shaken the very heavens with colossal alarms, and
conscientious objection would have taken on the proportions of a
national frenzy. In the face of such an avalanche of fears and
balderdash, there would have been no work at all for the German
propagandists; in fact, it is likely that a great many of them, under
suspicion on account of their relative moderation, would have been
lynched as agents of the American munitions patriots. For the mob, it
must be remembered, infallibly inclines, not to the side of the soundest
logic and loftiest purpose, but to the side of the loudest noise, and
without the artificial aid of a large and complex organization of
press-agents and the power to jail any especially effective opponent
forthwith, even a President of the United States would be unable to bawl
down the whole fraternity. That it is matter of the utmost importance,
in time of war, to avoid any such internal reign of terror must be
obvious to even the most fanatical advocate of free speech. There must
be, in such emergencies, a resolute pursuit of coherent policies, and
that would be obviously impossible with the populace turning
distractedly to one bogus messiah after another, and always seeking to
force its latest craze upon the government. Thus, while one may
perchance drop a tear or two upon the Socialists jailed by a sort of
lynch law for trying to exercise their plain constitutional rights, and
upon the pacifists tarred and feathered by mobs led by government
agents, and upon the conscientious objectors starved and clubbed to
death in military dungeons, it must still be plain that such barbarous
penalties were essentially necessary. The victims, in the main, were
half-wits suffering from the martyr complex; it was their admitted
desire to sacrifice themselves for the Larger Good. This desire was
gratified--not in the way they hoped for, of course, but nevertheless in
a way that must have given any impartial observer a feeling of profound,
if discreditable, satisfaction.

What a republic has to fear especially is the rabble-rouser who
advocates giving an objective reality to the gaudy theories which lie at
the foundations of the prevailing scheme of government. He is far more
dangerous than a genuine revolutionist, for the latter comes with ideas
that are actually new, or, at all events, new to the mob, and so he has
to overcome its congenital hostility to novelty. But the reformer who,
under a democracy, bases his case up