APPEALS TO VIOLENCE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2447, 29 June 1922, Page 2

APPEALS TO VIOLENCE

Concluding an article on the above subject the “Post” states: — “Assuming for argument’s sake that, in struggles of race, religion, or class, the average murderer believes that his crime is the result of sufficient provocation, the logical outcome is a campaign of violmice, illegal and legal, in which legal violence will have the final word, ft is not gradual redress of grievances by constitutional action — with all its faults of delay and legal injustice—preferable to a readjustment by means of anarchy and assassination? There is hardly any grievance that is too small to be exaggerated into a reason for assassination when the lower portion of the brain assumes the ascendancy. If this means anything it means this —that so long as there are very many people in whom the ascendancy of the upper brain is uncertain, and so long as they have leaders in whom that ascendancy is (or is supposed to be) definite, a very grave responsibility attaches to a leader who incites a crime, or who, by a cunning use of words, avoids condoning such a crime, while conveying to the minds of his readers the moral effect of condonation. He who, without murdering, teaches the rest to murder, is perhaps the greatest criminal of them all.”