LOOTING FOLLOWED FIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15263, 29 March 1913, Page 1 (Supplement)

LOOTING FOLLOWED FIRE.

BY TOHUMGA. " Much looting followed the fire" was flashed around the world the other morning. . Not at Adrianople, where Turk and Christian are wreaking on each other the deadly hatred of five hate-breeding centuries; not : at Pekin, whore heathen Chinese are weltering in the birth-spring of a new age, and a new destiny; not at Fez, where the savage Moor is being beaten into order by the iron,' flail of France, did this thing happen, but at Omaha, of the Americana—a great city that AngloSaxon genius has built in a new and' fruitful land, under the flag of a republic conceived by Englishmen and meant to make all men free and all. . men equal. Where is our boasted civilisation and where is our triumphant democracy when common disaster and common peril lets loose upon a stricken people, the thief, the robber and the ghoul who plunders the dead? A deadly wind,., irrisistible and unheralded, strikes down upon this' populous city, throwing buildings to the ground and flattening dwellings upon the heads of shrieking i women, schools upon the tender bodies of the children of the people. From the ruins rise at one© flames, kindled by a thousand fires, flames fed by splintered timbers and fanned by the following breeze. The frosty air of the northern March becomes*, the scorching, withering, roasting atmosphere in which none can live, and -death ' is merciful. Surely, if humanity had claims upon humanity, such horror would make them good. We may be sure that all worthy . men, all self-respecting women, rose heroic to the occasion, and; worked j desperately together .to rescue the im- j perilled from this awful, holocaust. .Nevertheless: Much looting followed the fire." \ You can imagine how the lowest instincts known to men made revel amid the agony of Omaha when Law and Order temporarily broke down. •, In this complex society of ours, vaguely striving to organise cities arid/states Among races bred on farms and grouping in hamlets, seeking to replace, clanship by nationality and the -blood tie by the civic spirit, there is a lack of homogenity which displays itself in such volcanic outbursts- We have not realised that no state is safe of -which, the individual elements - are not' magnetically. cohesive, ? that Law and Order must depend in the ultimate upon, the loyal and spontaneous support of every citizen.. In Omahathe immediate result of a* shock to society was .to 'bring about , a certain amount of social anarchy— happened m; San Francisco after the great earthquake, and as happens in every great human .hive, whenever the strong arm of : the.. Law.; is temporarily paralysed. - The American national organisation rose to the emergency, of course. At Omaha as at San Francisco 1: troops were poured into the city and martial law/ swiftly laid anarchy low, But-what: if martial law should fail ?, And; what, sort of society is being built up where only . platoon fire saves' it from destruction by its own sotailed" citizens?" .. : -The ant is. supposed to be, lower in the ! scale l 'of .life, than man. It is » : insignifi- , cant thai* we rarely dream of the wonder- ' ful, cities which^^a^ . been buflt ' Oiganifieid by- . these' little creatures* Send a tornado into an anthill and see what happens Poke a stick into; r the swarming city, breaking down walls, destroying avenues, - overwhelming : thousands with unforeseen disaster what happens? Not an ant shirks.' Not an ant seeks its own safety. Not an. ant but rushes to , its appointed . place ; ready and eager to die if it must die, doing its duty. You may see the dauntless nurses rescuing their charges, ; the little sappers instantly at i; work to . : restore •• order from : chaos, the army that 'never retreats pouring forward in a flood to attack and resist and repel. Neither fire nor flood, nor shock, nor any other disaster, can break the ant organisation; yet we say they are low in the scale and . that Mam is the master of the earth. ■ The. reason, why the ant organisation' is stronger than our civilised organisation is . plain : the ant does not allow the worth- . less and tHe unfit to: breed and multiply, nor has it any. criminal class to lie in wait for disaster to its society. In amazing human folly,-deluded by a little .knowledge, misguided by a false phiianthrophy, deceived by a topsy-turvy humanitarianism, human civilisation not only tolerates worthless and dangerous elements, but actually makes it ■ easier for the worthless to multiply than for. the worthy. Civilisation thus stores up for itself the inevitable retribution, assuring itself ;of anarchy the moment the machinery breaks down by which the criminal is held in check.

"We may well boast of the Law and Order which is superimposed by a strong and noble race over a weak and ignoble race, although in that far distant time when Humanity, finds itself there will probably be no waste of noble blood in securing the persistence on the earth of inferior races whose • wide lands might better breed the master-people. But can we boast of a Law and Order which among ourselves relies upon the policeman,! which is not bound up with the duty-, sense of every man and woman permitted to live as a free citizen It is monstrous to think that in great cities packs of human wolves wait for the day of disaster so that they may leap at the throats of all decent citizens, and more monstrous still to consider how countless : thousands of simple people are being forced into association with the wolf-packs and are being contaminated and degraded! by enforced association.

"Ah but," they say "everybody has a right to live." But why?' Everybody has a right to opportunity to live in the state of which they are citizens, provided thev are good and desirable citizens. Nobody has a right to live in society who insults a woman or robs a fellow-citizen, or turns traitor to the state; further, there is no right to live at the expense of, or to the danger of. one's fellow-men. To assume that the worthless and the criminal, those who do not work for themselves and for thoße who depend on them and for the state which shelters .them and who exist at the expense of society or at war with society, have any rights at all, is a preposterous and absurd delusion of an effeminated civilisation. Weighed against the safety of the state the lire of the individual is as nothing; weighed' against the : right of the lawabiding and the fit, the: claims of the criminal and the unfit are as thistle-down floating on the wind. And for this , allsufficient and conclusive reason: that unless the safety of the state •is set above' the life of any individual the State must surely perish with every individual in it; that unless the law-abiding and the fit dominate the state and mould it to their own needs and ideals, the state perishes unavoidably by inevitable process of decay. '**;•' \ •* ' . . Those who will loot from. their own fellow-men, when every civic instinct and patriotic impulse and human; inspiration call upon them to do a citizen's duty are to be found in every civilised city and in every civilised land. -They are always \ and invariably the criminal and worthless aaslOßt whom-"it is necessary always to oir*de policemen ■ and for whom society ftoei more than it' does for honest toilers png aeU-MciifiQas cities*