People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1895 — Extracts From Altgeld’s Message. [ARTICLE]

Extracts From Altgeld’s Message.

Hitu the PrfKhleHt Hartl“The great civil war settled that we should not have anarchy. It remains to be settled whether we shall be destroyed by despotism. If the president can, at his pleasure, in the first instance, send troops into any city, town or hamlet in the country, or into any number of cities, towns or hamlets, whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law, his judgment, which means his pleasure, being the sole criterion, then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the president and those of Emperor William or of the czar of Russia. Neither of these potentates ever claimed anything more.”

Hi* Tietcson Injunctions. Under the head of “Government by Injunctions” the governor assails the federal judge for revolutionizing the form of government and issuing a ukase, “called an injunction, forbidding whatever he pleases and what the law does not forbid, and thus legislates for himseTf without limitation and makes things penal which the law does not make penal, makes other things punishable by imprisonment which at law are punishable only by fine, and he deprives men of the right of trial by jury when the law guarantees this right, and he then enforces this ukase in a summary and arbitrary manner by imprisonment, throwing men into prison not for violating a law but for ‘ being guilty of a contempt of court in disregarding one of these injunctions. These injunctions are a very great convenience to corporations when they can be had for the asking by a corporation lawyer, and these were 'the processes of the court to enforce which the president sent the federal troops to Chicago.”

Anarchy Stands no Show. On the subject of anarchy the governor says“the brigandage of the trusts is responsible for the unhappy social conditions of the nation. The big concerns organize against the laborer and the consumer, but deny 1 lie right of organization to their victims. The constitution has of late years become a barrier to the protection of the public, and the federal judiciary a subservient tool of trusts. Combinations of capital have succeeded and the fate of the laborer is apparently sealed if this state of affairs continues. The cry of anarchy is misleading. Qur government is in no danger from the anarchy of a mob. Anarchists can accomplish nothing in this country, for the people are too loyal—too patriotic.”