favorable to the prosecution of their designs.

A revered fetish of the Americans was "freedom of speech": it was believed
that if bad men were permitted to proclaim their evil wishes they would go
no further in the direction of executing them--that if they might say what
they would like to do they would not care to do it. The close relation
between speech and action was not understood. Because the Americans
themselves had long been accustomed, in their own political debates and
discussions, to the use of unmeaning declamations and threats which they
had no intention of executing, they reasoned that others were like them,
and attributed to the menaces of these desperate and earnest outcasts no
greater importance than to their own. They thought also that the foreign
anarchists, having exchanged the tyranny of kings for that of majorities,
would be content with their new and better lot and become in time good and
law-abiding citizens.

The anarchist of that far day (thanks to the firm hands of our gracious
sovereigns the species is now extinct) was a very different person from
what our infatuated ancestors imagined him. He struck at government, not
because it was bad, but because it was government. He hated authority, not
for its tyranny, but for its power. And in order to make this plain to
observation he frequently chose his victim from amongst those whose rule
was most conspicuously benign.

Of the seven early Presidents of the American republic who perished by
assassination no fewer than four were slain by anarchists with no personal
wrongs to impel them to the deed--nothing but an implacable hostility to
law and authority. The fifth victim, indeed, was a notorious demagogue who
had pardoned the assassin of the fourth.