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Title: Notes [Oct, 1888]
Author: Freedom Press (London)
Date: October, 1888
Language: en
Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 3, No. 25, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3078, retrieved on April 14, 2020.

Freedom Press (London)

Notes [Oct, 1888]

If there were no police, how would the community protect itself 'from

the violence of homicidal maniacs? We have replied to such questions

theoretically by the score; just now Whitechapel experience is replying

in letters of blood to be seen and read of all men.

The police do not and cannot protect us from homicidal maniacs. This

horrible disease attacks human beings very rarely even under our present

unhealthy social conditions. When it does, helpless people are at the

maniac's mercy in spite of our "admirable police." The Star enumerated

the other day sixteen recent murders in London, not including the

Westmintter and Whitechapel affairs, whose perpetrators are still

unknown. Facts to shake the most robust faith in the preventive efficacy

of a police force.

Englishmen may talk at meetings if they like about the superiority of

state over voluntary organization for the discovery of crime, but

immediately there is real and wide-spread danger, their common sense

leads them to form vigilance committees and set about protecting

themselves. If there had been no police in Whitechapel at all, the

murderer would probably have been put beyond the possibility of doing

further damage by this time.

There is nothing which so hinders men from acting effectively as the

feeling that they can shift their responsibilities on to the shoulders

of some one else who is paid to carry them.

What about the social conditions that force women who are anxious to

work honestly, to stand about trying to sell themselves in the streets

at night, with the danger of being brutally murdered, added to the

miseries of hunger and shame? Are we Revolutionists the enemies of

mankind? or the respectable people who preach that such things must be

and a change of social conditions is an unnecessary and dangerous

absurdity?

A grandiloquent manifesto "To the workers, employed and unemployed," has

fallen under our notice. It professes to be published by the "Central

Revolutionary Committee." We have no idea who these gentlemen may be;

but "the abolition of all government" reads strangely on the program of

such a body. A Central Revolutionary Committee smacks of the French

Jacobinism of a hundred years ago rather than the Communist-Anarchism of

to-day. The whole document appears to us of questionable value.

The Cork band that declined to play "God Save the Queen" at the Irish

Exhibition, has been greeted on its return home with rapturous welcome.

Foes revile their action and friends (?) think it was foolish; but we

attach some importance to the courage shown by a party of obscure

Irishmen in refusing to play a tune which has never been played in

Ireland without the intention of a hidden insult to the majority of the

population. "What English band at English exhibition has played "God

Save Ireland"?