no standing-room on the soil where every possible political privilege and right is granted to every male citizen, where we have all means of law-abiding development, and where it rests with our citizens peacefully to correct every political wrong. We must deal sternly with this folly. Despite the fact that the assassin of our President was born upon our soil, he was to all intents and purposes alien; he was of alien birth and alien stock; his whole mind was alien. No sane man imbued with the American idea could ever have been guilty of the audacious folly, the insanity of egotism, indicated in his words "I don't believe in your institutions, and therefore I shot your President."

We must restrict undesirable immigration as far as possible. We do this now concerning paupers and criminals; we must do it also concerning the worst criminals for a democracy-those who refuse to abide by the will of the majority, who disown the sanctity of law, who refuse the authority of government, whose one idea of reform is to explode a dynamite bomb or to creep up to the noble ruler of a free people with a revolver in a muffled hand. In some way we must insist upon it that our country shall not be the dumpingground of European paupers and criminals, the asylum of the outlawed of every land, the resort of those who frankly avow the purpose of overturning law and government by force.

We must minimize the production of the human raw material of such crimes. This is largely a matter of education. Our children must be educated in reverence for law, to a sense of the sanctity of citizenship. A public opinion must be created that will condemn unhesitatingly all forms of irreverence and lawlessness. Partizanship has run wild in the lawlessness of political discussion. Legitimate criticism and caricature is one thing-the criminal recklessness of criticism and caricature of our "yellow journalism" and of our "antiimperialism" is altogether another thing. Strange irony this, which lumps together the Boston Brahman and the New York Daily Sewer!

When Charles Kingsley was here he thought he saw the

greatest danger ahead of us in our unbalanced abuse of our rulers.

We must systematically educate our foreign-born citizens and our public-school children into a recognition of the splendid political privileges given in our Republic, and teach them to see that in their hands are the means of correcting all social evils peacefully. I remember hearing of the surprise, the incredulity, and then the enthusiasm of a roomful of Russian Jews, to whom a friend of mine was expounding the Constitution of the United States, as he read to them the language of the opening of that immortal document, "We, the people of the United States." "Does that," they asked, "really mean that the Constitution is made by us-the people?"

We must educate our plain people to understand the philosophy of history, wherein an unhampered self-government is the ideal of every society-an ideal, however, to be reached alone through the training of men by government, under law. There are forms of anarchism among us that rest on no philosophic theories, but simply on the brutal passions and the selfish greed of man. We have had in this country 3,000 lynchings in twenty years-one every other day. These have taken place in every State of the Union save seven. They have included among their victims many women and children. They have been provoked, not by one crime alone, but by a large number of crimes. They have been attended with horrors beyond belief.

Labor strikes have tended to end, as in Homesburg, in the revolver and the bomb.

Manufacturers have not hesitated to dispense with the arm of the law and to hire the condottiere of our modern civilization, the Pinkerton police.

Railroads have ignored laws for the protection of life among their employees.

Corporate wealth has high-handedly bade defiance to law, crushed recklessly all competition by thoroughly anarchistic methods, and not stopped short of corrupting legislatures.

Out on Long Island life is daily endangered by a highhanded defiance of the laws regulating the speed of vehicles

on the part of rich men, whose automobiles terrorize horses and drivers alike.

While such practical anarchism prevails, we must not wonder at anarchistic assassinations. While lawlessness is found everywhere, and ordinary life is held so lightly, we must expect lawless disregard of exceptional lives.

The freedom of our social degenerates to stock the world with further broods of degenerates is the back-lying factor of our problem, which appals all thoughtful students of sociology. While paupers, criminals, and the insane form the parents of a considerable part of the nation, what are we to expect but such children as shock and outrage and endanger our civilization? From such material we must look for the periodic craze for murder which every now and then breaks forth among us.

A vast problem this, the solution of which is not yet in sight, but the study of which is forced afresh upon us by this crime.

The problem of revolutionary anarchism is not a problem for our statesmen alone: it is a problem for every citizen. The ultimate cure for anarchy lies in a deeper sense of individual responsibility to law for life. We must all deepen our abhorrence of lawlessness. We must all cherish a deeper reverence of every form of law. We must learn to hold all life, even in its humblest and most insignificant forms, sacred. To end the fascinations of revolutionary anarchy for certain minds, we must not merely use counter force to suppress it: we must seek to accept and embody whatever truths there are in the philosophic anarchism which gives it birth. We must individually seek to realize the ideal of philosophic anarchism, and become ourselves, each of us, self-governing beings, enshrining the moral law, so as to need no restraint of external legislation. While doing this, we must hold the untrained lives around us under the stern majesty of law, until they, too, become self-legislating human beings, living embodiments of immanent law. R. HEBER NEWTON.

New York,

THE ENGLISH FRIENDLY SOCIETIES.

HE great things of life are almost always the quiet, unnoticed growths among the rank and file of the people. Last winter we saw the funeral of a woman, Queen Victoria, who, while she was good, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called great, but by the chance of birth she had been placed in a position of great prominence. Great things had happened during her reign, but she had not been the cause of them. Her personal goodness and common sense, and the fact that she mainly left things alone, permitted the really great developments of the Victorian era-but she did not. create them.

In London we had forced on us the lack of any real democratic spirit, the almost groveling obsequiousness of the mass of the people—the workers and makers of things. At Rochdale we attended a quiet meeting on a Saturday night that was really great, although those who took part in it did not know it. Comparing it with the pageant of the Queen's funeral, that event sinks into its proper insignificance as a gorgeous theatrical spectacle to amuse the masses-as a carillon of bells, beautiful and impressive, that chimes the hour and marks the passage of time. This other meeting is like the rising of sap in the trees, which causes the blossoming of spring and the bloom and fruitage of summer. As Thoreau has said, the rising of the sap is always quiet and unnoticed, but a really great

event.

In 1841, a few workingmen in the small manufacturing town of Rochdale, then with about fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants, joined themselves together to form the Newbold Friendly Society. It was incorporated in 1888, under the acts passed in 1862 and 1886, and to-day, with one exception, does the largest business of any friendly society in England; and the Preston Society does business hundreds of miles from its home, while the Newbold Friendly Society will not receive any sick

benefit contributions or pay the sick benefits to any member removing more than fifty miles from Rochdale. It is purely local and intends to remain such, so that its management may always remain in the hands of the members.

Its first meeting was held in the Fox Inn, on the Milnrow Road, a mile or so from the center of Rochdale, and the meeting we attended was held at the same place, although it is not very convenient. With the exception of its former treasurer, who was the landlord of the Fox Inn, all its officers as well as its members were workingmen, and they are all now workingmen. The Society, like almost all the friendly societies in Great Britain, has been started and developed by the British workingman, without the aid of his social and financial superiors and generally without their knowledge or even suspicion of the great things he is actually doing.

To show what he is accomplishing, I copy almost the whole of the last report, which is very short, very concise, very plain and to the point, and entirely without fine writing or frills. I have put in parentheses the English money turned into ours, reckoning the pound as worth five dollars, which is a trifle in excess of its real value. I also have omitted the minor figures, so that the amounts in our money may be easily grasped in round numbers:

"The report for the year ending March 31st, 1900, along with the financial statement, is herewith submitted to you:

"The total income from all sources is £16,402 17s. 8d. ($82,ooo), and the capital of the Society now stands at £52,981 7s. 5d. ($264,000).

"The number of members at the end of the year is 25,721, being a net gain on the year of 186.

"The interest from investments amounts to the sum of £2,196 15s. 7d. ($11,000), and from the bank £39 5s. 2d. ($200).

"The amount paid in funeral claims is £2,360 ($11,500), as against £1,991 10s. od. ($10,000) last year, an increase of £368 10s. od. ($1,800).

"The sick claims for the year amount to £13,233 15s. 7d. ($66,000), being an increase over last year of £1,383 os. 7d. ($6,500).