I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent, that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure and simple.  Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice; if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written injustice, men are not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience.  There is no law, on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly upon the people, which should be permitted to stand one hour.  It is through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is by the prostitution of the rights of the masses, by men who pretend to be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and death fill the largest space in the news channels of every land.

In New York City—­where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth and the christianized humanity of the New World are supposed to have their highest exemplification—­men, women and children die by the thousands, starved and frozen out of the world!  Thousands die yearly in the city of New York from the effects of exposure and insufficient nutriment.  The world, into which they had come unbidden, and the fruits of which a just God had declared they should enjoy as reward of the sweat of their brows, had refused them even a bare subsistance; and, this, when millions of food rot in the storehouses without purchasers!  The harpies of trade prefer that their substance should resolve itself into the dirt and weed from which it sprung, rather than the poor and needy should eat of it and live.

I have walked through the tenement wards of New York, and I have seen enough want and crime and blasted virtue to condemn the civilization which produced them and which fosters them in its bosom.

I have looked upon the vast army of police which New York City maintains to protect life and so-called “vested rights,” and I have concluded that there is something wrong in the social system which can only be kept intact by the expenditure of so much productive force, for this vast army, which stands on the street corners and lurks in the alley ways, “spotting,” suspicious persons, “keeping an eye” on strangers who look “smart,” this vast army contributes nothing to the production of wealth.  It is, essentially, a parasite.  And yet, without this army of idlers, life would be in constant danger and property would fall prey not only to the vicious and the desperate, but to the hungry men and women who have neither a place to shelter them from the storms of heaven, nor food to sustain nature’s cravings from finding an eternal resting place in the Potter’s Field.  And, even after every precaution which selfishness can devise, courts of law and police officers are powerless to stay the hand of the pariahs whom society has outlawed—­the men and women who are doomed to starve to death and be buried at the expense of society.  The streets of every city in the Union are full of people who have been made desperate by social adjustments which prophets laud to the skies and which philosophers commend as “ideal,” as far as they go.