horror, because that is a field from which even republics are fortressed off by the reflected majesty of their bloody monarchs. If a ruler multiplies murder by infinity he is excused and spared because the most honored and exalted prerogative of ruling was once murder. Rulers are the same in all ages and circumstances. Pope Julius II for example. He had strong ambitions which could only be satisfied by battlefields; to gratify him people had to fight. "His nature needed violent excitements, and this was the real ground of his actions. He threw himself upon whatever came nearest."* But we shall try rulers and presidential war-compounding cranks by the same laws as other stick-daggers, and no bad egg was ever hatched better than McKinley to begin with. We are to set a new model of civilization and righteousness to the world, of equal righteousness and no favoritism to the maggot 'great.'

Not only should the president be impeached, but action for murder in first degree should be brought upon him. May be to rob large wipes out the sin which police-courts and tar-brands the starving thief of one loaf, but shall he who initiates job-lot butchery euphemized war and does it by breaking his country's fundamental law, go scot free while murderers in little hang? No, he shall take his trial with them, and if it is found that he inflamed this war without constitutional sanction, let him hang or let them not hang. Take your choice, but as to hanging small murderers and electing vast ones to a second term of the presidency, that isn't worthy an Anglo-Saxon intellect, so just and fearless and equitable as that cryptically is. Why mince words? McKinley has been more a traitor to popular rights than Charles the First of England, ten thousand times more beastly cruel than Louis Sixteenth of France, and their execution in expiation of the wrongs they did, broke down the barricades and let the pioneers of life into the world. McKinley fashions to

*Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo, i, 285.

restore what Cromwell and the French revolution sapped. Millionaire regnancy is as horrible as empire of Stuart or Capet. I will not have a tyrant monopolist over me any more than I will have a tyrant thing called king over me. The restoration of tyranny, phrased as commerce, is as wicked and quick to be resented as efforts. to vamp ɔver pre-revolutionary absolutism. And I say plainly that one who tries to accomplish this by general murder as McKinley has done should hang, or hanging should be abolished and none of the annual ten thousand life-takers in this country should pay the penalty of their necks. Discrimination is what I protest against. Why shoot one mad dog and let another live? All mad dogs are on a par. If wisdom says abolish capital punishment, good, but if not then hang the worst criminal today existing on this continent.

Or shall we be good lambs and let the wolves in poodle skin swallow us? Shall the ancient regime be restored because it is unchristian to snakes not to frank them to bite you, unloving to bulls not to permit them to gore you, untender to cannibals to forbid them to eat you? We had better lay aside a little our transcendent treatises on love and skin-licked culture and study a little how the best in the human family is resolutely extinguished by the domination of human brutes. Look at these embryonic billionaires for whom McKinley is the midwife and general imbecility the surgeon. They are the real foreigners, the savages. They are of the effete and gangrened empire of tyrants, where rottenness oozes from the gilded summit to the reeking base of society. We know it all by heart, a million times have we declared our glad freedom from that putrid past, yet now it surges up with its infinite slime to engulf society again. Where are we? What are we doing? Is not this generation guardian of the human race for all the future? May it dally in the luxuriance of imbecility while all the worth of life is effaced and the earth is turned back into a dunghill?

CHAPTER XVIII.

Turning-Point For Mankind.

1. Do not Go On.

What further devolves on the nation in this conflict and crisis? Realize again the whirlwind of autocratic events that has swept us down and the future is clear. The Paris treaty of peace outlined no policy toward the Philippines; it is not granted to the president by our system of government to initiate a policy in such affairs without consulting congress and receiving its sanction; and congress in this must register the people's will. Failing to execute the people's wish spoken through a truth-telling congress would make a president the usurper of powers not his and a criminal before the supreme nation. McKinley assumed this role. He could have inquired of the old congress for directions; he could have convened the new congress and asked its advise; he could meanwhile have laid the whole matter before the people with his own preferred policy, for discussion and instruction: none of these things did he do, but he issued an insulting proclaimer to the Filipinos on his own authority, arrogating sovereignty over them and initiating the creed of sovereignty, an extra-constitutional act for him as mere executive. These omissions and commissions, every one of them unconstitutional and usurpatory, brought war and pitched us into that expansion from which the president's flunkeys tell us we cannot withdraw.

The issue that this hurls full-sized into the Anglo-Saxon world is whether the people are to govern themselves, as

heretofore, or one man is to ravish self-government forcibly from them and arbitrarily govern alone. Every other problem becomes infinitessimal when this emerges, and the people can re-establish their supremacy only by undoing all the usurper's acts, repudiating his every move, terminating the war, drawing out of the Philippines, and closing the insolent chapter of expansion. There is no other way to re-enthrone popular sovereignty, for if expansion goes on it firmly achieves all the measures that will render one-man sovereignty invulnerable. The people owe it to themselves to undo what was carpentered in despite of them by victorious rascality, unless there is some clear advantage in letting it stand. But letting this stand is the certain ruin of popular freedom, which is everything. They must unwrite this crimson history, for republican salvation.

For this reason it is that what is now done is the turning point for mankind. Compared with loss of freedom every argument for more war is not alone mere sound and emptiness, but reacts against its own cause. These familiar arguments are that we must prosecute the war until the 'rebels' give up to vindicate our dignity, that we owe it to other nations-as an international obligationto do so, that we owe it to the Filipinos themselves to do it in order to set up and maintain an orderly government there, that we must proceed until congress meets to decide whether we shall proceed, that we must proceed because it is already decided without congress that

we

must proceed, that it is necessary to go on in order to bring ourselves into the rank of great world powers and take our proper place in the universe, that going on will not bring us into entanglements with the world powers or the universe, and that trade demands it. This medley of mountebank monstrosities and selfslaughtering contradictions is enough to harry up derision, but when we follow the steps which have forced

imperialists to base their glum cause on such arguing we have a much stronger feeling. We forced a war upon the Philippines purely to compass ends of spoliation, and now we enumerate dignity, international duty, obligation to those warred against, doubt what congress will do, knowledge what congress will do, national ambition, freedom from national ambition, Christianity, diplomatic scorn of christianity, and a secure platform for spoliation, as reasons for carrying the licking of the innocent Filipinos on to perfection. The most prominent and serviceable of these arguments just now as given in the latest words of the ever-blatant aspirant for the presidency in 1904 is,

"What the people have to do is to resolve to back up the President to the fullest extent, in seeing that the outburst of savagery is repressed once and for all," and to see that these new tropic islands "are governed primarily in the interest of the inhabitants and therefore ultimately for the honor and renown of America." Rusevelt.

The gist of this and all the naively vapid pleadings is the same, and is said in two words, Go on. But the argument is shivered when you look at the reasons for going on: 'to repress the outburst of savagery once for all.' We merely ask whose savagery, and who burst out? and that shivers the argument into splinters. To govern in their own interest those who do not want to be governed by us, and to obtain the authority to do it by conquering them; that shivers the argument to atoms. And every single reason amounts merely to 'Go on,' that the results of going on inaugurated by presidential fight and fiat may achieve themselves: setting in transcendent authority the millionaire vampires ruling through their cut-throat tool, defiant of the people and popular forms of government.

So that the one thing to say and act on is, Do not go on! End the war by renouncing the traitor syndicate claims of sovereignty. Renounce all thoughts of annexation. Help the natives as best we may according to their desire in self-government, but give them independence, and give it now. We cannot otherwise vindicate and