POLICE AND COMMUNITY RELATIONS 801

This is why the riots in our cities and on our campuses are regarded
with terror. They reveal a total contempt for the law — the law which
stands between our civilization and the total collapse of all we value.

Ironically, it is the best of our society and not the worst of it that
must bear a great portion of today's guilt. I am speaking of those
who were and are intellectual, spiritual, civic and political leaders
within our communities and throughout our nation. I am speaking
of parents who were too permissive and students who failed to dis-
cipline their idealism. None of these people wanted anything but the
best, yet they have reaped the worst.

As a nation we preached equality under the law, yet allowed laws
and practices that were unequal to exist. There were no national laws
that legislated discrimination but neither were there national laws to
forbid discriminatory practices.

Dr. Martin Luther King was to lead movements that dramatically
revealed this lack. First, through the power of the purse in the Bir-
mingham bus boycott; later through marches and sit-ins aimed at
segregated facilities. At a time when discriminatory State and local
laws and practices were prevalent in the South, civil disobedience was
quickly acclaimed as worthy doctrine. Intellectual and spiritual lead-
ers hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where
the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even
for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle
becomes a flood.

In America, Constitutional government provides for elected officials
responsible to their electorate to change the law. Defiance of the law
allows cynical leaders responsible to none to exploit the madness of a
mob. Rapidly, civil disobedience fell prey to civil disorder. Passive
resistance gave way to erosive force. Logical leadership was obscured
by the demagogue's harangue.

This phenomenon is apparent in our cities and on our college
campuses where high ideals have disintegrated and legitimate causes
all but disappeared. And while no thinking person denies that social
injustice exists, no thinking person can condone any group's, for any
reason, taking justice into its own hands. Once this is permitted,
democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise:
the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities. My
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is secure only so long
as I respect your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I
can claim no right as a human or a citizen that you cannot claim
equally under the law.