To any one convinced of what seems to be a supreme truth, that the
happiness of humanity can only be secured by the liberty of the
individual, the tendency of opinion in Europe in this present year must
be a matter of grave anxiety. The liberty of the public is everywhere
suffering from the return to reaction of their governments. The excesses
of a few are made the excuse for the annoyance and restriction of the
many. Legislation by fear is everywhere replacing legislation by
justice, and is likely to continue to do so. The only statesman who has
spoken of anarchy in any kind of philosophic spirit is Lord Rosebery,
who called it ‘that strange sect of which we know so little.’ All other
political speakers have treated of it only with blind abuse. In truth we
do know almost nothing of it; we do not know even who are its high
priests and guiding spirits. We know that it is a secret society, and we
know that secret societies have always had, in all climes and for all
races, the most singular and irresistible fascination. To meet it,
ordinary society has only its stupid and brutal police system; its
armies of spies, who, as the journey of Caserio from Cette to Lyons
proves, are hopelessly useless, even when they are truthful.
It is true that, in the long run, secret societies have always been
conquered and dispersed by ordinary society, but they are constantly
reappearing in new forms, and it is certain that they have an extreme
attraction for certain minds and classes of men, that they exact and
receive an universal obedience which is never given to ordinary laws.
They constitute a phase, a phenomenon, of human nature which is in
itself so strange that it ought to be examined with the most calm and
open-minded philosophy, instead of being judged by the screams of
frightened crowds and the coarse invective of such politicians as
Crispi. The curious power which can induce young men to risk their
lives, and give them willingly to the scaffold, cannot be worthily
examined and met by a rough classification of these men amongst monsters
and wretches. That they have been brought, in their youth, to entire
insensibility to personal danger and absolute indifference to death,
whether to suffer it or cause it, is an indisputable fact; but no one
seems to care to investigate the means by which they are brought to this
state of feeling, nor the social causes by which this doctrine of
destruction has been begotten. They are classed amongst criminals and
sent to the scaffold. But it is certain that they are different to
ordinary criminals; they may be much worse than they, but they are
certainly different, and are in a sense entirely free from egotism,
which is the usual motive of common crimes, except so far as they are
seduced by the egotism of vanity.
It is impossible not to recognise great qualities allied to great
cruelties in anarchists and nihilists, and, in the former, to great
follies. When we remember the ghastly punishment of even the slightest
political offences in Russia, yet see continually that some one is found
who dares place on the Tsar’s dressing-table or writing-table a skull, a
threatening letter, a dagger, or some other emblem and menace of death;
that to do this, access is obtained into the most private and
carefully-guarded apartments of imperial palaces; that who it is that
does this can never be ascertained (_i.e._, there is no traitor who
betrays the secret), and that the most elaborate and constant vigilance
which terror can devise and absolutism command is impotent to trace the
manner in which entrance is effected, we must admit that no common
organisation can be at work, and that no common qualities must exist in
those affiliated to it. There is no doubt that anarchism is a much more
vulgar and much more guilty creed than nihilism. The latter has the
reason of its being in the most brutal government that the world holds;
it lives in a hell and only strives to escape from that hell, and
liberate from it its fellows. Anarchy, with no such excuse, strikes
alike at the good and the bad; strikes indeed at the good by preference.
Yet there are qualities in it which we have been accustomed to consider
virtues; there are resolution, patience, _sang froid_ and absolute
indifference to peril; it is these which make it formidable. It also
cannot be doubted that behind its Caserios and its Vaillants there must
be some higher intelligence, some calm, trained, dominant minds. It has
grown up in the dark, and by stealth; unsuspected, unseen, until it is
strong enough to shake like an earthquake the existing institutions of
the world. We see the bomb, the pistol, the knife; but we do not see the
power which directs these, any more than we see that volcanic stratum
which makes the solid earth divide and crumble.
The existing clumsy machinery of tribunals and police offices will not
have more faculty to detect it than has the public in general. There are
no seismographic instruments in the political world. There are only a
scaffold and a house of detention. This age, which is squeamish about
execution, has invented the infernal torture of solitary confinement. It
need not surprise us if there be a return to rack and thumbscrew, these
primitive agencies being refined and intensified by the superior
resources of science. It is, I believe, proved that Stambuloff tortured
his political prisoners with the old-fashioned forms of torture. These
can scarcely be worse than the solitary confinement in humid underground
cells in which Francesco Crispi causes those who displease him to be
confined. Men in the freshness of youth, in the full promise of talent,
are shut up in these infernal holes in solitude for a score of years,
their health ruined and their minds distraught. Many of these men have
no fault whatever except that the authorities are afraid of their
political doctrines and of the sympathy the populace feel for them.
Where is the regard for ‘life’ in these fell sentences? Death would be a
thousand times more merciful.
A youth of twenty-one was in the second week of July condemned at
Florence to fifteen months’ imprisonment for having called the _pretore_
of a petty court and his subordinate _vigliacchi_ (scoundrels); an
expression so appropriate to the officials of these vicious and corrupt
little tribunals that it was unpardonable. If at the end of the fifteen
months this lad comes out of prison at war with society, a second
Caserio, a second Vaillant, whose will be the fault?
A young lady of good family saved a little dog from the guards in Paris,
and when she had seen it safely up its staircase turned in righteous
indignation on the men. ‘Are you not ashamed to persecute innocent
little animals?’ she said to them. ‘You would be better employed in
catching thieves.’ This just remark so infuriated them, as a similar
observation did the Florentine _pretore_, that they seized her, cuffed
her, dragged her along under repeated blows, tearing some of her clothes
off her back, and, reaching the police-station, locked her up with the
low riff-raff of the streets. This took place in a fashionable quarter
of Paris. If the male relatives of the young gentlewoman had lynched the
guards who thus outraged her they would only have done their duty; but
we know that the Parisian tribunals would have condemned them had they
done so, and absolved the rascally myrmidons of the law. There is no
justice anywhere if police are compromised by it.
At Mantua, in the month of August of this year, a poor woman, who has
five children to maintain by her daily labour, was arrested by a guard
for bathing in a piece of water outside the town (she ought to have been
rewarded for her unusual cleanliness); and being taken before the
tribunal she was sentenced to a fine. She exclaimed as she heard the
sentence, ‘And the brigadier who brought this misery on me has his
decoration!’ She was condemned to further punishment for the rebellious
utterance; her defender, a young lawyer, in vain protested, and, for
thus protesting, was himself arrested and charged with the misdemeanour
of endeavouring ‘to withdraw a prisoner from just authority’! Can
anything be more infamous?
In July at Ravenna eight young lads were flung into prison for singing
the Hymn of Labour.
Yet more absurd still. In Florence a band of young men were arrested for
singing the choruses from the _Prophète_, which sounded revolutionary to
the ears of the police. At the same time, the indulgence shown to the
crimes of the police is boundless.
A poor man named Pascia was, in the same city, last week condemned to
thirty-five days’ imprisonment for having said an impudent word to the
guards. On hearing the sentence his wife, a young woman with a baby in
her arms, expostulated, asking who would now earn her own and her
child’s bread. She was arrested, and locked up for the night on the
charge of ‘outraging authority.’
On the twenty-second of April of this year, Alfredo Ghazzi,
Customs-house guard on the Italian border of the Tresa, fired into a
fishing-boat on the Tresa, having received no provocation whatever, and
maimed two men, named Zennari and Zannori, of whom the former died; the
latter, after a long illness recovered. The military tribunal of Milan
_entirely_ absolved the guard Ghazzi.
For an offence of the kind (_reanto arbitrario in servizio_), even
though ending in its victim’s death, the legal maximum of punishment is
only two years’ imprisonment; but in this instance not even a fine was
levied.
In Prussia the murder of men, women and children is frequent by the
bayonets and the bullets of guards and sentinels. The other day a little
boy was on the grass of a square in Berlin; the guard tried to arrest
him; the child, frightened, ran away; the guard shot him dead. Such
occurrences are frequent. If a newspaper condemns them the editor is
imprisoned. It is wholly illogical to tell anarchists that human life is
sacred when its sanctity can be disregarded at will by any soldier or
police officer. The public was convulsed with horror before the
assassination of Carnot; quite rightly; but why is it wholly unmoved at
the assassination of the fishermen of Tresa, or of the child of Berlin?
The English nation has not perhaps been greatly interested in the fate
of the conscript Evangelisto; has perhaps never heard of him. Briefly,
he was, in the spring of this year, a young trooper, a peasant who had
recently joined at Padua, could not learn to ride and had weak health;
he was bullied to death by the officer immediately over him; he was made
to ride with his feet tied beneath his horse, when he fell he was pulled
up into the saddle and beaten, his hands being tied; once again he fell,
and then never rose again; they swore at him and flung water over him in
vain; he was dead. The officer who killed him is still at large and
retains his position in the cavalry; being young, rich, and of rank, he
drives four-in-hand about Udine, where he is now quartered, and when he
is hissed and hooted by the country people they are arrested. Now, if
the Italian press were to say what it has not said about this
disgraceful affair under the new law, such lawful and proper censure
would be called calumny of the army, and would be visited with fine and
imprisonment.
The soldier is to be inviolable and revered as a god, when his bayonet
or his sabre are the instruments of oppression of the government; but at
other times he is considered as carrion with which his superiors may do
whatever they choose.
It is constantly stated that the officer who tortured Evangelisto to
death will be brought to trial, but months have elapsed since the
tragedy and the young man is still enjoying himself[P] in full
possession of his military rank. How could any public writer, who does
his duty to the public, castigate too severely such atrocities as these?
-----
Footnote P:
Since this was written, the officer, Blanc-Tassinari, has been tried
by a _civil tribunal_, found guilty of ‘culpable homicide and abuse of
authority,’ and condemned to five months’ detention in a fortress, and
a fine of £20 (500 fr.). This punishment will entail no privation, as
he is rich, and will live as he pleases in the fortress, and when the
five months have expired, will rejoin his regiment as if nothing had
happened. De Felice, Molinari, Garibaldi-Bosco, Barbato, and hundreds
of intelligent and disinterested patriots are brought before military
courts, are sentenced to twenty, twenty-five, thirty years’
imprisonment, are condemned to prison diet, to shaved heads, to forced
labour, to solitary cells, whilst this young brute, who made the lives
of his soldiers a martyrdom, and is found guilty of culpable homicide,
receives practically no chastisement whatever. And the English Press
upholds and justifies the Government under which such enormities are
possible.
-----
Yet even to hint at the brutality which goes on in the barracks is
considered almost treason in Italy even as in Germany.
The legislation of fear goes hand in hand with a military despotism. The
one is the outcome of the other.
The commercial world, the financial world, and the world of pleasure are
beside themselves with terror. In Italy this passion of fear is being
used to secure the passing of laws which will completely paralyse the
press and enable the government on any pretext to carry away its foes
out of the Chambers, and to confine to _domicilio coatto_ any person,
male or female, in whom it may suspect any danger to itself, or who may
be merely personally disliked by the men in office.
There is no exact equivalent in English for _domicilio coatto_; it means
the right of Government to send anyone it pleases to reside in any
district it selects, for as long a period as it may choose to ordain. A
journalist was the other day arrested in Rome whilst talking with a
friend, his offence being the expression of republican opinions. He was
ordered to reside in an obscure village where he had been born, but
which he had left when in swaddling clothes; his house, family and means
of livelihood were all in Rome. He had been previously domiciled in
Bologna, whence he had been expelled for the same offence of opinion.
The confinement of a man of this profession to an obscure and remote
village is, of course, the deprivation of all his means of livelihood.
There is nothing he can do in such a place; meanwhile his family must
starve in Rome or wherever they go.
Another journalist, merely accused of _desiring another form of
government than the monarchial_, was put in the felon’s dock, loaded
with chains and surrounded by gendarmes, in the same place where Paolo
Lega had been sentenced an hour before. A seller of alabaster statuettes
and ornaments, though there was nothing against him except the suspicion
of the police, was so harrassed by the latter in Civita Vecchia that he
sold off all his stock at ruinous prices, and went towards Massa, his
native place, hoping to dwell there in peace; he was, however, arrested
at Corneto, on a vague charge of anarchism and flung into prison. These
are only a few examples out of thousands. Can any better plan be devised
for the conversion of industrious, harmless and prosperous persons into
paupers and criminals?
It apparently seems a little thing to the violent old man who throughout
1894 has been unfortunately paramount in Italy, to uproot men from their
homes and occupations and pitchfork them into some hamlet where they
were born, or some barren sea-shore or desolate isle. But to a man who
maintains himself by the work of either his hands or his brain, such
deportation from the place where all his interests lie, is a sentence of
ruin and starvation for him and his family; and if the Government gives
him a meagre pittance to keep life in him (which it does not do unless
he is actually a criminal or one condemned as such), all the women and
children belonging to him must fall into complete misery, being deprived
of his support. The English Press takes no notice of these seizures of
citizens, and their condemnation to _domicilio coatto_, perhaps it does
not comprehend what _domicilio coatto_ means; or perhaps it thinks that
it would not matter at all to a journalist, a solicitor, or a merchant,
living and working in York, in Exeter, or in London, to be suddenly
transported thence to some obscure hamlet in Hants, in Connaught, or in
Merionethshire, and ordered never to leave that place.
There is a project for deporting all those thus uprooted and condemned
in Italy to ‘_domicilio coatto_,’ to an island on the Red Sea, there to
rot out their wretched lives in fever and famine. On a barren shore,
where not a blade of grass will grow, in face of a sun-scorched sea
which no vessel ever visits save once a year, the skiffs of
pearl-fishers, many of the most intelligent, the most disinterested, and
the most patriotic men of Italy will be left to die by inches in the
festering heat, deriving what consolation they may from the reflection
that whilst honest men are thus dealt with for the sin of political
opinion, the men who forged, robbed and disgraced their nation, at the
Banca Romana, are set at liberty and caressed and acclaimed by the
populace.
‘I hope the country will draw a parallel between Tanlungo and
ourselves,’ said Dr Barbato, a man of high talent and character, who has
been condemned to the agonies of solitary confinement in the prisons of
Perugia for political offences; he is well known as a writer; and when
the famous Liberal deputy, Cavallotti, was allowed to see him the other
day, he merely said that he hoped he might be allowed more air, as the
confinement to his cell made him suffer from almost continual vertigo,
which prevented him from pursuing any intellectual thought.
The fortresses, prisons and penitentiaries are crowded all over Italy
with prisoners, many of them as worthy of respect as Dr Barbato, as
innocent as Molinari, as high-spirited and noble-hearted as De Felice.
Under the additions which have been made to the Code in the last
parliamentary sessions these captives will be increased by thousands.
Here is the text of some articles in the draft of the new laws recently
passed at Montecitorio:—
‘Whoso uses the press to excite to crime, does not merely commit an
offence of the press but commits a common felony, with the aggravation
of turning to a felonious purpose an instrument designed to uphold
education and instruction. Whereas the destructive aim of those who
would reduce existing society to the last gasp, is above all, to
inoculate the army with the passion of discord and insubordination,
the army which is our joy and pride by its example of patriotism, of
self-denial, and of self-sacrifice, we propose, with the second
article of this projected addition to the code, a punishment for this
especial offence which, as the code stands at present, escapes penal
chastisement. Thus we propose that any incitement to lawlessness, any
propaganda leading to insubordination and rebellion, do not cease to
be felonious offences because the offender employs the medium of the
press instead of that of speech, and ... this form of offence should
also be raised to the honour (_sic_) of a crime meet to be judged by
the assizes whenever the offender shall use for such purpose the
public press, and the greater gravity of the offence shall render it
more ignoble, and shall not any longer allow it to escape under an
aureole of political glory.’
It then proceeds to provide that such offence shall be punishable by a
term of not less than five and of not more than ten years; and it is
plain with what ease this clause may be stretched to comprehend and
condemn every phase of liberal opinion in any way obnoxious to the
Government in power.
Literature itself is threatened in the most perilous and insolent manner
by the following lines in Article 2 of this Crispian programme:—
‘Whosoever by means of the press, or in whatever other figurative
sense (_qualsiasi altro senso figurativo_) instigates the military to
disobey any law, or to be lacking in respect to their superiors, or to
violate in any manner the duties of discipline, or the decorum of the
army or of men under arms, or exposes it to the dislike or the
ridicule of civil persons, shall be punished by imprisonment of a term
varying from three to thirty months, and with the fine of from three
hundred to three thousand francs.’
With such a comprehensive decree as this the delightful _Abbozzi
Militare_ of De Amicis might be condemned as wanting in respect, whilst
Dante, were he living, would be sent much further than Ravenna.
Every one who attacks in print existing institutions is to be dragged
into a criminal court, and from thence to prison; the philosophic
republican, the meditative layman, who dares to bring his well-weighed
thoughts to bear against existing institutions, will be set in the same
dock with the thief, the forger, and the murderer, and from the dock
will pass to the _ergastolo_, to the diet, the clothes, and the
existence, of common felons.
This is a violation of intellectual and personal liberty which does not
concern Italian writers alone; it is one which should rouse the alarm,
the indignation and the sympathy of every thinker in every clime who
from his study endeavours to enlighten and liberate the world.
Stripped of its pompous verbiage this addition to the Code will enable
the government to silence and put away every public writer, orator,
pressman, or deputy, who is displeasing or annoying to them. Observe the
provision to treat as penal all judgments of the press passed on
verdicts of the tribunals. The tribunals are at present merely held in
some slight check by the expression of public opinion given in the daily
press. This check is to be removed and the most conscientious, the most
honourable of journalists, may be treated as a common malefactor and
deprived of trial by jury. To be judged by jury has hitherto been the
inalienable right of newspaper proprietors or of contributors to the
press. It is impossible to exaggerate this menace to the liberties of
the press. An insolent and unscrupulous minister, and a timid and
servile parliament, have reduced the Italian press to the level of the
Russian press.
There is scarcely any political article which the ingenuity of a public
prosecutor could not twist into a criminal offence, and this project of
law is so carefully worded that the meshes of its net are wide enough to
entrap all expressions of opinion. Anything by its various sections may
be construed into incitement to disorder or rebellion. John Bright and
Stuart Mill would be condemned with Krapotkine and Tolstoï. A writer
writing against conscription would be treated as equally guilty with one
writing in favour of regicide.
The assassination of opinion is a greater crime than the assassination
of a man. John Milton has said that, ‘It is to hit the image of God in
the eye.’
The whole provisions of these new laws are no less infamous; they will
legalise arbitrary and unexplained arrest, and will condemn to
‘_domicilio coatto_’ any deputy or citizen who may be suspected or
obnoxious, and the law can be stretched to include and smite the
simplest expression of individual views, the mere theory and deductions
of philosophic studies.
This paper could under it be easily attacked as an _apologia pro
anarchia_.
The printing press may not be an unmixed good, but it is certain that
the absolute freedom of its usage is its right and its necessity.
The purpose of anarchism in its outrages is no doubt to make all
government impossible through terror, but they will probably only
succeed in making through terror every government a tyranny. The extent
to which terror can carry already existing governments is nowhere seen
so conspicuously as in Italy, where reaction is violent and entirely
unscrupulous in its paroxysm of fear.
It is grotesque, it is impudent, of such governments as exist at the
close of this century to expect that any writer, gifted with any
originality of thought and having the courage of his opinions, should be
content with them or offer them any adulation. The governments of the
immediate moment are conspicuous for all the defects which must irritate
persons of any intelligence and independence. All have overwhelmed their
nations with fiscal burdens; all lay the weight of a constant
preparation for war on their people; all harass and torment the lives of
men by meddlesome dictation; all patronise and propagate the lowest
forms of art; all muddle away millions of the public treasure; all are
opportunists with neither consistency nor continuity. There is not a
single government which can command the respect of any independent
thinker. Yet we are told to revere government as a sacred custodian
throned upon the purity of spotless snows!
‘Two things are necessary to this country—liberty and government,’ said
Casimir-Perier in his opening address. He might have added that no one
has ever yet succeeded in making the two dwell in unison. Liberty and
government are dog and cat; there can be no amity or affinity between
them. Governments are sustained because men make a sacrifice, sometimes
compulsory, sometimes voluntary, of their liberties to sustain
government. What is the idea of liberty which Casimir-Perier has in his
mind? This kind of nobly sounding phrase is much beloved by politicans;
they usually mean nothing by them. He will certainly leave the
Prefectures and all their subordinates as he finds them; he will allow
the Department of Seine et Oise to be poisoned, despite its inhabitants’
piteous protests; he will sustain and probably give still more power to
the police and the detective system; he will not prevent arbitrary
arrests in the streets of innocent persons, nor domiciliary visits on
suspicion to private houses; he certainly will not touch conscription;
he in all likelihood will revive obsolete press laws, and he will
without doubt harass and muzzle the socialists on every occasion; he
will have his _Cabinet Noir_ and secret services like the ministers of
the Empire, and he will not alter by a hair’s breadth the spoliation of
the public for taxation, the worry of the citizen by bye-laws, the
corruption of municipal and political elections, and the impossibility
for any Royalist to obtain justice at any _mairie_, prefecture, or
tribunal.
As the Republican can obtain no justice in Germany, as the Jew can
obtain none in Russia, as the Ecclesiastic and the Socialist alike can
obtain none in Italy, so the Royalist and the Socialist alike can obtain
none in France. The same tendency to mete out justice by political
weights and measures is to be observed in England, although not to so
great an extent, because in England the character and position of judges
and magistrates are far higher and less accessible to corruption and
prejudice. Yet even there, since political bias is allowed to influence
the issue of cards for State balls, and admittance to the opening of
State Ceremonies, it will soon inevitably influence legal decisions in
the country. Interference with the freedom of the press would not yet in
a political sense be tolerated in England, but its tribunals have come
grievously near to it in some recent verdicts, and the mere existence of
Lord Campbell’s Vigilance Society is an invasion of the liberty of
literature; whilst the steps to be taken are not many which would carry
the _Times_ the _Post_ the _Standard_, and many other journals from
their servile adulation of the sham Sylla of Italy to the advocacy of a
similar tyranny to his over Great Britain. Neither Conservatism nor
Radicalism is any protection against tyranny, _i.e._, incessant
interference with the individual liberty of the citizen; and republics
are as opposed to individualism as monarchies and empires.
Carnot lies dead in the Pantheon, and liberty lies dying in the world.
His tender and unselfish heart would have ached with an impersonal
sorrow, greater even than his grief for those he loved, could he have
known that his death would have been made an excuse for intemperate
authority and pusillanimous power to gag the lips and chain the strength
of nations.