Sickles' Threat Against Newspapers Decried as Anarchy
At the annual dinner of the Third Army Corps union in New York City recently, after several speakers had severely denounced the newspaper censure of the conduct of the war in the Philippines, General Daniel Sickles, a veteran of the Civil War, in responding to a toast, gave utterance to this sentiment, which was greeted by his audience with cheers:— As to that fashionable sheet which General Tremain mentioned, any time that two hundred and fifty old soldiers will get together and place themselves under my command, I will lead them in an effort to throw the whole concern into the gutter. What else but anarchy is held up and indorsed by this utterance? What but anarchy would it be when a mob, led by a general of the Civil War or any other man, should set aside all law, from the national Constitution down to the law of the State and city in which they lived, and proceed to visit punishment of their own devising upon a newspaper company which had offended them, without even the forms of a trial? Such incidents reveal anarchy in its most dangerous form.