association to consider it. I refer to times when crime becomes epidemic, and our industrial problems are lighted up by the flames of burning property, and sometimes by the flash of army rifles—times such as we saw in 1877, 1886 and 1894. At such times there is a dangerous tendency through our whole community to tolerate and even sympathize with acts of violence on the part of strikers. This tendency has its origin in a latent belief that the capitalists whose property is in danger are themselves sinners, and that in these times of outbreak. Violence is merely attempting, in a wild, unreasoning way, to get even with Chicane. It is felt that the corporations ought not to complain if the local governments which they have conspired to emasculate have not the virility to defend them. The burning of cars is doubtless not justified by the fact that their owners corrupted a legislature, but the community having tolerated one crime, has a sneaking tendency to tolerate the other as an offset.
This illustration of the solidarity of evil brings us back to the opinion of the criminal that if the local officials with whom he comes in contact are corrupt, then society as a whole is as corrupt as himself. What we have called his "opinion" is little more than a feeling, an instinct. But it is not so preposterous and unreasonable as one could wish. If a corrupt police department exists year after year it does not seem to be an unreasonable implication that it is as good a police department as the community cares to take the trouble to have. The community is, in fact, particeps criminis. And a further fact, already hinted at, which has not perhaps attained the notoriety it deserves, confirms the same view. Many of those whom we call our best citizens—people that is with wealth, social position and very likely church membership—are personally interested in having a local, or possibly a state government that is not too honest. As attorneys, or investors, or business men, they are likely to be interested in building contracts, or paving contracts, or electric lighting, or a water company, or a gas company, or street railway franchises, or in "placing" the bonds which the government may issue from time to time. For such reasons as these many citizens
