HOW IMPERIALISM IS FOSTERED.
By G.
IT is hardly worth while to criticise the administration for imperial tendencies, when "the people love to have it so." The great popular apostasy from republican principle is especially manifest in the growth and multiplicity of secret societies. They are all founded on imperial principles—concentration of authority, high-sounding titles, gaudy regalias, and exclusiveness. The Christian Cynosure truthfully remarks: Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and other men of like stamp, saw and said years ago that secret associations were inconsistent with free government. The lodges train men for despotism; the officers to love and execute it, the rank and file to submit to it. Of the recent great strike in Chicago, the same journal says: "As you all know, this was a secret society strike, pure and simple. Men with no grievance laid down work which they had engaged to do, and undertook to maim or kill any who should take it up." Any association among men whose members are obligated, directly or indirectly, to screen one another, right or wrong, and who carry out this principle, is antagonistic to free government. It is this kind of concentration for selfish ends that saps the life-blood of free institutions, and instils imperialistic principles. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."