The Dangers of Secret Societies
THE Toledo Blade finds a lesson in the Dublin Park murders and similar Irish atrocities, against all secret combinations and all surrender of the individual conscience to the will of any official superior. It says: "No man has the right to place himself where he has no moral control of his own actions, yet this is what he does when he joins a secret society and binds himself to blindly obey all orders from headquarters without hesitation or thought of whether they are right or wrong. Indeed he dare not question the mandates of these persons whom he does not know. He must simply do as he is bidden, even though it makes him a partner in the most atrocious crimes, when he has no intention of committing a moral wrong. The lesson these disclosures teach is to become a member of no societies whose purposes are not openly declared, to take no oaths to obey persons whose very names are unknown."