They stimulated and organized discontent. Every
one of them became a center of moral and political contagion. To those as
yet unprepared to accept anarchy was offered the milder dogma of
Socialism, and to those even weaker in the faith something vaguely called
Reform. Each was initiated into that degree to which the induration of his
conscience and the character of his discontent made him eligible, and in
which he could be most serviceable, the body of the people still cheating
themselves with the false sense of security begotten of the belief that
they were somehow exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to
their national welfare and integrity. Human nature, they thought, was
different in the West from what it was in the East: in the New World the
old causes would not have the old effects: a republic had some inherent
vitality of its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep
it alive. They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and
charmed themselves asleep by repeating "liberty," "all men equal before
the law," "dictates of conscience," "free speech" and all manner of such
incantation to exorcise the spirits of the night. And when they could no
longer close their eyes to the dangers environing them; when they saw at
last that what they had mistaken for the magic power of their form of
government and its assured security was really its radical weakness and
subjective peril--they found their laws inadequate to repression of the
enemy, the enemy too strong to permit the enactment of adequate laws.
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