have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way
of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a
bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently
define it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do
you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing
with all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effrontery
to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,
your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching and
maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you
it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.

THE GAME OF POLITICS

I.

IF ONE were to declare himself a Democrat or a Republican and the claim
should be contested he would find it a difficult one to prove. The
missing link in his chain of evidence would be the major premise in
the syllogism necessary to the establishment of his political status--a
definition of "Democrat" or "Republican." Most of the statesmen in
public and private life who are poll-parroting these words, do so with
entire unconsciousness of their meaning, or rather without knowledge
that they have lost whatever of meaning they once had. The words are
mere "survivals," marking dead issues and covering allegiances of the
loosest and most shallow character. On any question of importance each
party is divided against itself and dares not formulate a preference.
There is no question before the country upon which one may not think
and vote as he likes without affecting his standing in the political
communion of saints of which he professes himself a member. "Party
lines" are as terribly confused as the parallels of latitude and
longitude after a twisting earthquake, or those aimless lines
representing the competing railroad on a map published by a company
operating "the