It seemed to me then that in the millions of words uttered and
written at that time, no one adequately urged that
public-spirited citizens set themselves the task of patiently
discovering how these sporadic acts of violence against
government may be understood and averted. We do not know whether
they occur among the discouraged and unassimilated immigrants who
might be cared for in such a way as enormously to lessen the
probability of these acts, or whether they are the result of
anarchistic teaching. By hastily concluding that the latter is
the sole explanation for them, we make no attempt to heal and
cure the situation. Failure to make a proper diagnosis may mean
treatment of a disease which does not exist, or it may
furthermore mean that the dire malady from which the patient is
suffering be permitted to develop unchecked. And yet as the
details of the meager life of the President's assassin were
disclosed, they were a challenge to the forces for social
betterment in American cities. Was it not an indictment to all
those whose business it is to interpret and solace the wretched,
that a boy should have grown up in an American city so uncared
for, so untouched by higher issues, his wounds of life so
unhealed by religion that the first talk he ever heard dealing
with life's wrongs, although anarchistic and violent, should yet
appear to point a way of relief?
The conviction that a sense of fellowship is the only implement
which will break into the locked purpose of a half-crazed creature
bent upon destruction in the name of justice, came to me through
an experience recited to me at this time by an old anarchist.
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