Excerpt from The Comical History of Montana, a Serious Story for Free People: Being an Account of the Conquest of America's Treasure State by Alien Corporate Combine, the Confiscation of Its Resources, the Subjugation of Its People, and the Corruption of Free Government to the Uses of Lawless Enterprise and Organized Greed Employed

The first successful uplift movement in Montana was conceived and accomplished by the Vigilantes. Crude in plan and rude in performance, there was an uprising which destroyed the last doubt in lawless minds with re spect to the efficiency of government of the people, by the people, for the people It demonstrated that absence of law afforded no excuse for crime, and gave security to life and property without increase of taxation. In some of the valleys where the Vigilantes rode, less than half a century ago, land now has a market value of as much as one thousand dollars per acre for orchard home uses, but the most profitable crop which ever hung from Montana trees was in the gruesome forms of dead out laws. Then and there was implanted a respect for the penalties of wrong-doing and a regard for the rights of others which has endured against the insidious in fluence of wholesale corruption, and the most subtle encroachments upon the powers of government, to the present time. It is today more dangerous in the state of Montana to steal a horse than to loot a bank or to bribe a legislative majority, chiefly because the Vigi lantes failed to furnish a precedent in justice for bank looting and legislative corruption as they did for horse thieving; while later administrators of justice, in the approved manner of courts, have regarded precedent and form and ceremony above the purpose of the law and the effect of justice. It has been said that the Vigi lautes themselves were lawless and inspired to action solely with regard to the one first law of self defense.

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