and under any exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists.
These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist speaker standing on his soap-box, in the course of his remarks, indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution. His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create esprit de corps in the police department, and the policeman on that beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would "knock his block off." He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private and not in his official capacity.
