ARBITRARY SEARCHES AND SEIZURES consequence has been that the law has come to be in ill repute. The public, and espe cially the foreign element thereof, has come to look upon the police power as an arbitrary power exercised as the result of prejudice and not of right or good government. The violence and lawlessness of the means used have emphasized and encouraged violence and lawlessness. In the famous campaign, for instance, which was waged in Chicago some years since by Miss Jane Addams, of the Hull House, against the political boss, John Powers, three policemen stood by and saw a political supporter of the party of Miss Addams assaulted by a mob of Italians and driven from the polling place, and in stead of arresting the assailants searched the victim to see if he carried concealed weapons upon his person. At the time of the assassination of President McKinley, Miss Emma Goldman, who was believed to have incited the deed, eluded the vigilance of the police for nearly three weeks; a show of diligence, however, appeared necessary, and to make such a showing every one who bore the name of anarchist, whether a scientific anarchist, a terrorist, or a social ist; whether a follower of the non-resistent Tolstoi or of the terrorist, bomb-throwing Nicolai Russakoff, and whether man, woman, or child, was arrested without warrant, without the filing of a complaint, and was denied the right of giving bail or of consult ing counsel. The evil was not righted until Miss Jane Addams, of the Hull House, her self a quaker non-resistent, called attention to the fact that among those arrested was a young girl who had not passed the doll period, and that the surest way to encour age and promote anarchy was for the authorities themselves to brush aside the law and themselves to become anarchists. We should bear in mind the fact that the Nihilist in Russia was originally with but
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few exceptions a theorist and a non-resist ent; that he only became a terrorist and only began to resort to the bomb after the Russian government had itself become anarchistic, and after some fifty of his num ber who had been tried and acquitted by the courts had been arbitrarily exiled. Often the mob itself becomes politically powerful and the means which have been used to suppress it may in turn be used by it for the destruction of property and of property rights. The ruling classes of Russia gave to the Russian people their first lessons in lawlessness. They are to-day reaping in a large measure that which they have sown . Obedience to and reverence for the law does not come from many arrests. It comes from its ethical nature, from its reasonable ness, from the unswerving justice and even ness of its enforcement, from the knowledge by the people of what it is and their belief in its righteousness. The manufacturers of Illinois, for instance, first banded together and formed an association for the purpose of opposing the child labor law of that state. When, however, they investigated the law and became satisfied that it was to be en forced without fear and without prejudice they ceased their resistance and gave to it their approval. In the same way it is believed that hu manity in the factory, in the mine, and in the workshop, and honesty in business, will come, in the main, not from many statutory enactments and burdensome regulations, but from the awakening of a broader civic conscience, and above all an insistence upon that measure of individual liberty under the law which shall make employer and employee as equal in strength as possible and equal partners in the industrial effort to create wealth and social prosperity. GRAND FORKS, No. DAK., April, 1906.
