As a Dutch boy I was taught a wholesome respect for law and for authority.  The fact was impressed upon me that laws of themselves were futile unless the people for whom they were made respected them, and obeyed them in spirit more even than in the letter.  I came to America to feel, on every hand, that exactly the opposite was true.  Laws were passed, but were not enforced; the spirit to enforce them was lacking in the people.  There was little respect for the law; there was scarcely any for those appointed to enforce it.

The nearest that a boy gets to the law is through the policeman.  In the Netherlands a boy is taught that a policeman is for the protection of life and property; that he is the natural friend of every boy and man who behaves himself.  The Dutch boy and the policeman are, naturally, friendly in their relations.  I came to America to be told that a policeman is a boy’s natural enemy; that he is eager to arrest him if he can find the slightest reason for doing so.  A policeman, I was informed, was a being to hold in fear, not in respect.  He was to be avoided, not to be made friends with.  The result was that, as did all boys, I came to regard the policeman on our beat as a distinct enemy.  His presence meant that we should “stiffen up”; his disappearance was the signal for us to “let loose.”

So long as one was not caught, it did not matter.  I heard mothers tell their little children that if they did not behave themselves, the policeman would put them into a bag and carry them off, or cut their ears off.  Of course, the policeman became to them an object of terror; the law he represented, a cruel thing that stood for punishment.  Not a note of respect did I ever hear for the law in my boyhood days.  A law was something to be broken, to be evaded, to call down upon others as a source of punishment, but never to be regarded in the light of a safeguard.

And as I grew into manhood, the newspapers rang on every side with disrespect for those in authority.  Under the special dispensation of the liberty of the press, which was construed into the license of the press, no man was too high to escape editorial vituperation if his politics did not happen to suit the management, or if his action ran counter to what the proprietors believed it should be.  It was not criticism of his acts, it was personal attack upon the official; whether supervisor, mayor, governor, or president, it mattered not.

It is a very unfortunate impression that this American lack of respect for those in authority makes upon the foreign-born mind.  It is difficult for the foreigner to square up the arrest and deportation of a man who, through an incendiary address, seeks to overthrow governmental authority, with the ignoring of an expression of exactly the same sentiments by the editor of his next morning’s newspaper.  In other words, the man who writes is immune, but the man who reads, imbibes, and translates the editor’s words into action is immediately marked as a culprit, and America will not harbor him.  But why harbor the original cause?  Is the man who speaks with type less dangerous than he who speaks with his mouth or with a bomb?