John Peter Altgeld Quotes
The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.
Altgeld, John Peter. The Cost of Something for Nothing. Hammersmark Publishing Company, 1904.
France was coming under great criticism from the rest of Europe for the bloodbath of executions that the Revolution had become. Many French thought that perhaps they were executing too many people. Saint-Just urged them to hold the course and they did.
This quotation so impressed Thomas Jefferson that he wrote it in his Commonplace Book.
He was referring to a case where an unarmed criminal suspect was being arrested by 5 police officers who choked him to death in what the coroner ruled was a homicide. Some police union spokesmen justified the homicide on the grounds that the victim had resisted arrest (in great question from viewing the video tapes). “Had he not, he would not be dead”. The spokesman ignored the fact that the choke hold that the police used was prohibited by the Police Department Manual and Rules as well as imprudent and unnecessary in that case. Surely 5 trained policemen can physically control 1 unarmed man without choking him Sharpton observed, and with this pithy quote, put the tragedy into perspective as a violation of civil rights.
John Peter Altgeld was an American politician and the 20th Governor of Illinois, serving from 1893 until 1897. He was the first Democrat to govern that state since the 1850s. A leading figure of the Progressive movement, Altgeld signed workplace safety and child labor laws, pardoned three of the men convicted in the Haymarket Affair, and rejected calls in 1894 to break up the Pullman strike by force. In 1896 he was a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, opposing President Grover Cleveland and the conservative Bourbon Democrats. He was defeated for reelection in 1896 in an intensely fought, bitter campaign.
