Alexandria Gazette

TOO MUCH FREEDOM.

Every body in America believes in freedom. It is the creed of our people and the rock upon which our nation was founded. That all men were born equals and only through the self debasement of some can others become their acknowledged superiors is the doctrine of all free-born peoples who live and flourish under the various flags of that form of government, known as a republic, in which the body politic is of the people and for the people. As the Loudoun Times says, freedom does not mean that murderers have a free-born right to kill; that thieves have a free-hand right to steal; that venomous groups of selfish, wilful men have the free right to defy the recognized laws of a recognized government of a vast majority of a free-born people, nor does it mean that freedom of speech gives to men in days like these any right whatever to spew forth their nauseous spittle of treasonable denunciation, filled with germs of destruction, against the government under whose flag they live.

War has clearly developed the fact that too much freedom exists in America for that minority of her people who have sought her sheltering protection from what they could not obtain under the flag beneath whose folds they or their ancestors were born. Bomb plots, wilful destruction of lives and property, profiteering, strikes and denunciations of our government and its policies have no places today in the records of our present-day history. The time has come when the safety of our nation demands that murderers and bomb plotters in America must pay the penalty of their crimes; that profiteers who make harder the lot and sufferings of a people at war must be stopped in their stealings, that Americans in name and Germans at heart must be checked in their preachings and speakings, and that all men who are found guilty of treason shall pay the penalty of their acts at the end of a rope, immediately upon the establishment of their guilt. There is too much freedom in America today for men German things German and thoughts German. There are too many free German playgrounds in America today and too few German burying-grounds.