Page:The Debs Decision, 1919.djvu/48

 Light and speaks the Truth and cries out for Justice—is their greatest enemy. So they have always tried this process of putting ideas into jail.

Years ago, when the Mexican War was being fought, an American named Henry D. Thoreau refused to pay his war tax. He did not believe in the war and he refused to support the Government that prosecuted the war. So they put Thoreau in jail. Later he wrote about his experience:

"As I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, and the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. ...

"I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. ...

"I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog.

"I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. ...

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less