The Glass Village by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online Page A

going, and we had our prayer and the reading and the oration, and in my father’s boyhood this cannon was fired, too; and afterwards there were bread and cheese and punch for everybody. The orator of the day made a rousing speech about how our ancestors had fought and bled and died to win our liberties for us, and how we were free men and must ever be ready to lay down our lives in defense of our freedom. And we yelled and whistled and shot off guns, because the freedom to be young and strong and prosperous and full of hope and scared of nothing and nobody seemed to us a mighty important thing.”
    The Judge looked down at the vacant faces, and the vacant faces stared up at him; and he said suddenly, “And today we’re celebrating another Fourth of July. And the river that ran through our village we now call the Hollow, and we use part of it to dump our trash and garbage. The houses that were white are a dirty gray and falling to pieces. We’re worn away to a handful. Nine children in the grade school, three in the high school at Comfort. Four farms, all struggling to keep out of the hands of the Sheriff. And an old man gets up and babbles about liberty, and you say to yourselves, ‘Liberty? Liberty to what? To get poorer? To lose our land? Liberty to see our children want? Liberty to get blown up, or to die in caves like moles, or to see our bones glow like candles in the dark?’ These are hard questions to answer, neighbors, but I’m going to try to answer them.”
    They stirred.
    They stirred, and the Judge talked of the great conflict between the free world and Communism, and of what was happening to Americans’ liberties in the name of the fight against it. How some in power and authority had seized the opportunity, in the struggle against Communism, to attack and punish all who held opinions contrary to theirs, so that today a man who held a contrary opinion, no matter how loyal he might be, was denied equal justice under law. How today in some cases even the thoughts of a man’s father, or of his sister, were sometimes held against him. How today men stood convicted of high crimes by reason of mere association, even of the distant past. How today the unsupported word of self-confessed traitors was honored under oath. How today accusation was taking the place of evidence, and the accused were not permitted to cross-examine their accusers, and often were not told who their accusers were—or even, as was happening with increasing frequency, the exact nature of the charges.
    â€œAnd you ask me,” said Judge Shinn, his arms jerking a little, “what all this has to do with you, and I tell you, neighbors, it has everything to do with you! Who wants to be poor? But who’d hesitate if he were given the choice between being a poor freeman and a rich slave? Isn’t it better to lose your land than your right to think for yourself? Did the farmers who grabbed their muskets and fought the Redcoats from behind their farm fences take up arms to defend their poverty or their independence of mind and action?
    â€œThe attack on free men always begins with an attack on the laws which protect their freedom. And how does the tyrant attack those laws? By saying at first, ‘We will set the laws aside for a little while—this is an emergency.’ And the emergency is dangled before your eyes while your rights are stolen from you one by one; and soon you have no rights, and you get no justice, and—like Samson—you lose your strength and your manhood and you become a thing, fit only to think and to do what you’re told. It happened that way in Nazi Germany. It happened that way in Soviet Russia. Are you going to let it happen here?”
    Judge Shinn wiped his face; and he cried, “There is no liberty without justice, and there’s no justice unless it’s the identical justice for all. For those who disagree with us as for those who hold the same