The blow was aimed not at this President, but at all Presidents; at every symbol of government.  President McKinley was as emphatically the embodiment of the popular will of the Nation expressed through the forms of law as a New England town meeting is in similar fashion the embodiment of the law-abiding purpose and practice of the people of the town.  On no conceivable theory could the murder of the President be accepted as due to protest against “inequalities in the social order,” save as the murder of all the freemen engaged in a town meeting could be accepted as a protest against that social inequality which puts a malefactor in jail.  Anarchy is no more an expression of “social discontent” than picking pockets or wife-beating.

The anarchist, and especially the anarchist in the United States, is merely one type of criminal, more dangerous than any other because he represents the same depravity in a greater degree.  The man who advocates anarchy directly or indirectly, in any shape or fashion, or the man who apologizes for anarchists and their deeds, makes himself morally accessory to murder before the fact.  The anarchist is a criminal whose perverted instincts lead him to prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order.  His protest of concern for workingmen is outrageous in its impudent falsity; for if the political institutions of this country do not afford opportunity to every honest and intelligent son of toil, then the door of hope is forever closed against him.  The anarchist is everywhere not merely the enemy of system and of progress, but the deadly foe of liberty.  If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for but one red moment, to be succeeded, for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.

For the anarchist himself, whether he preaches or practices his doctrines, we need not have one particle more concern than for any ordinary murderer.  He is not the victim of social or political injustice.  There are no wrongs to remedy in his case.  The cause of his criminality is to be found in his own evil passions and in the evil conduct of those who urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his.  He is a malefactor and nothing else.  He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a “product of social conditions,” save as a highwayman is “produced” by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse.  It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause.  No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than if preaching the murder of some specified private individual.  Anarchistic speeches, writings, and meetings are essentially seditious and treasonable.