Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Farmers’ Protective Association, held at Atchison, February 7th, 1888.

Mr. Chairman: When I was visited, a few days ago, by a committee of Atchison county farmers, and requested to welcome the members of this Association to my home, I very cheerfully assented. I was glad to gratify my old neighbors and friends, and, in their name, bid their fellow-members of the Protective Associative a cordial welcome to Atchison. I knew that their greeting, their reception, their hospitality, would supplement and emphasize my words, and so, if I should fail in fairly expressing the pleasure they feel in having you for their guests, their kindliness and generosity would atone for my failure. I greet and welcome you, therefore, in the full assurance that your brief sojourn here will be made enjoyable by all the gracious courtesies that inspire generous hearts, and that you will return to your homes carrying with you only pleasant memories of your visit to Atchison, and of the hospitality of your hosts, the members of the Atchison county branch of your organization.

I cannot claim a close familiarity with the aims, principles, and workings of your Association. But I have learned, from its constitution, that its objects are “the protection of the person and property of its members, and to assist the civil authorities in the enforcement of law.” The uninitiated speak of it as an “anti-horse thief society,” and it seems to exercise a wholesome influence over those individuals who entertain communistic ideas concerning property rights in horseflesh. And if your organization had no other or broader aims than to make horse-stealing unprofitable and horse thieves unsafe, it would be a useful society. A Western sheriff in pursuit of a horse thief will ride faster and go further than will an officer in search of any other criminal, because he knows that his tenure of office largely depends upon the energy, activity, courage, and success of his pursuit. He knows, too, that he is backed by a public sentiment which holds horse-stealing to be one of the gravest and meanest of crimes, and so he is impelled to activity and vigilance by the strongest incentives—his sense of official duty, his desire to win the approval of his fellow-citizens, and his fear of popular condemnation should he fail in his mission.

But your constitution does not pledge your support to the enforcement of the law against horse-stealing alone. It explicitly declares that the objects of your association are, “the protection of the person and property of its members, and to assist the civil authorities in the enforcement of law.” The wisest and greatest of Americans said that this government of ours was a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” In this country, all power, all authority, is vested in the people. They make and unmake laws. He, therefore, who derides or disregards law, is not contemning or defying a despot or an autocrat—he is antagonizing the sovereign power of the people.

Law may not be, as Coke defines it, “the perfection of wisdom.” I have known laws, indeed, that were rather the perfection of folly. But, good or bad, as laws in this country are merely the expression of the people’s will, they should be respected as long as they remain laws. For law is just as necessary to the human race as is the air we breathe or the food we eat. William Pitt truly said that “where law ends, tyranny begins.” Contempt for and disregard of law naturally lead to anarchy, and anarchy, soon becoming intolerable, invites despotism. Nations prosper, peoples thrive, as their laws are wise, humane, and just; but even a bad law is better than no law at all. Lawlessness means disorder, tumult, crime; it means the oppression of the weak by the strong; and, in the end, it means despotism. A people who cannot make and obey their own laws will, just as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow morning, at last invite the rule of an autocrat who will make laws for them.

No system of government is perfect. I doubt very much whether a system of laws can ever be devised that will be perfect. But human nature is weak and selfish, and law, with its pains and penalties, is necessary to restrain its passions and subdue its violence. Until the sublime lessons of the Sermon on the Mount become the inspiration of every human heart—that is, until the millennium shall come—mankind must be governed by law, and the laws must be made by human beings who have all the frailties and imperfections of their fellows. Wisely and honestly as they may legislate, they will make mistakes. Carefully and intelligently as they may frame codes, they cannot fit them to deal with every vice, and folly, and imperfection, and passion of poor humanity, and so injustice may be done in the very temples dedicated to law.

But, after all, the law-makers of America, State and National, have done and are doing fairly well. Wrongs exist that should be rooted out. Selfishness, and greed, and rapacity, are always active and aggressive, and when they are curbed or beaten back in one direction, they seek new fields and pastures in which to gorge themselves. Corporate power and privilege needs to be firmly and effectively limited and regulated. Those latter-day crimes against the people, the so-called “trusts,” should be prohibited, in every section of this country, by National as well as State laws. Men who combine to regulate the supplies of this country; who purchase or lease, and then lock up a manufactory of linseed oil, as was done in this city only a brief while ago, and thus not only destroy an important municipal industry, but destroy the products of thousands of farms in half a dozen surrounding counties—the men who are responsible for such things as this, no matter what excuse they may make, are criminal in the sight of God and man, and should be punished, not by fine alone, but by imprisonment. The meanest horse thief who ever invaded a farmer’s stable at midnight is not more dangerous than are the men who organize and manage such “trusts” as these. Let us have laws, severe, far-reaching, swift, and merciless in their operation, to punish the greedy cormorants who are, under the guise of regulating production and supply, organizing “trusts” to control everything that is produced in America. And, if necessary, let us have “Protective Associations” everywhere, to “assist the civil authorities in the enforcement of law.”

Of late years, too, this country has been invaded by a horde of alien malcontents who, under the guise of a new philosophy, are sedulously preaching the gospel of universal hate and promiscuous robbery. All laws should, according to their theories, be repealed; every man who, by his thrift or industry, has accumulated property, is a thief; the real criminals are not those who steal horses, but those who pretend to own them; all forms of government are tyranny; and there can be no true liberty, no real freedom, until governments and laws are all utterly obliterated. This is the doctrine of one wing of these malcontents. But another gang, going to the other extreme, preach the theory that the government should be everything and do everything. They would blot out the individual, utterly. The government should own all property, conduct all business affairs, monopolize all industries. Everybody and everything should be reduced to a dull, dead level; every man, woman and child should be controlled, in all he does, by the State; should do nothing except in the service of the State, and have nothing except by permission of the State.

These anarchic and socialistic forces are, however, although as wide apart as the poles in their theories, allied like Siamese twins in their common hatred of the existing order of things, and howl, in sympathetic tune, “Down with the government;” “Down with law;” “Down with property rights.”

Every thoughtful, sensible American citizen, native-born or naturalized, should unite in demanding that these apostles of hate and lawlessness should be suppressed. They outrage the liberty of the land. They degrade our boasted freedom of speech. They abuse the generosity of our laws. They are public pests. They should be regarded and dealt with as criminals. Organizations such as yours should hold them to be public enemies, as obnoxious to public order and safety, and far more dangerous, than are the horse thieves who invade your barns or your fields. Is not a man who preaches and advocates wholesale murder, arson, or robbery, a more vicious criminal than the man who murders, burns, or steals in a retail way? And why should the rope of the scaffold dangle and the doors of the penitentiary open for the one class of criminals, who actually perpetrate these crimes, while the other and more vicious and cowardly class are permitted to run at large, and howl their atrocious doctrines through the press or on the stump?

It is time that the law-respecting, intelligent citizens of the United States were awakening to a sense of the dangers that menace our country. They are strong enough to deal with all these dangers—strong enough to throttle, with one hand, the preachers of hate and lawlessness, while with the other they beat down the allied trusts and the grasping monopolies of the land. The people of America are slow to anger, I know. They are patient, industrious, and inclined to laugh at the cry of “wolf.” They did not believe, until the civil war had burst upon them, that it would ever come; and even when the roar of hostile cannon was thundering in their ears, both sides thought the conflict would end in sixty days. But these sober, patient, industrious people, when once aroused, are terrible in their anger, and as remorseless as fate. And they can fight! The bloodiest battles, the most desperate conflicts the world has ever known, attest their valor, their endurance, their sublime patriotism, and their love of our country and its institutions. I trust the coming years have in store for us, and for our children, no renewal of such scenes of strife and bloodshed and destruction as marked the period from 1861 to 1865. But it is not wise to shut our eyes to the dangers that menace our laws and our form of government, nor to fail or refuse to adopt measures for the preservation of the public peace and the punishment of those who are seeking to disturb it.

I have, perhaps, wandered away from the subjects you have met to discuss. But your constitution furnished the text, and I am sure you will pardon the digression. You meet, as law-abiding, law-respecting citizens, to organize for the protection of your own interests under the laws. An American citizen can have no higher aspiration than to see his country governed by just laws, justly administered by just men. When this aspiration is realized, the person, the property, the inalienable rights of every American citizen will be safe against aggressors. To realize this aspiration, a healthy, intelligent public sentiment is necessary, and I verily believe that your organization, if its announced objects are kept steadily in view, will have a tendency to create such a sentiment. I trust your deliberations may be pleasant and harmonious, and that you may, one and all, return to your homes and your work inspired with a firm determination to do whatsoever you can to secure just laws, and to see that they are justly administered by just men.