights of the weak and the defenceless, any one of these will draw out our souls in the hot and aggressive indignation which is the imparted fire of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ All the bright hopes of life had gone down amid the gloom of midnight darkness. Several months lingered slowly away while these men were awaiting their trial. Day after day they heard the tolling of the tocsin, the reverberations of the alarm gun, and the beating of the insurrection drum, as the demon of lawless violence rioted through the streets of the blood-stained metropolis. The execrations of the mob, loud and fiend-like, accompanied the cart of the condemned, as it rumbled upon the pavements above their heads, bearing the victims of popular fury to the guillotine ”

“ This process is called 'Legitimate Obstruction'; and the greatest triumph the 'Opposition' can ever enjoy, is when they are able to point out that, owing to their 'Obstruction', the Government have failed in everything they have tried to do for the good of the Nation!'"
"Your friend has not put it quite correctly," I said. "The Opposition would no doubt be glad to point out that the Government had failed through their own fault; but not that they had failed on account of Obstruction!" ”

“ But those who wish to destroy it are themselves the very ones who, under the pretext of saving it, wish to change or overturn the existing form of government. In vain these conspirators have hoped to frighten us by deploying about us the trappings of armed force. ”

“ He pointed to the collapse of every great nation throughout history who had neglected the arts of self-defence. He appealed to the youth of the nation to prepare themselves to guard their womenkind, their homes, the sacred soil of their country, and at that point was interrupted by a drowsy member of the audience with stentorian lungs, who seemed just at that moment to have waked up. ”

“ There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own destruction. ”

“ It fell a victim to ambition and faction, to base and unworthy men, to parricides and traitors; and every other nation must run the same fortune, expect the same fatal catastrophe, who suffer themselves to be debauched with the same vices, and are actuated by the same principles and passions. ”

“ Such-like problems in our country become so difficult because they are of the inside: the obstructions are all within our own mind, which is at once in revolt if there be any proposal for getting rid of them. ”

“ If it is not said that any considerable number wantonly abuse and outrage him, it must be said that they manifest a barbarous indifference to his fate, which just as surely drives him on to destruction as open cruelty would. ”

“ We have already seen the system of extensive combinations carried on in defiance of the laws;—organized bands and tumultuous assemblages of peasantry, extorting money, and enforcing their demands with threats of violence;—wanton destruction of property, in the breaking of machinery, in attacks upon private houses, and in the far more horrible crime of the nocturnal incendiary;—violence and excesses in many towns;—and riot, pillage, and arson, defying for some days, in a great city, municipal authorities and military force. ”

“ Your bodies, citizens, your freedom, your wives, your children, are the slaves, the property, the toys of one man—real tyrant and traitor, the oppressor of the weak, the enemy of the people; and that man is——"
Again he was interrupted, this time more forcibly. A terrific blow on the head deprived him of speech and of sight. His senses reeled, there was a mighty buzzing in his ears, which effectually drowned the cries of execration or of approval that greeted his tirade, as well as a new and deafening tumult which filled the whole narrow street with its weird and hideous sounds. ”

“ Destruction is upon them already; all will be destroyed, as the circumstances stand, before the master acts to avert peril. Something must be destroyed at all events. The only volition to be exercised is, Shall the destruction be anticipated as to part, to procure the rescue of the rest? ”

“ Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs. ”

“ Nor must we lose sight here of the law of imitation, and the necessity the State is under of dealing at times with epidemics of crime. That a little leaven corrupteth the whole mass, is especially true of the leaven of iniquity. Avarice, lust, desire of revenge, etc., are as so many ever-ready and deadly mines beneath the surface of society, and a single explosion usually precipitates a general upheaval. To an individual highly charged with such passions, the satisfying of them is of all good things the best. ”

“ Despots and fanatics have exerted their ingenuity to invent torments for their victims—how useless!—the rack, the boot, fire,—all that they have imagined are not to be compared to the torture of extreme thirst. ”

“ Destruction is the purport of war; its civilizing virtue acts like the hot iron on a cancer, destroying the corrupt tendons in order to arrive at perfect health. No pardon! (Very good, very good.) Destroy! Kill! ”

“ A more decisive argument is afforded by a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners, and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life. Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit. ”

“ Their preachings of violence and their antagonism to property made them an unknown quantity, to be feared, and not to be lightly handled—a bomb of political dynamite that might explode any moment and scatter the product of ages into fragments! ”

“ Is it possible that torments and useless cruelty, the instrument of furious fanaticism, or the impotency of tyrants, can be authorised by a political body? which, so far from being influenced by passion, should be the cool moderator of the passions of individuals. ”

“ Behold, then the policy, or rather the madness and folly of oppressive rulers: if they are successful in their injurious measures, they are exposing themselves and their subjects an helpless prey to the ravages of some ambitious neighbour: if they are not; they are raising up enemies against themselves at home, and, as it were, setting fire to their own habitations. ”

“ The real evils of the system were those which arose from its un-conscious barbarism—the natural and inevitable results of holding human beings as chattels, without right, the power of self-defence or protestation—dumb driven brutes, deprived of all volition or hope, subservient to another's will, and bereft of every motive for self-improvement as well as every opportunity to rise. ”

“ And then, after having ourselves assiduously corrupted men, we shut them up like wild beasts in places from which they cannot escape, and where they become still more brutalized, or else we kill them. And these very men whom we have corrupted and brutalized by every means, we bring forward as a proof that one cannot deal with criminals except by brute force. ”

“ But when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and society were not utterly dissolved. ”

“ The more I have seen, and the more I have conversed with Maximilian, the more clearly I perceive that the civilized world is in a desperate extremity. This Brotherhood of Destruction, with its terrible purposes and its vast numbers, is a reality. If the ruling class had to deal only with a brutalized peasantry, they might, as they did in other ages, trample them into animal-like inability to organize and defend themselves. ”

“ We are destructive, or rather, accurately speaking, we should like to be destructive--only we aren't. That was a bad miss of mine. But if we like to destroy, you women love to annex. Witness that pile of seaweed and shells beside you. ”

“ The brutalization of the man is the first step; then infuse a fiendish spirit, and place all under the restrictions of necessary forms, and you have an organization fit for scientific slaughter. And the more to blind our eyes to the hideous creation, we make it the nation's moral ideal. ”

“ Possibly, here and there an extremist might be found to object, that, thus openly to set up, as he did, his own prejudices and those of his family, in the place of law, justice and humanity, as his rule of official conduct, to the manifest injury of twenty-seven thousands of innocent people, was a most shameless abuse of power and perversion of authority. ”

“ They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. ”

“ But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often inseparably welded together? ”

“ The executions of the regicides were very numerous, and conducted in a spirit of barbarous brutality, that excited a great deal of disgust at the time among all but those who were animated by the desire to retaliate the atrocities that the other side had committed. It is in fact, a very common fault among philanthropists, and others who rush about with a strong sense of great social wrongs, to commit some other wrongs equally great, or even greater, upon the persons by whom their virtuous indignation may have been excited. ”