asoning of the common mind, of the yellow press, of the demagogue, in
dealing with the causes of the evils of the present day. The Republican
Party declared that President McKinley was responsible for prosperity;
by equally sound reasoning Czolgosz may have argued that he was
responsible for social misery. According to this theory, Rockefeller is
the giant mind that invented the trusts; political bosses such as Croker
and Murphy are the infamous creatures who fasten upon a helpless
populace of millions of souls a Tammany Hall; Bismarck created modern
Germany; Lloyd George created social reform in England; while Tom Mann
in England and Samuel Gompers in America are responsible for strikes;
and Keir Hardie and Eugene Debs responsible for socialism. The
individual who with great force of ability becomes the foremost figure
in social, political, or industrial development is immediately assailed
or glorified. He becomes the personification of an evil thing that must
be destroyed or of a good thing that must be protected. It is a result
of such reasoning that men ignorant of underlying social, political, or
industrial forces seek to obstruct the processes of evolution by
removing the individual. On this ground the anarchists have been led to
remove hundreds of police officials, capitalists, royalties, and others.
They have been poisoned, shot, and dynamited, in the belief that their
removal would benefit humanity. Yet nothing would seem to be quite so
obvious as the fact that their removal has hardly caused a ripple in the
swiftly moving current of evolution. Others, often more forceful and
capable, have immediately stepped into their places, and the course of
events has remained unchanged.

Speaking on this subject, August Bebel refers to the hero-worship of
Bismarck in Germany: "There is no other person whom the social democracy
had so much reason to hate as him, and the social democracy was not more
hated by anybody than by just that Bismarck. Our love and our hatred
were, as you see, mutual. But one would search in vain the entire social
democratic press and literature for an expression of the thought that it
would be a lucky thing if that man were removed.... But how often did
the capitalist press express the idea that, were it not for Bismarck, we
would not, to this day, have a united Germany? There cannot be a more
mistaken idea than this. The unity of Germany would have come without
Bismarck. The idea of unity and libe