Such is the false position from which neither the Salvation Army nor
the Church of England nor any other religious organization whatever can
escape except through a reconstitution of society. Nor can they merely
endure the State passively, washing their hands of its sins. The State
is constantly forcing the consciences of men by violence and cruelty.
Not content with exacting money from us for the maintenance of its
soldiers and policemen, its gaolers and executioners, it forces us to
take an active personal part in its proceedings on pain of becoming
ourselves the victims of its violence. As I write these lines, a
sensational example is given to the world. A royal marriage has been
celebrated, first by sacrament in a cathedral, and then by a bullfight
having for its main amusement the spectacle of horses gored and
disembowelled by the bull, after which, when the bull is so exhausted
as to be no longer dangerous, he is killed by a cautious matador. But
the ironic contrast between the bullfight and the sacrament of marriage
does not move anyone. Another contrast--that between the splendor, the
happiness, the atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young
couple, and the price paid for it under our abominable social
arrangements in the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of
other young couples--is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr
Upton Sinclair, who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat
packing industries of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of what
is going on all over the world underneath the top layer of prosperous
plutocracy. One man is sufficiently moved by that contrast to pay his
own life as the price of one terrible blow at the responsible parties.
Unhappily his poverty leaves him also ignorant enough to be duped by
the pretence that the innocent young bride and bridegroom, put forth
and crowned by plutocracy as the heads of a State in which they have
less personal power than any policeman, and less influence than any
chairman of a trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches
his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the
bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying
twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all these,
the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging: had he blown
all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it, not one could have
escaped the charge of being an accessory, before, at, and after the
fact, to poverty and prostitution, to such wholesale massacre of
infants as Herod never dreamt of, to plague, pestilence and famine,
battle, murder and lingering death--perhaps not one who had not helped,
through example, precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the
dynamiter his well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving
every day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its
unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates
can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask
of justice and humanity from themselves also. Be it noted that at this
very moment there appears the biography of one of our dukes, who, being
Scotch, could argue about politics, and therefore stood out as a great
brain among our aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's
favorite historical episode, which he declared he never read without
intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding of the
Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our
respectable classes "the whiff of grapeshot," though Napoleon, to do
him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would fain have had it
forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of
like passions with ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go,
who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney
are now revelling in "the whiff of dynamite" (the flavor of the joke
seems to evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the
class they hate even as our argute duke hated what he called the mob.
In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid
explosion. All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood! Tear
"the Anarchist beast" to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold. Imprison him
for life. Let all civilized States band together to drive his like off
the face of the earth; and if any State refuses to join, make war on
it. This time the leading London newspaper, anti-Liberal and therefore
anti-Russian in politics, does not say "Serve you right" to the
victims, as it did, in effect, when Bobrikofl; and De Plehve, and Grand
Duke Sergius, were in the same manner unofficially fulminated into
fragments. No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye brave
Russian revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess-monstrous!
hideous! hound down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please, that
we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we may regret
it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were treated. And
meanwhile, since we have not yet caught him, let us soothe our
quivering nerves with the bullfight, and comment in a courtly way on
the unfailing tact and good taste of the ladies of our royal houses,
who, though presumably of full normal natural tenderness, have been so
effectually broken in to fashionable routine that they can be taken to
see the horses slaughtered as helplessly as they could no doubt be
taken to a gladiator show, if that happened to be the mode just now.
Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the one
man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of human
nature is the fulminator, now a hunted wretch, with nothing,
apparently, to secure his triumph over all the prisons and scaffolds of
infuriate Europe except the revolver in his pocket and his readiness to
discharge it at a moment's notice into his own or any other head. Think
of him setting out to find a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude
of human wolves howling for his blood. Think also of this: that at the
very first essay he finds what he seeks, a veritable grandee of Spain,
a noble, high-thinking, unterrified, malice-void soul, in the guise--of
all masquerades in the world!--of a modern editor. The Anarchist wolf,
flying from the wolves of plutocracy, throws himself on the honor of
the man. The man, not being a wolf (nor a London editor), and therefore
not having enough sympathy with his exploit to be made bloodthirsty by
it, does not throw him back to the pursuing wolves--gives him, instead,
what help he can to escape, and sends him off acquainted at last with a
force that goes deeper than dynamite, though you cannot make so much of
it for sixpence. That righteous and honorable high human deed is not
wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits the fugitive wolf
only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently smell him out. The
fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is nearest; shoots himself;
and then convinces the world, by his photograph, that he was no
monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good looking young man
with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling courage and
resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at him): one to
whom murdering a happy young couple on their wedding morning would have
been an unthinkably unnatural abomination under rational and kindly
human circumstances.
Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves, balked
of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed to torture
him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing to fasten his
teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him down until they came
to finish him.
Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he wishes
to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude in that
matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces. Popular
Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a
sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane
vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and
profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality,
and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely
called punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is
tolerated. The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well
aware of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces
punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his
paper The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for
blasphemy.