244
OUR NATIONAL PARADOX—LEGALIZED LAWLESSNESS.
unpunished crime are not the ear-marks of genuine freedom. Like the well-meaning people who contribute so liberally in aid of the heathen, while oblivious of those dying of privation within sight of their own doors, we have been loudly proclaiming universal freedom to the nations of the earth, while the holy fire of Liberty has been suffered to smoulder on our own altars.
True liberty is not lawlessness. It is that condition of socievy in which the sacred sights of life and property are jealously guarded; in which evil-doers are deterred from crime by the swiftness and certainty of punishment; in which no family prestige, no financial power, can shield a culprit from the consequences of his transgressions.
To claim that freedom, thus defined, exists to-day in America, is an abuse of language; it is an insult to common intelligence. That, owing to a depraved public sentiment, it is almost impossible to punish the offences; that, therefore, the most vicious criminals defy justice; that they have the avowed sympathy and support of influential communities; that some of the highest offices, state and national, are bought and sold; that the unsavory odor of swindling, bribery, fraud and perjury taints the moral atmosphere; that even human life is no longer held sacred; that all these, and multitudes of similar enormities, exist within our borders, is a commentary on our civilization as notorious as it is disgraceful.
Many of these evils are the unforeseen outgrowth of our line of policy. They have developed with terrible rapidity within the past few years, and their eradication calls for the deepest thought of our most accomplished and patriotic statesmen.
It is the proud boast of American citizenship to-day that the Union has been consecrated as a home for the oppressed of every nation. Here the exiled Irishman, an alien on his native shores, finds peace, prosperity and fraternity; here the proscribed and persecuted children of Israel, fleeing from vindicitive Russian bigotry, find open the avenues to wealth, preferment and happiness; here the long-suffering German peasant, ground at home between the upper and nether millstones of social tyranny and military despotism, finds ample scope for the cultivation of his innate talent and power; here, in fine, under the protecting shadow of the flag of freedom, are gathered representatives of every soil, pursuing the avocations, perfecting the arts and speaking the languages of every land on earth. This is a proud boast—the grandest triumph of time and of governments.
Were this the only result of the in-pouring of foreigners, then indeed, would this favored country be not the "Mecca of nations," but the Eden of the world. The industrious immigrant, seeking a wider field for honest labor, aspiring only to the proud position of a free man among free men, cannot be too heartily greeted. But no sane man who values the peace and reputation of his home, invites there indiscriminately the vile and the virtuous. He does not voluntarily admit to the hallowed confidences of friendship the thief and the highwayman; neither does he gather them diligently into his family temple.
But this is just what our nation has done, and is doing. The same law which made the United States an asylum for the downtrodden, made it, likewise, a rendezvous for criminals of every type. The nation has been a camping-ground for the communists of France, the socialists of Germany and the nihilists of Russia, whose object is not the amelioration, but the overthrow of established society, and who aim at the attainment of their object by the perpetration