Protestation

“ There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; ”

“ Their eldest child, John, baptized at Broadwindsor by his father, 6th June 1641, was afterwards rector of Sidney Sussex College, edited the Worthies of England, 1662, and became rector of Great Wakering, Essex, where he died in 1687.
At Broadwindsor, early in the year 1641, Thomas Fuller, his curate Henry Sanders, the church wardens, and others, nine persons altogether, certified that their parish, represented by 242 grown-up male persons, had taken the Protestation ordered by the speaker of the Long Parliament. ”

“ I protest, in the name of the sacred rights of property, contemned and trampled under foot by brutal force. I protest, in the name of citizenship and the inviolability of individual persons, of whose rights no man may be deprived without being accused in form, arraigned and judged. ”

“ To sit in silence when we should protest
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance and lust
The Inquisition yet would serve the law
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. ”

“ Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors cannot assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. ”

“ Then a wail of anguished protest went up from the miserable crowd—
“Law—what have we to do with the Law—we who are dead already? We cannot dwell in a strange place. Kill us and put us under the ground on which we have lived our lives. ”

“ To strike for our rights and our liberty. Hurrah! we shall succeed!”
The dissenters cried with one accord, “Our objections we withdraw.
Hurrah, hurrah for the fireworks’ strike!” and they cried again, “Hurrah!” ”

“ The finest minds in the world, the greatest masses of workers and their friends, made their protest known to the American government, through its embassies, before its government buildings, in the streets and roadways of America. ”

“ If the protest were a threat, it was far removed. Many things might happen before the gray wall should rise high enough to cast its shadow, and the shadow of the coming end, over the miraculous city of the plain. ”

“ As an assertion of power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt, as an emphatic and stinging protest against high-handed, greedy, and shameless injustice to the weak and defenseless, as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors to their folly and peril, the exodus has done valuable service. ”

“ What I did, and what I attempted to do, was my protest,—a protest which resounded from one end of the Union to the other, and which, I hope, by the dissemination of this, my narrative, to renew and repeat it,—it was my protest against the infamous and atrocious doctrine that there can be any such thing as property in man! ”

“ They lead directly to disunion and civil commotion; and therefore it is, that at their commencement, when they are first found to be maintained by respectable men, and in a tangible form, I enter my public protest against them all. ”

“ High time, high time for the voice of every true man and woman, of every lover of liberty, to thunder forth such a mighty collective protest that shall reverberate from North to South, and East to West, and rouse the awakened manhood of America to a heroic stand for Liberty and Justice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They hope to transform every demonstration of soldiers and workers into a pogrom, which will frighten the peaceful population and throw it into the arms of the Restorers of Law and Order.
“Under such conditions every attempt to organise a demonstration in these days, although for the most laudable object, would be a crime. All conscious workers and soldiers who are displeased with the policy of the Government will only bring injury to themselves and to the Revolution if they indulge in demonstrations. ”

“ It is important to bear in mind that the statesmen of our Revolution were inaugurating a political and not a social revolution, and that the gravamen of their protest was against the authority of a distant crown. ”

“ But opposed to our tyranny has always existed a revolutionary protest. Part of the nation is half-barbarian, but the rest has a superior mentality, a lofty moral spirit which faces danger and sacrifice because of liberty and truth.... ”

“ And all the while we know that we carry with us a personality, richly deft and fantastically coloured, something as opulent as the Indies and as mysterious as China. Hence the irritation, the depression, the half instinctive revolt, the protest that does not even find words for itself. And we shall do well as the forms come snowing down upon us, to recognise the revolt and assert the protest, for it may be that when we come to the end of filling in these things, we shall find ourselves to be nothing better than the paltry details we have so often set down: we shall have lost our souls. ”

“ For the sake of justice, and to relieve the Government from all suspicion of undue harshness, the undersigned protest against the spirit in which these proceedings have been conducted, and appeal to you for such remedy as shall seem best, to the end that the public interests may be adequately protected without any sacrifice of the rights of the citizen, and without needless interference with the order of business. ”

“ Perhaps it is a protest uttered on the threshold of life,—an unconscious protest, distressing to hear; ignorance, smiling on the infinite, seems to make all creation responsible for the fate allotted to a weak and defenceless being. ”

“ The workmen and workwomen in whom discontent has bred the disease of riot, the abnormality, the abortion known as Anarchy, Socialism. The hem of the uprising is composed of idlers and loungers, indeed, but it is the labourer's head upon which the red cap of protest is seen above the vortex of the crowd. ”

“ There were better ways of protesting than by kicking policemen’s shins, breaking windows, and sneaking about at midnight setting fire to houses. Yet when she saw these women pelted, hooted at, and threatened, the spirit of partisanship fired up at the challenge. ”

“ Nobody should be blamed who, when such things are done, in good faith and from patriotic motives protests against them. In a republic, arbitrary stretches of power, even when demanded by necessity, should never be permitted to pass without a protest on the one hand, and without an apology on the other. ”

“ When all the smothering by-streets weep and wail;
When wisdom breaks the hearts of her best sons;
When kingly men, voting for truth, may fail :—
These are a portent and a call to arms.
Our protest turns into a battle cry:
"Our shame must end, our States be free and clean ”

“ Then special minions of the law are detailed to this place, for violence and hatred of employers, insurrection and socialism find here ready followers. Impromptu mass meetings are common, and law-breaking schemes find their cradle beneath its glittering lights. It is always thronged within and without, a veritable nursery of riot and disorder. ”

“ They protested; but of what benefit is a legal and natural protest to thirty poor defenceless and guiltless young men, loaded with chains by a papal bureaucrat, surrounded by fifty ruffians armed to the teeth? ”

“ Personally I rise to protest. I look on this interference with serious art and thought and serious minds as an outrage. I fear for the ultimate intelligence of America, which in all conscience, judged by world standards, is low enough. ”

“ When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all{91} protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. ”

“ We must believe that in the nature of riots there is something which serves the interests of the government, for I have invariably heard the police accused of inciting them. My resistance, that which I spoke of, will ever be a legal resistance, pursued by legal means, by the press, by the tribune, and with patience,—that great force granted to the oppressed and to the vanquished. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the great quarrel between the North and the South was waxing hot and hotter, it was again direct action which preceded and precipitated political action. And I may remark here that political action is never taken, nor even contemplated, until slumbering minds have first been aroused by direct acts of protest against existing conditions. ”

“ All the blood ever shed in sacrifice, all the eloquence that ever thrilled senates and peoples in defense of the right, all the protests ever in silence felt or in public uttered against the wrong, are here held in everlasting form. ”

“ But the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other or lower class or condition of men. ”

“ The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives. ”

“ In the eighteenth century the culmination of this rising tide of protest came in a general and determined revolt against despotism in either Church or State, which, at the close of the century, swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers, and prepared the way for the marked intellectual and human and political progress which characterized the nineteenth century. ”

“ And it is not only a few very strong and violent characters, in which the national feeling of legal right raises its protest against such a condition of things, but this protest is sometimes repeated by the whole population under certain forms, which, according to their object or to the manner in which the whole people or a definite class look upon them or apply them, may be considered as popular substitutes for, and accessories to, the institutions of the state. ”

“ Protest is a formal communication on the part of a State to another that it objects to an act performed or contemplated by the latter. A protest serves the purpose of preservation of rights, or of making it known that the protesting State does not acquiesce in and does not recognise certain acts. ”

“ The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups d’état and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself, and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. ”

“ In the hands of those who declare themselves to be our enemies? A fair question from a woman never gets a fair answer. Windows are smashed—not as an argument, but as a protest.”
“A protest strikes me as a futile thing. No one ever does anything that looks unfair or tyrannical without being perfectly sure that was the thing they meant to do. If a protest is successful it creates discord without altering what is done. ”

“ Another one of our ablest contemporaries, The Indianapolis Freeman, gives some pertinent thoughts just on this point: "The organized protest of the representatives of nine millions of people against flagrant, unprovoked bloodshed and wrong must attract attention and arouse the intelligent, humane pulse and conscience of the nation and civilized world. ”

“ Protests were made by civilized countries everywhere—particularly did the English government take a stand for humane conditions, "her philanthropy and political interests being roused to simultaneous action." ”

“ And at this point, the poison boils over in the system, the nation involved runs up a temperature, and it passes rapidly from acts of injustice to some culminating act of impiety, such as cannot be permitted, and against which a protest has to be made by the outraged world. ”

“ Yet they must know that the heed paid to our protests against ill-treatment of our citizens will be exactly proportionate to the belief in our ability to make these protests effective should the need arise. ”

“ We humbly claim to be no more than serious students of the history and conditions of our country and her aspirations. We despise hypocrisy, Our practical protest was against the institution, which since its birth, has eminently helped to display not only its worthlessness but its far-reaching power for mischief. ”

“ Yet by allowing these orderly and civilized protests against injustice to be suppressed, we only increase the forces of frustration which the conditions of second-class citizenship are generating amongst us. ”