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CHAPTER XXIII.

Is Liberty to Die?

America then, the pure and beloved, the unsullied divine child of Destiny, is at death's door with vile diseases, caught by the pure child when it was going about nights seeing the world as fag of its envied instructors, the European Powers. It has drunk of the exudations of British scrofula, and who can live after that? In this place it caught the Dreyfus chancre, in that noisome alley the English Boer complaint, in a third the Russian tubercle of autocracy. The lovely offspring of liberty and manly revolution is ulcered from head to foot, and each ulcer is one of those mean malignant ones taken where honor and purity would not have been. Will America survive this? There seems to be just one hope that the excess of foulness of the eating sores may arouse a reaction. The realization that we are the peerless hypocrites of the world, above our rivals the Franco-English, the DreyfusBoer Hag of the Planet, may stir the dregs of life in us, but is the good brain substance we had so eaten away that we cannot realize?

We can realize that France is a black-blooded JusticeKiller, and clearly see just why she is that; we can realize that visceral old England is a bloody Planet-Bloat, a never sober landlord harpy, with purple-red bottle nose, the decayed proud flesh of its face blotched hideously with. the emblems of its excesses, that the bowelly old sot is dying of gluttony, a dropsical epicure and gormand that lives only to stuff its cancered belly and makes the whole world work to feed its insatiable sores. We can see

these loathsome reaiities, in others, and smell them, but not the same odious ugliness in ourselves. Is it possible to bring this sense of realization home, in time? Let us make one final effort, describing the last stages of the disease, as they are on October 18, 1899. Let us first show in the last light of those two rotten humbugs, England and France, that we do see through them at least, and lippingly abhor them, then that our Philippine jimjam is nothing but the Dreyfus-Boer snake turned over c1 its back, then that our conscience and perception break off short just at the moment we should apply our abhorrence to ourselves, and having shown these things let us in honor of our pure childhood cease reviling FrancoEngland, make a tabula rasa of the flag, and where the stars and stripes were paint the lies that are now our national principles. France, England and America should now form cne triplet nation, for they rest on the same foundation sands, and they should have one triplet-flag. In the centre of this three-in-one cloth there should be a picture of George Washington's army shooting Filipinos; on one side General Mercier and George Washington should be sitting together torturing the body of Dreyfus and convicting him while drinking a toast of French wine to the proofs of his innocence; elsewhere Washington and his army of forefathers should be seen enlisting under Chamberlain, Salisbury and Rhodes, to go out to Africa and shoot freedom into the Boers. In various parts of the liberty-triplet flag, on a small scale, McKinley should be making speeches out of palace-car windows, eating dinners like an English queen, stroking the fur of returned volunteers, and kissing the babies of those who remained in Manila, dead.

One whole compartment of the grave-scented flag should be reserved for A History of His Lies, and, How a President Made Apaches of Yankees, the exact proportions of flattery, suppression, invention, bullion patriotism, political influence, Heaven-juice, and treason-threats,

used first to donkeyfy and then to Apachefy the astute Yankees, being accurately given. What McKinley Has Learned from Kaiser the Ego should be indicated on medals in the form of a composite tombstone of Dreyfus, President Kruger and Aguinaldo, the inscriptions thereon being our Ego's words of paternal chin-chucking to volunteers come home. "How I Stopped Their Mouths," will be the caption epitaph, "and prevented them from telling true stories by filling their mouths with the lard of Majesty." I at Fargo: "I have come here especially that I might look into the faces of the North Dakota volunteers, who saw service in the battle line in Luzon. You did your duty and you filled MY heart with joy When you, with other volunteers, sent ME word that you would not quit the battle line in Luzon until I could create a new army and send it there. You refused to beat a retreat or shirk your duty in the presence of the enemy. No matter who wanted you to go home,. . . . No soldiers of any country ever had any more delicate or trying duty." I kiss you, good boys, don't talk any more about What Happened in Hell and How the Generals Concealed it.'

First, then, that our glass moral eyes can still perceive the imperishable nastiness of England and France, although charmed-blind to our own. A paper belonging to McKinley, the Chicago Inter-Ocean, says, “The issue is one of principle. The Boers are determined to be independent. For more than fifty years they have striven to keep British hands off their altars and their firesides... The declared purpose of the Boers is to resist this freebooters' raid to the end. So we have a great empire and a small republic on the brink of war simply because the republic will not yield up its constitution and its independence to Great Britain. On one side we see a religicus and patriotic people fighting for republican institutions; on the other side, a strong monarchy striving by force of arms to crush, rob, and imperialize that people;

on the one side, a nation going forth to loot; on the other side, a people standing fast for their altars and their fires; on the one side justice, honesty and self-defense; on the other side greed, aggression, and wanton onslaught. That is the line on which the war is to be fought and the victory won." (Oct. 4, '99.) Now this is the fac-simile of our relation to the Filipinos, visible to an eyeless protoplasm or a mummy-bone, but not one imperialist in America can see it, on his oath, and his oaths are as large and loud as thunder-clouds, to frighten all others out of seeing it. Just two columns away from the InterOcean's Pecksniffiad against Boered England is this doinestic hen-cluck on the subject of Animalculus Dewey's apotheosis: "But what do we see after months of deliberation, after the cost has been counted, and after the future has been considered in critical calmness? Simply an overwhelming, unprecedented, indescribable outburst of popular approval bestowed on the man, his achievement, and the policy for which that achievement stands."

What can make hypocrisy plainer to eyeless plasm and ashen bone than this?-yet bright-eyed American civilization reports that it cannot see it! Doddering McKinley civilization reports of itself through the Chicago Times-Herald, "Commercial expansion of a Christian nation always necessarily carries Christian ideas of government and society to the people who have been brought under the flag. Our government is a product of Christianity. All our laws and system of jurisprudence are based upon the Ten Commandments. We cannot get away from our national obligations to Christianity. Christianity and commerce have gone hand in hand, the one blazing the way for the other in all the centuries. God is certainly in Christian expansion." (Oct. 4, '99.) Blazing its way ever since gunpowder was invented, at least.

As to France, a noted fence-straddler in New York,

which straddles for a large population, Harper's Weekly,* asks, "What is it that has brought her to permit this cruelty? Why is it that she is, for the moment, the most disgraced nation of the nineteenth century [England and America excepted], the scorn of nearly all the rest of the world [America and England included]?" Then answers the Straddler: "The military monster which France has built up is guilty of this crime. It is this army ..which has absorbed the youth into its ranks and drawn them out of the industries of the country, has made disarmament practically impossible in Europe, and has at last struck at law and justice. . It has absorbed about onefifth of the revenues of the government, and it demands the services of all of the men of the country between the ages of twenty and forty-five. . In time this monster has come to represent France, so that we have the strange inconsistency of military control over a republic [etc.].." The army is a high-handed' "military hierarchy, which has only to nod and a whole people, with their President, their Parliament, and their courts of justice, lie prostrate in the uniformed armed presence which has been created for their protection, and for the gratification of their hopes of revenge. It claims absolute irresponsibility. In other words, it insists that it is the ultimate powerthe power from which there is no appeal. It stands towards France as the Tsar does towards Russia, . .Its chiefs may commit any crime, and the civil power may not prevent or punish them if they deem that such punishment will disturb the discipline of the army. So the republic exists to maintain an armed force that does all in its power to overthrow its fundamental institution-the theory that a democracy governs itself by means of laws to which all-governors and governed, soldiers and civilians—are subject." Some day "the republic will realize with horror that instead of being truly a self-governing people with rights, and with courts to protect

*September 23. 1899.

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