derfully like extending the martial law of the Philippines to the United States.

Encouraged by the way the public press received Judge Jackson's sentence, a week or so later Judge Kellar issued, in quick succession, two injunctions of a still more sweeping and caustic character. They enjoined President Mitchell and other officers of the United Mine Workers' Union from doing anything to aid the strikers. This was intended to prevent Mr. Mitchell and the other officers from delivering addresses, and also to prevent the distribution of food supplies among the strikers. The mine workers' union had made extensive arrangements to purchase food supplies and were shipping several carloads a day to the scene of the strike. They had hired quarters for the distribution of these supplies. This threatened to be a very effective means of prolonging the strike, and the Gauley Mountain Coal Company applied for an injunction, on the ground that the mine workers' union was a secret society, conspiring to injure the coal company's property and business. The injunction named the officers of the union who had charge of this peaceful, inoffensive, but very effective method of conducting the strike.

It is creditable to the yellow journals throughout the country that they broke out in violent protest against this scandalous misuse of the power of injunction. The public indignation thus created had a manifest effect on Judge Kellar's state of mind. A few days later, when John Richards and other strike leaders were brought before the judge, for having violated his blanket injunction, he did not call them "vampires," "busybodies," "loafers" and other abusive names, and sentence them to jail. On the contrary, although Richards admitted that the mine workers' union was aiding the strike and furnishing supplies to the strikers, and that he has been instrumental in organizing marching and camping parties, public meetings, etc., the court released the men on their own recognizance to appear on Auust 12th. Thereupon Judge Kellar delivered an explanatory preachment, in which he assumed such a friendly tone and

bearing, and exhibited such sympathetic interest in the strikers, one might almost have thought him their spiritual adviser.

In this explanation he said many things wholly inconsistent with his previous attitude, and some that were essentially silly. He gave several illustrations to show that strikers may do almost anything individually. They may approach non-union workers individually on the street, or even visit their homes, for the purpose of inducing them to quit work or to join the union, but they must not discuss the subject of a strike in public meetings. Among other things he said:

"A small assemblage of persons seeking peacefully and peaceably to gain a lawful and righteous end may do things which a large body of men with ostensibly the same purpose have no right to do, for the reason that that body of men may over-awe, and does over-awe in many instances, other people who have rights that must be respected."

According to this, small meetings are permissible, but large ones are dangerous and may be prevented. This, indeed is a new theory. If approaching an individual on the street, or in his home, is not intimidation, then surely public meetings are not. Public meetings are necessarily impersonal. By their very nature they must take the form of a discussion, an appeal to public sentiment and the sense of right. To repress the right of public meetings is manifestly to restrain the freedom of public speech.

To prevent mobs from congregating in the streets, loitering in the public highways, or trespassing on private property, is clearly within the bounds of maintaining social order, but to prevent the discussion of any question whatever in public meetings, however large, is an unwarranted interference with the right of free speech in this country, with which no judge, under any pretext, should be permitted to trifle.

It will be observed in this whole West Viriginia case that no violation of the law took place. The men did nothing illegal; nothing for which, by trial under the law, they could be punished in the least. The court issues an injunc

tion against the laborers 'doing almost everything that is necessary to gain their legitimate object, and unless they obey they are sentenced to a fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of the judge. For what? Not for having violated any law, but for contempt. Thus the court converts a perfectly lawful act into a crime in order that it may inflict a penalty.

We can afford to take many chances with an indiscreet use of freedom rather than risk the danger of arbitrary restriction. No country has ever suffered from freedom of speech, but the human race has endured untold oppression for the want of it. There may be indiscretion now and then; foolish things may be said; but public opinion and free criticism can be trusted to counteract any serious effects; but once let it become an acknowledged principle of action that any interested party who is opposed to free discussion may by aid of the courts suppress it and the heart of American liberty is gone. The unseemly and unmanly conduct of Judge Jackson in passing sentence on six laborers who had violated no law shows that judges can no more be trusted with arbitrary power than can capitalists and political partisans. The safety of all lies in the freedom of all. Civilization and popular institutions are safer with free speech, even for demagogues, than with the unlimited power of injunction in the hands of such guardians of the constitution as Judges Jackson and Kellar.

THE RULE OF FORCE

ALBERT R. CARMAN

It is easy to believe at the afternoon sitting of the league for the suppression of something popular that the world is ruled by show of hands and not by arms; but that only goes to prove the need of another league to bring about the mental invigoration of people who believe pleasant things easily. The world is ruled by force; and even the most innocuous league expects that the things it "views with alarm" will eventually have to reckon with the police force.

This fact has a direct bearing upon certain questions concerning which people are prone to permit themselves the pleasure of loose and exalted thinking. There is, for example, the franchise-"the right of franchise," as we are fond of saying with full-mouthed emphasis. Discussions go on in plenty in which our title to a vote at the annual elections is spoken of as if it were one of the fundamental rights of every human being, ranking with "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." One could almost come to expect, after a prolonged immersion in a peaceful American community, that babies would be born with a folded ballot paper in one hand and a pencil in the other.

A broader rendering of the same high principle makes the woman suffrage propaganda so irresistible, logically— though it is less successful with that silent, inner logic which man guards so carefully against the accidents of argument. Woman suffrage may not make much practical headway, but it wins every pitched battle of the platform where the disputants begin with the assumption that the franchise is a "right" possessed inalienably by every man. Reasoning from that as a basic principle, it is impossible in justice to deny to women the right of voting on laws by which they are to be governed, of helping to decide what kind of schools their children shall be taught in, and of joining in the expenditure of their own taxes. Parroting

that this is a man's privilege proves nothing, unless a reason is given for it; and what reason can there be given when the franchise is made a birth-right, and when its essential universality is preached triumphantly in the face of expediency and patriotic doubt?

But the franchise is not a right; it is an expedient. Within the national ring fence-as without it-force is still king; and the strongest party gets its way. When a dispute arises in a savage tribe over which of two claimants shall get the throne, they fight it out; and the victorious party inaugurates its candidate. When a similar dispute arises in a civilized community over who shall be premier or president, they do not fight it out. Civil war disturbs business, destroys property and kills off a certain number of the victors as well as the vanquished, to say nothing of incommoding those not particularly interested. So they agree to count noses, assuming that the larger party will be the stronger. And that is all the franchise amounts to-a reasonably fair method of counting noses.

It is not a substitute for force, but a substitute for civil war as a means of measuring force. Force still rules. Superficial thinkers sometimes object that we let the cripple vote when he could not fight. We let the cripple vote on both sides, the assumption being that about as many will vote with one party as with the other. Then it is said, in a specific instance, that the minority party would stand a good chance of winning, if it appealed to arms; and the fact that it does not do so is taken to prove that it is the "snow white ballot" and not the machine gun which rules a civilized nation. But this objection ignores the fact that there is a large party in the community which is more opposed to civil war than to any other possibility that the election in question might involve; and it would go with the majority party in keeping the peace. Where the issues which hang upon the election are so important that the majority are ready to risk civil war rather than acquiesce, they do it; and we need go no farther than the great American civil war for a case in point.