The problem then becomes, Is it possible to stir men from their

indifference? We have said that the spirit of liberty was nurtured by

colonial life; that the elements of colonial life were the desire for

sectarian independence, and the jealous watchfulness incident thereto;

the isolation of pioneer communities which threw each individual

strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all-around men, yet at

the same time made very strong such social bonds as did exist; and,

lastly, the comparative simplicity of small communities.

All this has mostly disappeared. As to sectarianism, it is only by dint

of an occasional idiotic persecution that a sect becomes interesting; in

the absence of this, outlandish sects play the fool's role, are anything

but heroic, and have little to do with either the name or the substance

of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have gradually become the

"pillars of society," their animosities have died out, their offensive

peculiarities have been effaced, they are as like one another as beans

in a pod, they build churches and--sleep in them.

As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly

interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously diminishing

proportion engaged in all around farming; and even these are slaves to

mortgages. For our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned

to last a week, and certainly there is none which would not be bankrupt

with despair at the proposition that it produce its own food. In

response to this condition and its correlative political tyranny,

Anarchism affirms the economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of

the great communities, the use of the earth.

I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this _will_ take place;

but I see clearly that this _must_ take place if ever again men are to

be free. I am so well satisfied that the mass of mankind prefer material

possessions to liberty, that I have no hope that they will ever, by

means of intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke of

oppression fastened on them by the present economic system, to institute

free societies. My only hope is in the blind development of the economic

system and political oppression itself. The great characteristic looming

factor in this gigantic power is Manufacture. The tendency of each

nation is to become more and more a manufacturing one, an exporter of

fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency follows its own logic, it

must eventually circle round to each community producing for itself.

What then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer shall

have no foreign market? Why, then mankind must face the dilemma of

sitting down and dying in the midst of it, or confiscating the goods.

Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now; and so far we are

sitting down and dying. I opine, however, that men will not do it

forever; and when once by an act of general expropriation they have

overcome the reverence and fear of property, and their awe of

government, they may waken to the consciousness that things are to be

used, and therefore men are greater than things. This may rouse the

spirit of liberty.

If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling

the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of

workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants

will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be

seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities

of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along

the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own

needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent.

For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals,--those

may be free who are able to make their own living.

In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of tyranny, the

standing army and navy, it is clear that so long as men desire to fight,

they will have armed force in one form or another. Our fathers thought

they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the voluntary

militia. In our day we have lived to see this militia declared part of

the regular military force of the United States, and subject to the same

demands as the regulars. Within another generation we shall probably see

its members in the regular pay of the general government. Since any

embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization, inevitably

follows the same line of centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that

the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up

voluntarily, like the minute-men of Massachusetts, and disbands as soon

as the occasion which called it into existence is past: that the really

desirable thing is that all men--not Americans only--should be at

peace; and that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw

their support from the army, and require that all who make war shall do

so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be

provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade.

As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be

carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of

isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible;

but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a

fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the

world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will

result.

And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the

whole world--if it ever shall be, as I hope it will,--then may we hope

to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the

simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that

to be an American was greater than to be a king.

In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans,--only Men; over

the whole earth, MEN.

Anarchism In Literature

In the long sweep of seventeen hundred years which witnessed the

engulfment of a moribund Roman civilization, together with its borrowed

Greek ideals, under the red tide of a passionate barbarism that leaped

to embrace the idea of Triumph over Death, and spat upon the Grecian

Joys of Life with the superb contempt of the Norse savage, there was,

for Europe and America, but one great animating Word in Art and

Literature--Christianity. It boots not here to inquire how close or how

remote the Christian ideal as it developed was in comparison with the

teachings of the Nazarene. Distorted, blackened, almost effaced, it was

yet some faint echo from the hillsides of Olivet, some indistinct vision

of the Cross, some dull perception of the white glory of renunciation,

that shaped the dreams of the evolving barbarian, and moulded all his

work, whether of stone or clay, upon canvas or parchment. Wherever we

turn we find a general fixup or caste, an immovable solidity of orders

built upon orders, an unquestioning subordination of the individual,

ruling every effort of genius. Ascetic shadow upon all; nowhere does a

sun-ray of self-expression creep, save as through water, thin and

perturbed. The theologic pessimism which appealed to the fighting man as

a proper extension of his own superstition--perhaps hardly that, for

Heaven was but a change of name for Valhalla,--fell heavily upon the

man of dreams, whose creations must come forth, lifeless, after the

uniform model, who must bless and ban not as he saw before his eyes but

as the one eternal purpose demanded.

At last the barbarian is civilized; he has accomplished his own

refinement--and his own rottenness. Still he preaches (and practices)

contempt of death--when others do the dying! Still he preaches

submission to the will of God--but that others may submit to him! Still

he proclaims the Cross--but that others may bear it. Where Rome was in

the glut of her vanity and her blood-drunkenness--limbs wound in cloth

of gold suppurating with crime, head boastfully nodding as Jove and feet

rocking upon slipping slime--there stand the Empires and Republics of

those whose forefathers slew Rome.

And now for these three hundred years the Men of Dreams have been

watching the Christian Ideal go bankrupt. One by one as they have dared,

and each according to his mood, they have spoken their minds; some have

reasoned, and some have laughed, and some have appealed, logician,

satirist, and exhorter all feeling in their several ways that humanity

stood in need of a new moral ideal. Consciously or unconsciously, within

the pale of the Church or without, this has been "the spirit moving upon

the face of the waters" within them, and at last the creation is come

forth, the dream that is to touch the heart-strings of the World anew,

and make it sing a stronger song than any it has sung of old. Mark you,

it must be stronger, wider, deeper, or it cannot be at all. It must sing

all that has been sung, and something more. Its mission is not to deny

the past but to reaffirm it and explain it, all of it; and to-day too,

and to-morrow too.

And this Ideal, the only one that has power to stir the moral pulses of

the world, the only Word that can quicken "Dead Souls" who wait this

moral resurrection, the only Word which can animate the dreamer, poet,

sculptor, painter, musician, artist of chisel or pen, with power to

fashion forth his dream, is =Anarchism=. For Anarchism means fulness of

being. It means the return of Greek radiance of life, Greek love of

beauty, without Greek indifference to the common man; it means Christian

earnestness and Christian Communism, without Christian fanaticism and

Christian gloom and tyranny. It means this because it means perfect

freedom, material and spiritual freedom.

The light of Greek idealism failed because with all its love of life and

the infinite diversity of beauty, and all the glory of its free

intellect, it never conceived of material freedom; to it the Helot was

as eternal as the Gods. Therefore the Gods passed away, and their

eternity was as a little wave of time.

The Christian ideal has failed because with all its sublime Communism,

its doctrine of universal equality, it was bound up with a spiritual

tyranny seeking to mould into one pattern the thoughts of all humanity,

stamping all men with the stamp of submission, throwing upon all the

dark umber of _life lived for the purpose of death_, and fruitful of all

other tyrannies.

Anarchism will succeed because its message of freedom comes down the

rising wind of social revolt first of all to the common man, the

material slave, and bids him know that he, too, should have an

independent will, and the free exercise thereof; that no philosophy, and

no achievement, and no civilization is worth considering or achieving,

if it does not mean that he shall be free to labor at what he likes and

when he likes, and freely share all that free men choose to produce;

that he, the drudge of all the ages, is the cornerstone of the building

without whose sure and safe position no structure can nor should

endure. And likewise it comes to him who sits in fear of himself, and

says: "Fear no more, neither what is without or within. Search fully and

freely your Self; hearken to all the voices that rise from that abyss

from which you have been commanded to shrink. Learn for yourself what

these things are. Belike what they have told you is good, is bad; and

this cast mould of goodness, a vile prison-house. Learn to decide your

own measure of restraint. Value for yourself the merits of selfishness

and unselfishness; and strike you the balance between these two: for if

the first be all accredited you make slaves of others, and if the

second, your own abasement raises tyrants over you; and none can decide

the matter for you so well as you for yourself; for even if you err you

learn by it, while if he errs the blame is his, and if he advises well

the credit is his, and you are nothing. _Be yourself_; and by

self-expression learn self-restraint. The wisdom of the ages lies in the

reassertion of all past positivisms, and the denial of all negations,

that is, all that has been claimed by the individual for himself is

good, but every denial of the freedom of another is bad; whereby it will

be seen that many things supposed to be claimed for oneself involve the

freedom of others and must be surrendered because they do not come

within the sovereign limit, while many things supposed to be evil, since

they in nowise infringe upon the liberty of others are wholly good,

bringing to dwarfed bodies and narrow souls the vigor and full growth of

healthy exercise, and giving a rich glow to life that had else paled out

like a lamp in a grave-vault."

To the sybarite it says, Learn to do your own share of hard work; you

will gain by it; to the "Man with the Hoe," Think for yourself and

boldly take your time for it. The division of labor which makes of one

man a Brain and of another a Hand is evil. Away with it.

This is the ethical gospel of Anarchism to which these three hundred

years of intellectual ferment have been leading. He who will trace the

course of literature for three hundred years will find innumerable bits

of drift here and there, indicative of the moral and intellectual

revolt. Protestantism itself, in asserting the supremacy of the

individual conscience, fired the long train of thought which inevitably

leads to the explosion of all forms of authority. The great political

writers of the eighteenth century, in asserting the right of

self-government, carried the line of advance one step further. America

had her Jefferson declaring:

"Societies exist under three forms: 1. Without government as among the

Indians. 2. Under governments wherein every one has a just influence. 3.

Under governments of force. It is a problem not clear in my mind that

the first condition is not the best."

She had, or she and England together had, her Paine, more mildly

asserting:

"Governments are, at best, a necessary evil."

And England had also Godwin, who, though still milder in manner and

consequently less effective during the troublous period in which he

lived, was nevertheless more deeply radical than either, presaging that

application of the political ideal to economic concerns so distinctive

of modern Anarchism.

"My neighbor," says he, "has just as much right to put an end to my

existence with dagger or poison as to deny me that pecuniary assistance

without which I must starve."

Nor did he stop here: he carried the logic of individual sovereignty

into the chiefest of social institutions, and declared that the sex

relation was a matter concerning the individuals sharing it only. Thus

he says:

"The institution of marriage is a system of fraud.... Marriage is law

and the worst of all laws.... Marriage is an affair of property and the

worst of all properties. So long as two human beings are forbidden by

positive institution to follow the dictates of their own mind prejudice

is alive and vigorous.... The abolition of marriage will be attended

with no evils. We are apt to consider it to ourselves as the harbinger

of brutal lust and depravity; but it really happens in this, as in other

cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices,

irritate and multiply them."

The grave and judicial style of "Political Justice" prevented its

attaining the great popularity of "The Rights of Man," but the indirect

influence of its author bloomed in the rich profusion of Shelleyan

fancy, and in all that coterie of young litterateurs who gathered about

Godwin as their revered teacher.

Nor was the principle of no-government without its vindication from one

who moved actively in official centers, and whose name has been

alternately quoted by conservatives and radicals, now with veneration,

now with execration. In his essay "On Government," Edmund Burke, the

great political weathercock, aligned himself with the germinating

movement towards Anarchism when he exclaimed: "They talk of the abuse of

government; the thing, the thing itself is the abuse!" This aphoristic

utterance will go down in history on its own merits, as the sayings of

great men often do, stripped of its accompanying explanations. Men have

already forgotten to inquire how and why he said it; the words stand,

and will continue a living message, long after the thousands of sheets

of rhetoric which won him the epithet of "the Dinner-bell of the House"

have been relegated to the dust of museums.

In later days an essayist whose brilliancy of style and capacity for

getting on all sides of a question connect him with Burke in some manner

as his spiritual offspring, has furnished the Anarchists with one of

their most frequent quotations. In his essay on "John Milton," Macaulay

declares, "The only cure for the evils of newly acquired liberty

is--more liberty." That he nevertheless possessed a strong vein of

conservatism, sat in parliament, and took part in legal measures, simply

proves that he had his tether and could not go the length of his own

logic; that is no reason others should not. The Anarchists accept this

fundamental declaration and proceed to its consequence.

But the world-thought was making way, not only in England, where,

indeed, constitutional phlegmatism, though stirred beyond its wont by

the events of the close of the last century, acted frigidly upon it, but

throughout Europe. In France, Rabelais drew the idyllic picture of the

Abbey of Thelemes, a community of persons agreeing to practise complete

individual freedom among themselves.

Rousseau, however erroneous his basis for the "Social Contract," moved

all he touched with his belief that humanity was innately good, and

capable of so manifesting itself in the absence of restrictions.

Furthermore, his "Confessions" appears the most famous fore-runner of

the tendency now shaping itself in Literature--that of the free

expression of a whole man--not in his stage-character only, but in his

dressing-room, not in his decent, scrubbed and polished moral clothes

alone, but in his vileness and his meanness and his folly, too, these

being indisputable factors in his moral life, and no solution but a

false one to be obtained by hiding them and playing they are not there.

This truth, acknowledged in America, in our own times, by two powerful

writers of very different cast, is being approached by all the manifold

paths of the soul's travel. "I have in me the capacity for every crime,"

says Emerson the transcendentalist. And Whitman, the stanch proclaimer

of blood and sinew, and the gospel of the holiness of the body, makes

himself one with drunken revelers and the creatures of debauchery as

well as with the anchorite and the Christ-soul, that fulness of being

may be declared. In the genesis of these declarations we shall find the

"Confessions."

It is not the "Social Contract" alone that is open to the criticism of

having reasoned from false premises; all the early political writers we

have named were equally mistaken, all suffering from a like

insufficiency of facts. Partly this was the result of the habit of

thought fostered by the Church for seventeen hundred years,--which habit

was to accept by faith a sweeping generalization and fit all future

discoveries of fact into it; but partly also it is in the nature of all

idealism to offer itself, however vaguely in the mist of mind-struggle,

and allow time to correct and sharpen the detail. Probably initial steps

will always be taken with blunders, while those who are not imaginative

enough to perceive the half-shapen figure will nevertheless accept it

later and set it upon a firm foundation.

This has been the task of the modern historian, who, no less than the

political writer, consciously or unconsciously, is swayed by the

Anarchistic ideal and bends his services towards it. It is understood

that when we speak of history we do not allude to the unspeakable trash

contained in public school text-books (which in general resemble a

cellar junk-shop of chronologies, epaulettes, bad drawings, and silly

tales, and are a striking instance of the corrupting influence of State

management of education, by which the mediocre, nay the absolutely

empty, is made to survive), history which is undertaken with the purpose

of discovering the real course of the development of human society.

Among such efforts, the broken but splendid fragment of his stupendous

project, is Buckle's "History of Civilization,"--a work in which the

author breaks away utterly from the old method of history writing, viz.

that of recording court intrigues, the doings of individuals in power as

a matter of personal interest, the processions of military pageant, to

inquire into the real lives and conditions of the people, to trace their

great upheavals, and in what consisted their progress. Gervinus in

Germany, who, within only recent years, drew upon himself a prosecution

for treason, took a like method, and declared that progress consists in

a steady decline of centralized power and the development of local

autonomy and the free federation.

Supplementing the work of the historian proper, there has arisen a new

class of literature, itself the creation of the spirit of free inquiry,

since, up till that had asserted itself, such writings were impossible;

it embraces a wide range of studies into the conditions and psychology

of prehistoric Man, of which Sir John Lubbock's works will serve as the

type. From these, dark as the subject yet is, we are learning the true

sources of all authority, and the agencies which are rendering it

obsolete; moreover, a curious cycle of development reveals itself;

namely, that starting from the point of no authority unconsciously

accepted, Man, in the several manifestations of his activity, evolves

through stages of belief in many authorities to one authority, and

finally to _no authority_ again, but this time conscious and reasoned.

Crowning the work of historian and prehistorian, comes the labor of the

sociologist. Herbert Spencer, with infinite patience for detail and

marvelous power of classification and generalization, takes up the facts

of the others, and deduces from them the great Law of Equal Freedom: "A

man should have the freedom to do whatsoever he wills, provided that in

the doing thereof he infringes not the equal freedom of every other

man." The early edition of "Social Statics" is a logical, scientific,

and bold statement of the great fundamental freedoms which Anarchists

demand.

From the rather taxing study of authors like these, it is a relief to

turn to those intermediate writers who dwell between them and the pure

fictionists, whose writings are occupied with the facts of life as

related to the affections and aspirations of humanity, among whom,

"representative men," we immediately select Emerson, Thoreau, Edward

Carpenter. Now, indeed, we cease to reason upon the past evolution of

liberty, and begin to feel it; begin to reach out after what it _shall_

mean. None who are familiar with the thought of Emerson can fail to

recognize that it is spiritual Anarchism; from the serene heights of

self-possession, the Ego looks out upon its possibilities, unawed by

aught without. And he who has dwelt in dream by Walden, charmed by that

pure life he has not himself led but wished that, like Thoreau, he might

lead, has felt that call of the Anarchistic Ideal which pleads with men

to renounce the worthless luxuries which enslave them and those who work

for them, that the buried soul which is doomed to mummy cloths by the

rush and jangle of the chase for wealth, may answer the still small

voice of the Resurrection, there, in the silence, the solitude, the

simplicity of the free life.

A similar note is sounded in Carpenter's "Civilization: Its Cause and

Cure," a work which is likely to make the "Civilizer" see himself in a

very different light than that in which he usually beholds himself. And

again the same vibration shudders through "The City of Dreadful Night,"

the masterpiece of an obscure genius who was at once essayist and poet

of too high and rare a quality to catch the ear stunned by strident

commonplaces, but loved by all who seek the violets of the soul, one

Thomson, known to literature as "B. V." Similarly obscure, and similarly

sympathetic is the "English Peasant," by Richard Heath, a collection of

essays so redolent of abounding love, so overflowing with understanding

for characters utterly contradictory, painted so tenderly and yet so

strongly, that none can read them without realizing that here is a man,

who, whatever he _believes_ he believes, in reality desires freedom of

expression for the whole human spirit, which implies for every separate

unit of it.

Something of the Emersonian striving after individual attainment plus

the passionate sympathy of Heath is found in a remarkable book, which is

too good to have obtained a popular hearing, entitled "The Story of My

Heart." No more daring utterance was ever given voice than this: "I pray

to find the Highest Soul,--greater than deity, better than God." In the

concluding pages of the tenth chapter of this wonderful little book

occur the following lines:

"That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet of

'pauper' is to me the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime

that could be committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a

birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not

receive it, then it is they who are injured; and it is not the

'pauper'--oh! inexpressibly wicked world!--it is the well-to-do who are

the criminals. It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident,

drunken, or evil in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the

inalienable right of every child born into the light. If the world does

not provide it freely--not as a grudging gift, but as a right, as the

son of the house sits down to breakfast,--then is the world mad. But the

world is not mad, only in ignorance."

In catholic sympathy like this, in heart-hunger after a wider

righteousness, a higher idea than God, does the Anarchistic ideal come

to those who have lived through old phases of religious and social

beliefs and "found them wanting." It is the Shelleyan outburst:

"More life and fuller life we want."

_He_ was the Prometheus of the movement, he, the wild bird of song, who

flew down into the heart of storm and night, singing unutterably sweet

the song of the free man and woman as he passed. Poor Shelley! Happy

Shelley! He died not knowing the triumph of his genius; but also he died

while the white glow within was yet shining higher, higher! In the light

of it, he smiled above the world; had he lived, he might have died

alive, as Swinburne and as Tennyson whose old days belie their early

strength. Yet men will remember

"Slowly comes a hungry people as a lion drawing nigher.

Glares at one who nods and winks beside a slowly dying fire."

and

"Let the great World swing forever down the ringing grooves

of Change."

and

"Glory to Man in the highest for Man is the Master of Things"

and

"While three men hold together,

The kingdoms are less by three"

until the end "of kingdoms and of kings," though their authors "take

refuge in the kingdom" and quaver palsied hymns to royalty with their

cracked voices and broken lutes. For this is the glory of the living

ideal, that all that is in accord with it lives, whether the mouthpiece

through which it spoke would recall it or not. The manifold voice which

is one speaks out through all the tongues of genius in its greatest

moments, whether it be a Heine writing, in supreme contempt,

"For the Law has got long arms,

Priests and Parsons have long tongues

And the People have long ears,"

a Nekrassoff cursing the railroad built of men, a Hugo painting the

battle of the individual man "with Nature, with the Law, with Society,"

a Lowell crying:

"Law is holy ay, but what law? Is there nothing more divine

Than the patched up broils of Congress,--venal, full of meat

and wine?

Is there, say you, nothing higher--naught, God save us, that

transcends

Laws of cotton texture wove by vulgar men for vulgar ends?

Law is holy: but not your law, ye who keep the tablets whole

While ye dash the Law in pieces, shatter it in life and soul."

and again,

"One faith against a whole world's unbelief,

One soul against the flesh of all mankind."

Nor do the master dramatists lag behind the lyric writers; they, too,

feel the intense pressure within, which is, quoting the deathword of

a man of far other stamp, "germinal." Ibsen's drama, intensely real,

common, accepting none of the received rules as to the conventional

plot, but having to do with serious questions of the lives of the

plain people, holds ever before us the supreme duty of truth to one's

inner being in defiance of Custom and Law; it is so in Nora, who

renounces all notions of family duty to "find herself"; it is so in

Dr. Stockman, who maintains the rectitude of his own soul against

the authorities and against the mob; it should have been so in Mrs.

Alving, who learns too late that her yielding to social custom has

brought a fore-ruined life into the world besides wrecking her own; the

Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman, all his characters are created

to vindicate the separate soul supreme within its sphere; those that

are miserable and in evil condition are so because they have not

lived true to themselves but in obedience to some social hypocrisy.

Gerhart Hauptmann likewise feels the new pulsation: he has no hero,

no heroine, no intrigue; his picture is the image of the headless and

tailless body of struggle,--the struggle of the common man. It begins

in the middle, it ends in nothing--as yet. To end in defeat would be

to premise surrender--a surrender humanity does not intend; to triumph

would be to anticipate the future, and paint life other than it is.

Hence it ends where it began, in murmurs. Thus his "Weavers." Octave

Mirbeau, likewise, offers his criticism on a world of sheep in "The

Bad Shepherds," and Sara Bernhardt plays it. In England and America we

have another phase of the rebel drama--the drama of the bad woman, as a

distinct figure in social creation with a right to be herself. Have we

not the "Second Mrs. Tanqueray" who comes to grief through an endeavor

to conform to a moral standard that does not fit? And have we not Zaza,

who is worth a thousand of her respectable lover and his respectable

wife? And does not all the audience go home in love with her? And begin

to quest the libraries for literary justifications of their preference?

And these are not hard to find, for it is in the novel particularly, the

novel which is the special creation of the last century, that the new

ideal is freest. In a recent essay in reply to Walter Besant, Henry

James pleads most Anarchistically for his freedom in the novel. All such

pleas will always come as justifications, for as to the freedom it is

already won, and all the formalists from Besant to the end of days will

never tempt the litterateurs into chains again. But the essay is well

worth reading as a specimen of right reasoning on art. As in other modes

of literary expression this tendency in the novel dates back; and it is

strange enough that out of the mouth of a toady like Walter Scott should

have spoken the free, devil-may-care, outlaw spirit (read notably

"Quentin Durward"), which is, perhaps, the first phase of self-assertion

that has the initial strength to declare itself against the tyranny of

Custom; this is why it happens that the fore-runners of social change

are often shocking in their rudeness and contempt of manners, and, in

fact, more or less uncomfortable persons to have to do with. But they

have their irresistible charm all the same, and Scott, who was a true

genius despite his toadyism, felt it and responded to it, by always

making us love his outlaws best no matter how gently he dealt with

kings. Another phase of the free man appears in George Borrow's

rollicking, full-blooded, out-of-door gypsies who do not take the

trouble to despise law, but simply ignore it, live unconscious of it

altogether. George Meredith, in another vein, develops the strong soul

over-riding social barriers. Our own Hawthorne in his preface to the

"Scarlet Letter," and still more in the "Marble Faun," depicts the

vacuity of a life sucking a parasitic existence through government

organization, and asserts over and over that the only strength is in him

or her--and it is noteworthy that the strongest is in "her"--who

resolutely chooses and treads an unbeaten path.

From far away Africa, there speaks again the note of soul rebellion in

the exquisite "Dreams" of Olive Schreiner, wherethrough "_The Hunter

walks alone_." Grant Allen, too, in numerous works, especially "The

Woman Who Did," voices the demand for self-hood. Morris gives us his

idyllic "News from Nowhere." Zola, the fertile creator of dungheaps

crowned with lilies, whose pages reek with the stench of bodies,

laboring, debauching, rotting, until the words of Christ cry loud in the

ears of him who would put the vision away, "Whited sepulchres, full of

dead men's bones and all uncleanliness"--Zola was more than an

unconscious Anarchist, he is a conscious one, did so proclaim himself.

And close beside him, Maxim Gorki, Spokesman of the Tramp, Visionary of

the Despised, who whatever his personal political views may be, and

notwithstanding the condemnations he has visited upon the Anarchist, is

still an Anarchistic voice in literature. And over against these,

austere, simple, but oh! so loving, the critic who shows the world its

faults but does not condemn, the man who first took the way of

renunciation and then _preached_ it, the Christian whom the Church casts

out, the Anarchist whom the worst government in the world dares not

slay, the author of "Resurrection" and "The Slavery of Our Times."

They come together, from the side of passionate hate and limitless

love--the volcano and the sea--they come together in one demand, freedom

from this wicked and debasing tyranny called Government, which makes

indescribable brutes of all who feel its touch, but worse still of all

who touch it.

As for contemporaneous light literature, there are magazine articles and

papers innumerable displaying here and there the grasp of the idea. Have

we not the _Philistine_ and its witty editor, boldly proclaiming in

Anarchistic spelling, "I am an Anarkist?" By the way, he may now expect

a visitation of the Criminal Anarchy law. And a few years since, Julian

Hawthorne, writing in the Denver _Post_, inquired, "Did you ever notice

that all the interesting people you meet are Anarchists?" Reason why:

there is no other living dream to him who has character enough to be

interesting. It is the uninteresting, the dull, the ready-made minds who

go on accepting "Dead limbs of gibbeted gods," as they accept their

dinner and their bed, which someone else prepares. Let two names,

standing for strangely opposing appeals yet standing upon common ground,

close this sketch--two strong flashes of the prismatic fires which blent

together in the white ray of our Ideal. The first, Nietzsche, he who

proclaims "the Overman," the receiver of the mantle of Max Stirner, the

scintillant rhetorician, the pride of Young Germany, who would have the

individual acknowledge nothing, neither science, nor logic, nor any

other creation of his thought, as having authority over him, its

creator. The last, Whitman, the great sympathetic, all-inclusive Quaker,

whose love knew no limits, who said to Society's most utterly despised

outcast,

"Not until the sun excludes you, will I exclude you,"

and who, whether he be called poet, philosopher, or peasant was

supremely Anarchist, and in a moment of weariness with human slavery,

cried:

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they seem so placid

and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their conditions,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania

of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands

of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."

The Making of an Anarchist

"Here was one guard, and here was the other at this end; I was here

opposite the gate. You know those problems in geometry of the hare and

the hounds--they never run straight, but always in a curve, so, see? And

the guard was no smarter than the dogs; if he had run straight to the

gate he would have caught me."

It was Peter Kropotkin telling of his escape from the Petro-Paulovsky

fortress. Three crumbs on the table marked the relative position of the

outwitted guards and the fugitive prisoner; the speaker had broken them

from the bread on which he was lunching and dropped them on the table

with an amused smile. The suggested triangle had been the starting-point

of the life-long exile of the greatest man, save Tolstoy alone, that

Russia has produced; from that moment began the many foreign wanderings

and the taking of the simple, love-given title "Comrade," for which he

had abandoned the "Prince," which he despises.

We were three together in the plain little home of a London

workingman--Will Wess, a one-time shoemaker--Kropotkin, and I. We had

our "tea" in homely English fashion, with thin slices of buttered bread;

and we talked of things nearest our hearts, which, whenever two or three

Anarchists are gathered together, means present evidences of the growth

of liberty and what our comrades are doing in all lands. And as what

they do and say often leads them into prisons, the talk had naturally

fallen upon Kropotkin's experience and his daring escape, for which the

Russian government is chagrined unto this day.

Presently the old man glanced at the time, and jumped briskly to his

feet: "I am late. Good-by, Voltairine; good-by, Will. Is this the way to

the kitchen? I must say good-by to Mrs. Turner and Lizzie." And out to

the kitchen he went, unwilling, late though he was, to leave without a

hand-clasp to those who had so much as washed a dish for him. Such is

Kropotkin, a man whose personality is felt more than any other in the

Anarchist movement--at once the gentlest, the most kindly, and the most

invincible of men. Communist as well as Anarchist, his very heart-beats

are rhythmic with the great common pulse of work and life.

Communist am not I, though my father was, and his father before him

during the stirring times of '48, which is probably the remote reason

for my opposition to things as they are: at bottom convictions are

mostly temperamental. And if I sought to explain myself on other

grounds, I should be a bewildering error in logic; for by early

influences and education I should have been a nun, and spent my life

glorifying Authority in its most concentrated form, as some of my

schoolmates are doing at this hour within the mission houses of the

Order of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. But the old ancestral spirit

of rebellion asserted itself while I was yet fourteen, a schoolgirl at

the Convent of Our Lady of Lake Huron, at Sarnia, Ontario. How I pity

myself now, when I remember it, poor lonesome little soul, battling

solitary in the murk of religious superstition, unable to believe and

yet in hourly fear of damnation, hot, savage, and eternal, if I do not

instantly confess and profess! How well I recall the bitter energy with

which I repelled my teacher's enjoinder, when I told her that I did not

wish to apologize for an adjudged fault, as I could not see that I had

been wrong, and would not _feel_ my words. "It is not necessary," said

she, "that we should feel what we say, but it is always necessary that

we obey our superiors." "I will not lie," I answered hotly, and at the

same time trembled lest my disobedience had finally consigned me to

torment!

I struggled my way out at last, and was a freethinker when I left the

institution, three years later, though I had never seen a book or heard

a word to help me in my loneliness. It had been like the Valley of the

Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul yet, where

Ignorance and Superstition burnt me with their hell-fire in those

stifling days. Am I blasphemous? It is their word, not mine. Beside that

battle of my young days all others have been easy, for whatever was

without, within my own Will was supreme. It has owed no allegiance, and

never shall; it has moved steadily in one direction, the knowledge and

the assertion of its own liberty, with all the responsibility falling

thereon.

This, I am sure, is the ultimate reason for my acceptance of Anarchism,

though the specific occasion which ripened tendencies to definition was

the affair of 1886-7, when five innocent men were hanged in Chicago for

the act of one guilty who still remains unknown. Till then I believed

in the essential justice of the American law and trial by jury. After

that I never could. The infamy of that trial has passed into history,

and the question it awakened as to the possibility of justice under law

has passed into clamorous crying across the world. With this question

fighting for a hearing at a time when, young and ardent, all questions

were pressing with a force which later life would in vain hear again,

I chanced to attend a Paine Memorial Convention in an out-of-the-way

corner of the earth among the mountains and the snow-drifts of

Pennsylvania. I was a freethought lecturer at this time, and had spoken

in the afternoon on the lifework of Paine; in the evening I sat in the

audience to hear Clarence Darrow deliver an address on Socialism. It

was my first introduction to any plan for bettering the condition of

the working-classes which furnished some explanation of the course of

economic development, and I ran to it as one who has been turning about

in darkness runs to the light. I smile now at how quickly I adopted the

label "Socialist" and how quickly I cast it aside. Let no one follow

my example; but I was young. Six weeks later I was punished for my

rashness, when I attempted to argue for my faith with a little Russian

Jew, named Mozersky, at a debating club in Pittsburgh. He was an

Anarchist, and a bit of a Socrates. He questioned me into all kinds of

holes, from which I extricated myself most awkwardly, only to flounder

into others he had smilingly dug while I was getting out of the first

ones. The necessity of a better foundation became apparent: hence

began a course of study in the principles of sociology and of modern

Socialism and Anarchism as presented in their regular journals. It was

Benjamin Tucker's _Liberty_, the exponent of Individualist Anarchism,

which finally convinced me that "Liberty is not the Daughter but the

Mother of Order." And though I no longer hold the particular economic

gospel advocated by Tucker, the doctrine of Anarchism itself, as then

conceived, has but broadened, deepened, and intensified itself with

years.

To those unfamiliar with the movement, the various terms are confusing.

Anarchism is, in truth, a sort of Protestantism, whose adherents are a

unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority

must disappear to be replaced by self-control only, but variously

divided in our conception of the form of future society. Individualism

supposes private property to be the cornerstone of personal freedom;

asserts that such property should consist in the absolute possession of

one's own product and of such share of the natural heritage of all as

one may actually use. Communist-Anarchism, on the other hand, declares

that such property is both unrealizable and undesirable; that the common

possession and use of all the natural sources and means of social

production can alone guarantee the individual against a recurrence of

inequality, and its attendants, government and slavery. My personal

conviction is that both forms of society, as well as many

intermediations, would, in the absence of government, be tried in

various localities, according to the instincts and material condition of

the people, but that well founded objections may be offered to both.

Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society.

Therefore I no longer label myself otherwise than as "Anarchist" simply.

I would not, however, have the world think that I am an "Anarchist by

trade." Outsiders have some very curious notions about us, one of them

being that Anarchists never work. On the contrary, Anarchists are nearly

always poor, and it is only the rich who live without work. Not only

this, but it is our belief that every healthy human being will, by the

laws of his own activity, choose to work, though certainly not as now,

for at present there is little opportunity for one to find his true

vocation. Thus I, who in freedom would have selected otherwise, am a

teacher of language. Some twelve years since, being in Philadelphia and

without employment, I accepted the proposition of a small group of

Russian Jewish factory workers to form an evening class in the common

English branches. I know well enough that behind the desire to help me

to make a living lay the wish that I might thus take part in the

propaganda of our common cause. But the incidental became once more the

principal, and a teacher of working men and women I have remained from

that day. In those twelve years that I have lived and loved and worked

with foreign Jews I have taught over a thousand, and found them, as a

rule, the brightest, the most persistent and sacrificing students, and

in youth dreamers of social ideals. While the "intelligent American" has

been cursing him as the "ignorant foreigner," while the short-sighted

workingman has been making life for the "sheeny" as intolerable as

possible, silent and patient the despised man has worked his way against

it all. I have myself seen such genuine heroism in the cause of

education practiced by girls and boys, and even by men and women with

families, as would pass the limits of belief to the ordinary mind. Cold,

starvation, self-isolation, all endured for years in order to obtain the

means for study; and, worse than all, exhaustion of body even to

emaciation--this is common. Yet in the midst of all this, so fervent is

the social imagination of the young that most of them find time besides

to visit the various clubs and societies where radical thought is

discussed, and sooner or later ally themselves either with the Socialist

Sections, the Liberal Leagues, the Single Tax Clubs, or the Anarchist

Groups. The greatest Socialist daily in America is the Jewish

_Vorwaerts_, and the most active and competent practical workers are

Jews. So they are among the Anarchists.

I am no propagandist at all costs, or I would leave the story here; but

the truth compels me to add that as the years pass and the gradual

filtration and absorption of American commercial life goes on, my

students become successful professionals, the golden mist of enthusiasm

vanishes, and the old teacher must turn for comradeship to the new

youth, who still press forward with burning eyes, seeing what is lost

forever to those whom common success has satisfied and stupified. It

brings tears sometimes, but as Kropotkin says, "Let them go; we have had

the best of them." After all, who are the really old? Those who wear out

in faith and energy, and take to easy chairs and soft living; not

Kropotkin, with his sixty years upon him, who has bright eyes and the

eager interest of a little child; not fiery John Most, "the old

war-horse of the revolution," unbroken after his ten years of

imprisonment in Europe and America; not grey-haired Louise Michel, with

the aurora of the morning still shining in her keen look which peers

from behind the barred memories of New Caledonia; not Dyer D. Lum, who

still smiles in his grave, I think; nor Tucker, nor Turner, nor Theresa

Clairmunt, nor Jean Grave--not these. I have met them all, and felt the

springing life pulsating through heart and hand, joyous, ardent, leaping

into action. Not such are the old, but your young heart that goes

bankrupt in social hope, dry-rotting in this stale and purposeless

society. Would you be always young? Then be an Anarchist, and live with

the faith of hope, though you be old.

I doubt if any other hope has the power to keep the fire alight as I saw

it in 1897, when we met the Spanish exiles released from the fortress of

Montjuich. Comparatively few persons in America ever knew the story of

that torture, though we distributed fifty thousand copies of the letters

smuggled from the prison, and some few newspapers did reprint them. They

were the letters of men incarcerated on mere suspicion for the crime of

an unknown person, and subjected to tortures the bare mention of which

makes one shudder. Their nails were torn out, their heads compressed in

metal caps, the most sensitive portions of the body twisted between

guitar strings, their flesh burned with red hot irons; they had been fed

on salt codfish after days of starvation, and refused water; Juan

Ollé, a boy nineteen years old, had gone mad; another had confessed

to something he had never done and knew nothing of. This is no

horrible imagination. I who write have myself shaken some of those

scarred hands. Indiscriminately, four hundred people of all sorts of

beliefs--Republicans, trade unionists, Socialists, Free Masons, as well

as Anarchists--had been cast into dungeons and tortured in the infamous

"zero." Is it a wonder that most of them came out Anarchists? There were

twenty-eight in the first lot that we met at Euston Station that August

afternoon,--homeless wanderers in the whirlpool of London, released

without trial after months of imprisonment, and ordered to leave Spain

in forty-eight hours! They had left it, singing their prison songs; and

still across their dark and sorrowful eyes one could see the eternal

Maytime bloom. They drifted away to South America chiefly, where four or

five new Anarchist papers have since arisen, and several colonizing

experiments along Anarchist lines are being tried. So tyranny defeats

itself, and the exile becomes the seed-sower of the revolution.

And not only to the heretofore unaroused does he bring awakening, but

the entire character of the world movement is modified by this

circulation of the comrades of all nations among themselves. Originally

the American movement, the native creation which arose with Josiah

Warren in 1829, was purely individualistic; the student of economy will

easily understand the material and historical causes for such

development. But within the last twenty years the communist idea has

made great progress, owing primarily to that concentration in capitalist

production which has driven the American workingman to grasp at the

idea of solidarity, and, secondly, to the expulsion of active communist

propagandists from Europe. Again, another change has come within the

last ten years. Till then the application of the idea was chiefly

narrowed to industrial matters, and the economic schools mutually

denounced each other; to-day a large and genial tolerance is growing.

The young generation recognizes the immense sweep of the idea through

all the realms of art, science, literature, education, sex relations and

personal morality, as well as social economy, and welcomes the accession

to the ranks of those who struggle to realize the free life, no matter

in what field. For this is what Anarchism finally means, the whole

unchaining of life after two thousand years of Christian asceticism and

hypocrisy.

Apart from the question of ideals, there is the question of method.

"How do you propose to get all this?" is the question most frequently

asked us. The same modification has taken place here. Formerly there

were "Quakers" and "Revolutionists"; so there are still. But while they

neither thought well of the other, now both have learned that each has

his own use in the great play of world forces. No man is in himself a

unit, and in every soul Jove still makes war on Christ. Nevertheless,

the spirit of peace grows; and while it would be idle to say that

Anarchists in general believe that any of the great industrial problems

will be solved without the use of force, it would be equally idle to

suppose that they consider force itself a desirable thing, or that it

furnishes a final solution to any problem. From peaceful experiment

alone can come final solution, and that the advocates of force know and

believe as well as the Tolstoyans. Only they think that the present

tyrannies provoke resistance. The spread of Tolstoy's "War and Peace"

and "The Slavery of Our Times," and the growth of numerous Tolstoy

clubs having for their purpose the dissemination of the literature of

non-resistance, is an evidence that many receive the idea that it is

easier to conquer war with peace. I am one of these. I can see no end

of retaliations unless someone ceases to retaliate. But let no one

mistake this for servile submission or meek abnegation; my right shall

be asserted no matter at what cost to me, and none shall trench upon it

without my protest.

Good-natured satirists often remark that "the best way to cure an

Anarchist is to give him a fortune." Substituting "corrupt" for "cure,"

I would subscribe to this; and believing myself to be no better than the

rest of mortals, I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my lot to

work, and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue to the end;

for let me keep the integrity of my soul, with all the limitations of my

material conditions, rather than become the spineless and ideal-less

creation of material needs. My reward is that I live with the young; I

keep step with my comrades; I shall die in the harness with my face to

the east--the East and the Light.

The Eleventh of November, 1887

Memorial Oration[A]

Let me begin my address with a confession. I make it sorrowfully and

with self-disgust; but in the presence of great sacrifice we learn

humility, and if my comrades could give their lives for their belief,

why, let me give my pride. Yet I would not give it, for personal

utterance is of trifling importance, were it not that I think at this

particular season it will encourage those of our sympathizers whom the

recent outburst of savagery may have disheartened, and perhaps lead some

who are standing where I once stood to do as I did later.

This is my confession: Fifteen years ago last May when the echoes of the

Haymarket bomb rolled through the little Michigan village where I then

lived, I, like the rest of the credulous and brutal, read one lying

newspaper headline, "Anarchists throw a bomb in a crowd in the Haymarket

in Chicago," and immediately cried out, "They ought to be hung."--This,

though I had never believed in capital punishment for ordinary

criminals. For that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence I shall

never forgive myself, though I know the dead men would have forgiven

me, though I know those who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as

it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die,--a bitter

reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited the first wild rumor of an

event of which I knew nothing, and, in my mind, sent men to the gallows

without asking one word of defense! In one wild, unbalanced moment threw

away the sympathies of a lifetime, and became an executioner at heart.

And what I did that night millions did, and what I said millions said. I

have only one word of extenuation for myself and all those

people--ignorance. I did not know what Anarchism was. I had never seen

it used save in histories, and there it was always synonymous with

social confusion and murder. I believed the newspapers. I thought these

men had thrown that bomb, unprovoked, into a mass of men and women, from

a wicked delight in killing. And so thought all those millions of

others. But out of those millions there were some few thousand--I am

glad I was one of them--who did not let the matter rest there.

I know not what resurrection of human decency first stirred within me

after that,--whether it was an intellectual suspicion that may be I did

not know all the truth of the case and could not believe the newspapers,

or whether it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy which often

prompts the heart to go out to the accused, without a reason; but this I

do know that though I was no Anarchist at the time of the execution, it

was long and long before that, that I came to the conclusion that the

accusation was false, the trial a farce, that there was no warrant

either in justice or in law for their conviction; and that the hanging,

if hanging there should be, would be the act of a society composed of

people who had said what I said on the first night, and who had kept

their eyes and ears fast shut ever since, determined to see nothing and

to know nothing but rage and vengeance. Till the very end I hoped that

mercy might intervene, though justice did not; and from the hour I knew

neither would nor ever could again, I distrusted law and lawyers, judges

and governors alike. And my whole being cried out to know what it was

these men had stood for, and why they were hanged, seeing it was not

proven they knew anything about the throwing of the bomb.

Little by little, here and there, I came to know that what they had

stood for was a very high and noble ideal of human life, and what they

were hanged for was preaching it to the common people,--the common

people who were as ready to hang them, in their ignorance, as the court

and the prosecutor were in their malice! Little by little I came to know

that these were men who had a clearer vision of human right than most of

their fellows; and who, being moved by deep social sympathies, wished to

share their vision with their fellows, and so proclaimed it in the

market-place. Little by little I realized that the misery, the pathetic

submission, the awful degradation of the workers, which from the time I

was old enough to begin to think had borne heavily upon my heart, (as

they must bear upon all who have hearts to feel at all), had smitten

theirs more deeply still,--so deeply that they knew no rest save in

seeking a way out,--and that was more than I had ever had the sense to

conceive. For me there had never been a hope there should be no more

rich and poor; but a vague idea that there might not be so rich and so

poor, if the workingmen by combining could exact a little better wages,

and make their hours a little shorter. It was the message of these men,

(and their death swept that message far out into ears that would never

have heard their living voices), that all such little dreams are folly.

That not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in

mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any lasting alleviation come;

but in demanding, much,--all,--in a bold self-assertion of the worker to

toil any hours he finds sufficient, not that another finds for

him,--here is where the way out lies. That message, and the message of

others, whose works, associated with theirs, their death drew to my

notice, took me up, as it were, upon a mighty hill, wherefrom I saw the

roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the machines, the

things that men had made to ease their burden, the wonderful things, the

iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth in the living flesh of the

men who made them; I saw the maimed and crippled stumps of men go

limping away into the night that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown

up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide

in some dim corner where the black surge throws its slime.

I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the

man who tended it, and knew surely as I knew anything in life, that

never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.

I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of

the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than

that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a

day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm--I, and you, and

those others who never do any dirty work--those men had slaved away in

those black graves, and been crushed to death at last.

I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and

down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down

that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild

animal's hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to

labor there, with pick and shovel in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in

that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours

a day. Only slaves would do it.

I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the

coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that

"the record" of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies

who laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered bodies and

souls.

I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes driven by

sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his self-hood,

would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that

forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it.

And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar

refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost

their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it

was slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists were

right,--the whole thing must be changed, the whole thing was wrong,--the

whole system of production and distribution, the whole ideal of life.

And I questioned the government then; they had taught me to question it.

What have you done--you the keepers of the Declaration and the

Constitution--what have you done about all this? What have you done to

preserve the conditions of freedom to the people?

Lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and got gain! You have

sold away the land, that you had no right to sell. You have murdered the

aboriginal people, that you might seize the land in the name of the

white race, and then steal it away from them again, to be again sold by

a second and a third robber. And that buying and selling of the land has

driven the people off the healthy earth and away from the clean air

into these rot-heaps of humanity called cities, where every filthy thing

is done, and filthy labor breeds filthy bodies and filthy souls. Our

boys are decayed with vice before they come to manhood; our girls--ah,

well might John Harvey write:

"Another begetteth a daughter white and gold,

She looks into the meadow land water, and the world

Knows her no more; they have sought her field and fold

But the City, the City hath bought her,

It hath sold

Her piecemeal, to students, rats, and reek of the graveyard

mould."

You have done this thing, gentlemen who engineer the government; and not

only have you caused this ruin to come upon others; you yourselves are

rotten with this debauchery. You exist for the purpose of granting

privileges to whoever can pay most for you, and so limiting the freedom

of men to employ themselves that they must sell themselves into this

frightful slavery or become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and

murderers. And when you have done all this, what then do you do to them,

these creatures of your own making? You, who have set them the example

in every villainy? Do you then relent, and remembering the words of the

great religious teacher to whom most of you offer lip service on the

officially religious day, do you go to these poor, broken, wretched

creatures and love them? Love them and help them, to teach them to be

better? No: you build prisons high and strong, and there you beat, and

starve, and hang, finding by the working of your system human beings so

unutterably degraded that they are willing to kill whomsoever they are

told to kill at so much monthly salary.

This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and

defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To

hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions.

They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without

government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the

heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an

appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery

wherein there is any excuse for government.

It was for telling the people this that these five men were killed. For

telling the people that the only way to get out of their misery was

first to learn what their rights upon this earth were;--freedom to use

the land and all within it and all the tools of production--and then to

stand all together and take them, themselves, and not to appeal to the

jugglers of the law. Abolish the law--that is abolish privilege,--and

crime will abolish itself.

They will tell you these men were hanged for advocating force. What!

These creatures who drill men in the science of killing, who put

guns and clubs in hands they train to shoot and strike, who hail

with delight the latest inventions in explosives, who exult in the

machine that can kill the most with the least expenditure of energy,

who declare a war of extermination upon people who do not want their

civilization, who ravish, and burn, and garotte and guillotine, and

hang, and electrocute, they have the impertinence to talk about the

unrighteousness of force! True, these men did advocate the right to

resist invasion by force. You will find scarcely one in a thousand

who does not believe in that right. The one will be either a real

Christian or a non-resistant Anarchist. It will not be a believer in

the State. No, no; it was not for advocating forcible resistance on

principle, but for advocating forcible resistance to their tyrannies,

and for advocating a society which would forever make an end of riches

and poverty, of governors and governed.

The spirit of revenge, which is always stupid, accomplished its brutal

act. Had it lifted its eyes from its work, it might have seen in the

background of the scaffold that bleak November morning the dawn-light of

Anarchy whiten across the world.

So it came first,--a gleam of hope to the proletaire, a summons to rise

and shake off his material bondage. But steadily, steadily the light has

grown, as year by year the scientist, the literary genius, the artist,

and the moral teacher, have brought to it the tribute of their best

work, their unpaid work, the work they did for love. To-day it means not

only material emancipation, too; it comes as the summing up of all those

lines of thought and action which for three hundred years have been

making towards freedom; it means fulness of being, the free life.

And I say it boldly, notwithstanding the recent outburst of

condemnation, notwithstanding the cry of lynch, burn, shoot, imprison,

deport, and the Scarlet Letter A to be branded low down upon the

forehead, and the latest excuse for that fond esthetic decoration "the

button," that for two thousand years no idea has so stirred the world as

this,--none which had such living power to break down barriers of race

and degree, to attract prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic, Quaker

and Revolutionist. No other ideal but the free life is strong enough to

touch the man whose infinite pity and understanding goes alike to the

hypocrite priest and the victim of Siberian whips; the loving rebel who

stepped from his title and his wealth to labor with all the laboring

earth; the sweet strong singer who sang

"No Master, high or low";

the lover who does not measure his love nor reckon on return; the

self-centered one who "will not rule, but also will not ruled be"; the

philosopher who chanted the Over-man; the devoted woman of the people;

ay, and these too,--these rebellious flashes from the vast cloud-hung

ominous obscurity of the anonymous, these souls whom governmental and

capitalistic brutality has whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage

and bitterness, these mad young lions of revolt, these Winkelrieds who

offer their hearts to the spears.

[A] Delivered on November 11, 1901, in Chicago.

Crime and Punishment

Men are of three sorts: the turn backs, the rush-aheads, and the

indifferents. The first and second are comparatively few in number. The

really conscientious conservative, eternally looking backward for his

models and trying hard to preserve that which is, is almost as scarce an

article as the genuine radical, who is eternally attacking that which is

and looking forward to some indistinct but glowing vision of a purified

social life. Between them lies the vast nitrogenous body of the

indifferents, who go through life with no large thoughts or intense

feelings of any kind, the best that can be said of them being that they

serve to dilute the too fierce activities of the other two. Into the

callous ears of these indifferents, nevertheless, the opposing voices of

conservative and radical are continually shouting; and for years, for

centuries, the conservative wins the day, not because he really touches

the consciences of the indifferent so much (though in a measure he does

that) as because his way causes his hearer the least mental trouble. It

is easier to this lazy, inert mentality to nod its head and approve the

continuance of things as they are, than to listen to proposals for

change, to consider, to question, to make an innovating decision. These

require activity, application,--and nothing is so foreign to the

hibernating social conscience of your ordinary individual.

I say "social" conscience, because I by no means wish to say that these

are conscienceless people; they have, for active use, sufficient

conscience to go through their daily parts in life, and they think that

is all that is required. Of the lives of others, of the effects of their

attitude in cursing the existences of thousands whom they do not know,

they have no conception; they sleep; and they hear the voices of those

who cry aloud about these things, dimly, as in dreams; and they do not

wish to awaken. Nevertheless, at the end of the centuries they always

awaken. It is the radical who always wins at last. At the end of the

centuries institutions are reviewed by this aroused social conscience,

are revised, sometimes are utterly rooted out.

Thus it is with the institutions of Crime and Punishment. The

conservative holds that these things have been decided from all time;

that crime is a thing-in-itself, with no other cause than the

viciousness of man; that punishment was decreed from Mt. Sinai, or

whatever holy mountain happens to be believed in in his country; that

society is best served by strictness and severity of judgment and

punishment. And he wishes only to make his indifferent brothers keepers

of other men's consciences along these lines. He would have all men be

hunters of men, that crime may be tracked down and struck down.

The radical says: All false, all false and wrong. Crime has not been

decided from all time: crime, like everything else, has had its

evolution according to place, time, and circumstance. "The demons of our

sires become the saints that we adore,"--and the saints, the saints and

the heroes of our fathers, are criminals according to our codes.

Abraham, David, Solomon,--could any respectable member of society admit

that he had done the things they did? Crime is not a thing-in-itself,

not a plant without roots, not a something proceeding from nothing; and

the only true way to deal with it is to seek its causes as earnestly, as

painstakingly, as the astronomer seeks the causes of the perturbations

in the orbit of the planet he is observing, sure that there must be one,

or many, somewhere. And Punishment, too, must be studied. The holy

mountain theory is a failure. Punishment is a failure. And it is a

failure not because men do not hunt down and strike enough, but because

they hunt down and strike at all; because in the chase of those who do

ill, they do ill themselves; they brutalize their own characters, and so

much the more so because they are convinced that this time the brutal

act is done in accord with conscience. The murderous deed of the

criminal was _against_ conscience, the torture or the murder of the

criminal by the official is _with_ conscience. Thus the conscience is

diseased and perverted, and a new class of imbruted men created. We have

punished and punished for untold thousands of years, and we have not

gotten rid of crime, we have not diminished it. Let us consider then.

The indifferentist shrugs his shoulders and remarks to the conservative:

"What have I to do with it? I will hunt nobody and I will save nobody.

Let every one take care of himself. I pay my taxes; let the judges and

the lawyers take care of the criminals. And as for you, Mr. Radical, you

weary me. Your talk is too heroic. You want to play Atlas and carry the

heavens on your shoulders. Well, do it if you like. But don't imagine I

am going to act the stupid Hercules and transfer your burden to my

shoulders. Rave away until you are tired, but let me alone."

"I will not let you alone. I am no Atlas. I am no more than a fly; but I

will annoy you, I will buzz in your ears; I will not let you sleep. You

must think about this."

That is about the height and power of my voice, or of any individual

voice, in the present state of the question. I do not deceive myself. I

do not imagine that the question of crime and punishment will be settled

till long, long after the memory of me shall be as completely swallowed

up by time as last year's snow is swallowed by the sea. Two thousand

years ago a man whose soul revolted at punishment, cried out: "Judge

not, that ye be not judged," and yet men and women who have taken his

name upon their lips as holy, have for all those two thousand years gone

on judging as if their belief in what he said was only lip-belief; and

they do it to-day. And judges sit upon benches and send men to their

death,--even judges who do not themselves believe in capital punishment;

and prosecutors exhaust their eloquence and their tricks to get men

convicted; and women and men bear witness against sinners; and then they

all meet in church and pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive

those who trespass against us!"

Do they mean anything at all by it?

And I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard, and is not

heard, save here and there; just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard,

save here and there; and others great and small are lost in the great

echoless desert of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible

effect, so my voice also will be lost, and barely a slight ripple of

thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse; even that the

next wind of trial will straighten and leave as unimprinted sand.

Nevertheless, by the continued and unintermitting action of forces

infinitesimal compared with the human voice, the greatest effects are at

length accomplished. A wave-length of light is but the fifty-thousandth

part of an inch, yet by the continuous action of waves like these have

been produced all the creations of light, the entire world of sight, out

of masses irresponsive, dark, colorless. And doubt not that in time this

cold and irresponsive mass of indifference will feel and stir and

realize the force of the great sympathies which will change the attitude

of the human mind as a whole towards Crime and Punishment, and erase

both from the world.

Not by lawyers and not by judges shall the final cause of the criminal

be tried; but lawyer and judge and criminal together shall be told by

the Social Conscience, "Depart in peace."

* * * * *

A great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto these: "I have within

me the capacity for every crime."

Few, reading them, believe that he meant what he said. Most take it as

the sententious utterance of one who, in an abandonment of generosity,

wished to say something large and leveling. But I think he meant exactly

what he said. I think that with all his purity Emerson had within him

the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite

features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for

all the sweetness, the tenderness, and the nobility of his nature, he

had the tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every bit

of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of

life, from the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all

virtue were germinal. Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and

I and all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice, do

not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom

you have helped to put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be

more even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or the

outside temptation has not come upon you.

I am no disciple of that school whose doctrine is summed up in the

teaching that Man's Will is nothing, his Material Surroundings all. I do

not accept that popular socialism which would make saints out of sinners

only by filling their stomachs. I am no apologist for characterlessness,

and no petitioner for universal moral weakness. I believe in the

individual. I believe that the purpose of life (in so far as we can give

it a purpose, and it has none save what we give it) is the assertion and

the development of strong, self-centered personality. It is therefore

that no religion which offers vicarious atonement for the misdoer, and

no philosophy which rests on the cornerstone of irresponsibility, makes

any appeal to me. I believe that immeasurable mischief has been wrought

by the ceaseless repetition for the last two thousand years of the

formula: "Not through any merit of mine shall I enter heaven, but

through the sacrifice of Christ."--Not through the sacrifice of Christ,

nor any other sacrifice, shall any one attain strength, save in so far

as he takes the spirit and the purpose of the sacrifice into his own

life and lives it. Nor do I see anything as the result of the teaching

that all men are the helpless victims of external circumstance and under

the same conditions will act precisely alike, than a lot of spineless,

nerveless, bloodless crawlers in the tracks of stronger men,--too

desirous of ease to be honest, too weak to be successful rascals.

Let this be put as strongly as it can now, that nothing I shall say

hereafter may be interpreted as a gospel of shifting and shirking.

But the difference between us, the Anarchists, who preach

self-government and none else, and Moralists who in times past and

present have asked for individual responsibility, is this, that while

they have always framed creeds and codes for the purpose of _holding

others to account_, we draw the line upon ourselves. Set the standard as

high as you will; live to it as near as you can; and if you fail, try

yourself, judge yourself, condemn yourself, if you choose. Teach and

persuade your neighbor if you can; consider and compare his conduct if

you please; speak your mind if you desire; but if he fails to reach your

standard or his own, try him not, judge him not, condemn him not. He

lies beyond your sphere; you cannot know the temptation nor the inward

battle nor the weight of the circumstances upon him. You do not know how

long he fought before he failed. Therefore you cannot be just. Let him

alone.

This is the ethical concept at which we have arrived, not by revelation

from any superior power, not through the reading of any inspired book,

not by special illumination of our inner consciousness; but by the study

of the results of social experiment in the past as presented in the

works of historians, psychologists, criminologists, sociologists and

legalists.

Very likely so many "ists" sound a little oppressive, and there may be

those to whom they may even have a savor of pedantry. It sounds much

simpler and less ostentatious to say "Thus saith the Lord," or "The Good

Book says." But in the meat and marrow these last are the real

presumptions, these easy-going claims of familiarity with the will and

intent of Omnipotence. It may sound more pedantic to you to say, "I have

studied the accumulated wisdom of man, and drawn certain deductions

therefrom," than to say "I had a talk with God this morning and he said

thus and so"; but to me the first statement is infinitely more modest.

Moreover there is some chance of its being true, while the other is

highly imaginative fiction.

This is not to impugn the honesty of those who inherit this survival of

an earlier mental state of the race, and who accept it as they accept

their appetites or anything else they find themselves born with. Nor is

it to belittle those past efforts of active and ardent souls who claimed

direct divine inspiration as the source of their doctrines. All

religions have been, in their great general outlines, the intuitive

graspings of the race at truths which it had not yet sufficient

knowledge to demonstrate,--rude and imperfect statements of ideas which

were yet but germinal, but which, even then, mankind had urgent need to

conceive, and upon which it afterwards spent the efforts of generations

of lives to correct and perfect. Thus the very ethical concept of which

I have been speaking as peculiarly Anarchistic, was preached as a

religious doctrine by the fifteenth century Tolstoy, Peter Chilciky; and

in the sixteenth century, the fanatical sect of the Anabaptists shook

Germany from center to circumference by a doctrine which included the

declaration that "pleadings in courts of law, oaths, capital punishment,

and all absolute power were incompatible with the Christian faith." It

was an imperfect illumination of the intellect, such only as was

possible in those less enlightened days, but an illumination that

defined certain noble conceptions of justice. They appealed to all they

had, the Bible, the inner light, the best that they knew, to justify

their faith. We to whom a wider day is given, who can appeal not to one

book but to thousands, who have the light of science which is free to

all that can command the leisure and the will to know, shining white and

open on these great questions, dim and obscure in the days of Peter

Chilciky, we should be the last to cast a sneer at them for their heroic

struggle with tyranny and cruelty; though to-day the man who would claim

their claims on their grounds would justly be rated atavist or

charlatan.

Nothing or next to nothing did the Anabaptists know of history. For

genuine history, history which records the growth of a whole people,

which traces the evolution of its mind as seen in its works of

peace,--its literature, its art, its constructions--is the creation of

our own age. Only within the last seventy-five years has the purpose of

history come to have so much depth as this. Before that it was a mere

register of dramatic situations, with no particular connection, a

chronicle of the deeds of prominent persons, a list of intrigues,

scandals, murders big and little; and the great people, the actual

builders and preservers of the race, the immense patient, silent mass

who painfully filled up all the waste places these destroyers made,

almost ignored. And no man sought to discover the relations of even the

recorded acts to any general causes; no man conceived the notion of

discovering what is political and moral growth or political and moral

suicide. That they did not do so is because writers of history, who are

themselves incarnations of their own time spirit, could not get beyond

the unscientific attitude of mind, born of ignorance and fostered by the

Christian religion, that man is something entirely different from the

rest of organized life; that he is a free moral agent, good if he

pleases and bad if he pleases, that is, according as he accepts or

rejects the will of God; that every act is isolated, having no

antecedent, morally, but the will of its doer. Nor until modern science

had fought its way past prisons, exilements, stakes, scaffolds, and

tortures, to the demonstration that man is no free-will freak thrust by

an omnipotent joker upon a world of cause and sequence to play havoc

therein, but just a poor differentiated bit of protoplasm as much

subject to the general processes of matter and mind as his ancient

progenitor in the depths of the Silurian sea, not until then was it

possible for any real conception of the scope of history to begin. Not

until then was it said: "The actions of men are the effects of large and

general causes. Humanity as a whole has a regularity of movement as

fixed as the movement of the tides; and given certain physical and

social environments, certain developments may be predicted with the

certainty of a mathematical calculation." Thus crime, which for so many

ages men have gone on punishing more or less light-heartedly, so far

from having its final cause in individual depravity, bears a steady and

invariable relation to the production and distribution of staple food

supplies, a thing over which society itself at times can have no control

(as on the occasion of great natural disturbances), and in general does

not yet know how to manage wisely: how much less, then, the individual!

This regularity of the recurrence of crime was pointed out long before

by the greatest statisticians of Europe, who, indeed, did not go so far

as to question why it was so, nor to compare these regularities with

other regularities, but upon whom the constant repetition of certain

figures in the statistics of murder, suicide, assault, etc., made a

profound impression. It was left to the new historians, the great

pioneer among whom was H. T. Buckle in England, to make the comparisons

in the statistics, and show that individual crimes as well as virtues

are always calculable from general material conditions.

This is the basis from which we argue, and it is a basis established by

the comparative history of civilizations. In no other way could it have

been really established. It might have been guessed at, and indeed was.

But only when the figures are before us, figures obtained "by millions

of observations extending over different grades of civilization, with

different laws, different opinions, different habits, different morals"

(I am quoting Buckle), only then are we able to say surely that the

human mind proceeds with a regularity of operation overweighing all the

creeds and codes ever invented, and that if we would begin to understand

the problem of the treatment of crime, we must go to something far

larger than the moral reformation of the criminal. No prayers, no legal

enactments, will ever rid society of crime. If they would, there have

been prayers enough and preachments enough and laws enough and prisons

enough to have done it long ago. But pray that the attraction of

gravitation shall cease. Will it cease? Enact that water shall freeze at

100° heat. Will it freeze? And no more will men be sane and honest and

just when they are compelled to live in an insane, dishonest, and unjust

society, when the natural operation of the very elements of their being

is warred upon by statutes and institutions which must produce outbursts

destructive both to themselves and to others.

Away back in 1835 Quetelet, the French statistician, wrote: "Experience

demonstrates, in fact, by every possible evidence, this opinion, which

may seem paradoxical at first, that it is society which prepares the

crime, and that the guilty one is but the instrument which executes it."

Every crime, therefore, is a charge against society which can only be

rightly replied to when society consents to look into its own errors and

rectify the wrong it has done. This is one of the results which must, in

the end, flow from the labors of the real historians; one of the reasons

why history was worth writing at all.

Now the next point in the problem is the criminal himself. Admitting

what cannot be impeached, that there is cause and sequence in the action

of man; admitting the pressure of general causes upon all alike, what

is the reason that one man is a criminal and another not?

From the days of the Roman jurisconsults until now the legalists

themselves have made a distinction between crimes against the law of

nature and crimes merely against the law of society. From the modern

scientific standpoint no such distinction can be maintained. Nature

knows nothing about crime, and nothing ever was a crime until the social

Conscience made it so. Neither is it easy when one reads their law

books, even accepting their view-point, to understand why certain crimes

were catalogued as against the law of nature, and certain others as of

the more artificial character. But I presume what were in general

classed as crimes against nature were Acts of Violence committed against

persons. Aside from these we have a vast, an almost interminable number

of offenses big and little, which are in the main attacks upon the

institution of property, concerning which some very different things

have to be said than concerning the first. As to these first there is no

doubt that these are real crimes, by which I mean simply anti-social

acts. Any action which violates the life or liberty of any individual is

an anti-social act, whether done by one person, by two, or by a whole

nation. And the greatest crime that ever was perpetrated, a crime beside

which all individual atrocities diminish to nothing, is War; and the

greatest, the least excusable of murderers are those who order it and

those who execute it. Nevertheless, this chiefest of murderers, the

Government, its own hands red with the blood of hundreds of thousands,

assumes to correct the individual offender, enacting miles of laws to

define the varying degrees of his offense and punishment, and putting

beautiful building stone to very hideous purposes for the sake of caging

and tormenting him therein.

We do get a fig from a thistle--sometimes! Out of this noisome

thing, the prison, has sprung the study of criminology. It is

very new, and there is considerable painstaking nonsense about

it. But the main results are interesting and should be known

by all who wish to form an intelligent conception of what a

criminal is and how he should be treated. These men who are cool

and quiet and who move among criminals and study them as Darwin

did his plants and animals, tell us that these prisoners are

reducible to three types: The Born Criminal, the Criminaloid,

and the Accidental Criminal. I am inclined to doubt a great

deal that is said about the born criminal. Prof. Lombroso gives

us very exhaustive reports of the measurements of their skulls

and their ears and their noses and their thumbs and their toes,

etc. But I suspect that if a good many respectable, decent,

never-did-a-wrong-thing-in-their-lives people were to go up for

measurement, malformed ears and disproportionately long thumbs

would be equally found among them if they took the precaution

to represent themselves as criminals first. Still, however few

in number (and they are really very few), there are some born

criminals,--people who through some malformation or deficiency

or excess of certain portions of the brain are constantly

impelled to violent deeds. Well, there are some born idiots and

some born cripples. Do you punish them for their idiocy or for

their unfortunate physical condition? On the contrary, you pity

them, you realize that life is a long infliction to them, and

your best and tenderest sympathies go out to them. Why not to

the other, equally a helpless victim of an evil inheritance?

Granting for the moment that you have the right to punish the

mentally responsible, surely you will not claim the right to

punish the mentally irresponsible!

Even the law does not hold the insane man guilty. And the born criminal

is irresponsible; he is a sick man, sick with the most pitiable chronic

disease; his treatment is for the medical world to decide, and the best

of them,--not for the prosecutor, the judge, and the warden.

It is true that many criminologists, including Prof. Lombroso himself,

are of opinion that the best thing to do with the born criminal is to

kill him at once, since he can be only a curse to himself and others.

Very heroic treatment. We may inquire, Is he to be exterminated at birth

because of certain physical indications of his criminality? Such

neo-Spartanism would scarcely commend itself to any modern society.

Moreover the diagnosis might be wrong, even though we had a perpetual

and incorruptible commission of the learned to sit in inquiry upon every

pink-skinned little suspect three days old! What then? Is he to be let

go, as he is now, until he does some violent deed and then be judged

more hardly because of his natural defect? Either proposition seems not

only heartless and wicked but,--what the respectable world is often more

afraid of being than either,--ludicrous. If one is really a born

criminal he will manifest criminal tendencies in early life, and being

so recognized should be cared for according to the most humane methods

of treating the mentally afflicted.

The second, or criminaloid, class is the most numerous of the three.

These are criminals, first, because being endowed with strong desires

and unequal reasoning powers they cannot maintain the uneven battle

against a society wherein the majority of individuals must all the time

deny their natural appetites, if they are to remain unstained with

crime. They are, in short, the ordinary man (who, it must be admitted,

has a great deal of paste in him) plus an excess of wants of one sort

and another, but generally physical. Society outside of prisons is full

of these criminaloids, who sometimes have in place of the power of

genuine moral resistance a sneaking cunning by which they manage to

steer a shady course between the crime and the punishment.

It is true these people are not pleasant subjects to contemplate; but

then, through that very stage of development the whole human race has

had to pass in its progress from the beast to the man,--the stage, I

mean, of overplus of appetite opposed by weak moral resistance; and if

now some, it is not certain that their number is very great, have

reversed the proportion, it is only because they are the fortunate

inheritors of the results of thousands of years of struggle and failure,

struggle and failure, but _struggle_ again. It is precisely these

criminaloids who are most sinned against by society, for they are the

people who need to have the right of doing things made easy, and who,

when they act criminally, need the most encouragement to help the feeble

and humiliated moral sense to rise again, to try again.

The third class, the Accidental or Occasional Criminals, are perfectly

normal, well balanced people, who, through tremendous stress of outward

circumstance, and possibly some untoward mental disturbance arising from

those very notions of the conduct of life which form part of their moral

being, suddenly commit an act of violence which is at utter variance

with their whole former existence; such as, for instance, the murder of

a seducer by the father of the injured girl, or of a wife's paramour by

her husband. If I believed in severity at all I should say that these

were the criminals upon whom society should look with most severity,

because they are the ones who have most mental responsibility. But that

also is nonsense; for such an individual has within him a severer

judge, a more pitiless jailer than any court or prison,--his conscience

and his memory. Leave him to these; or no, in mercy take him away from

these whenever you can; he will suffer enough, and there is no fear of

his action being repeated.

Now all these people are with us, and it is desirable that something be

done to help the case. What does Society do? Or rather what does

Government do with them? Remember we are speaking now only of crimes of

violence. It hangs, it electrocutes, it exiles, it imprisons. Why? For

punishment. And why punishment? "Not," says Blackstone, "by way of

atonement or expiation for the crime committed, for that must be left to

the just determination of the Supreme Being, but as a precaution against

future offenses of the same kind." This is supposed to be effected in

three ways: either by reforming him, or getting rid of him altogether,

or by deterring others by making an example of him.

Let us see how these precautions work. Exile, which is still practised

by some governments, and imprisonment are, according to the theory of

law, for the purpose of reforming the criminal that he may no longer be

a menace to society. Logic would say that anyone who wished to

obliterate cruelty from the character of another must himself show no

cruelty; one who would teach regard for the rights of others must

himself be regardful. Yet the story of exile and prison is the story of

the lash, the iron, the chain and every torture that the fiendish

ingenuity of _the non-criminal class can devise by way of teaching

criminals to be good_! To teach men to be good, they are kept in airless

cells, made to sleep on narrow planks, to look at the sky through iron

grates, to eat food that revolts their palates, and destroys their

stomachs,--battered and broken down in body and soul; and this is what

they call reforming men!

Not very many years ago the Philadelphia dailies told us (and while we

cannot believe all of what they say, and are bound to believe that such

cases are exceptional, yet the bare facts were true) that Judge Gordon

ordered an investigation into the workings of the Eastern Penitentiary

officials; and it was found that an insane man had been put into a cell

with two sane ones, and when he cried in his insane way and the two

asked that he be put elsewhere, the warden gave them a strap to whip him

with; and they tied him in some way to the heater, with the strap, so

that his legs were burned when he moved; all scarred with the burns he

was brought into the court, and the other men frankly told what they had

done and why they had done it. This is the way they reform men.

Do you think people come out of a place like that better? with more

respect for society? with more regard for the rights of their fellow

men? I don't. I think they come out of there with their hearts full of

bitterness, much harder than when they went in. That this is often the

case is admitted by those who themselves believe in punishment, and

practice it. For the fact is that out of the Criminaloid class there

develops the Habitual Criminal, the man who is perpetually getting in

prison; no sooner is he out than he does something else and gets in

again. The brand that at first scorched him has succeeded in searing. He

no longer feels the ignominy. He is a "jail-bird," and he gets to have a

cynical pride in his own degradation. Every man's hand is against him,

and his hand is against every man's. Such are the reforming effects of

punishment. Yet there was a time when he, too, might have been touched,

had the right word been spoken. It is for society to find and speak

that word.

This for prison and exile. Hanging? electrocution? These of course are

not for the purpose of reforming the criminal. These are to deter others

from doing as he did; and the supposition is that the severer the

punishment the greater the deterrent effect. In commenting upon this

principle Blackstone says: "We may observe that punishments of

unreasonable severity ... have less effect in preventing crimes and

amending the manners of a people than such as are more merciful in

general...." He further quotes Montesquieu: "For the excessive severity

of laws hinders their execution; when the punishment surpasses all

measure, the public will frequently, out of humanity, prefer impunity to

it." Again Blackstone: "It is a melancholy truth that among the variety

of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one

hundred and sixty have been declared by act of Parliament to be felonies

... worthy of instant death. So dreadful a list instead of diminishing

_increases_ the number of offenders."

Robert Ingersoll, speaking on "Crimes Against Criminals" before the New

York Bar Association, a lawyer addressing lawyers, treating of this same

period of which Blackstone writes, says: "There is something in

injustice, in cruelty, which tends to defeat itself. There never were so

many traitors in England as when the traitor was drawn and quartered,

when he was tortured in every possible way,--when his limbs, torn and

bleeding, were given to the fury of mobs, or exhibited pierced by pikes

or hung in chains. The frightful punishments produced intense hatred of

the government, and traitors increased until they became powerful enough

to decide what treason was and who the traitors were and to inflict the

same torments on others."

The fact that Blackstone was right and Ingersoll was right in saying

that severity of punishment increases crime, is silently admitted in the

abrogation of those severities by acts of Parliament and acts of

Congress. It is also shown by the fact that there are no more murders,

proportionately, in States where the death penalty does not exist than

in those where it does. Severity is therefore admitted by the State

itself to have no deterrent influence on the intending criminal. And to

take the matter out of the province of the State, we have only to

instance the horrible atrocities perpetrated by white mobs upon negroes

charged with outrage. Nothing more fiendishly cruel can be imagined; yet

these outrages multiply. It would seem, then, that the notion of making

a horrible example of the misdoer is a complete failure. As a specific

example of this, Ingersoll (in this same lecture) instanced that "a few

years before a man was hanged in Alexandria, Va. One who witnessed the

execution on that very day murdered a peddler in the Smithsonian grounds

at Washington. He was tried and executed; and one who witnessed his

hanging went home and on the same day murdered his wife." Evidently the

brute is rather aroused than terrified by scenes of execution.

What then? If extreme punishments do not deter, and if what are

considered mild punishments do not reform, is any measure of punishment

conceivable or attainable which will better our case?

Before answering this question let us consider the class of crimes which

so far has not been dwelt upon, but which nevertheless comprises

probably nine-tenths of all offenses committed. These are all the

various forms of stealing,--robbery, burglary, theft, embezzlement,

forgery, counterfeiting, and the thousand and one ramifications and

offshoots of the act of taking what the law defines as another's. It is

impossible to consider crimes of violence apart from these, because the

vast percentage of murders and assaults committed by the criminaloid

class are simply incidental to the commission of the so-called lesser

crime. A man often murders in order to escape with his booty, though

murder was no part of his original intention. Why, now, have we such a

continually increasing percentage of stealing?

Will you persistently hide your heads in the sand and say it is because

men grow worse as they grow wiser? that individual wickedness is the

result of all our marvelous labors to compass sea and land, and make the

earth yield up her wealth to us? Dare you say that?

It is not so. =The reason men steal is because their rights are stolen

from them before they are born.=

A human being comes into the world; he wants to eat, he wants to

breathe, he wants to sleep; he wants to use his muscles, his brain; he

wants to love, to dream, to create. These wants constitute him, the

whole man; he can no more help expressing these activities than water

can help running down hill. If the freedom to do any of these things is

denied him, then by so much he is a crippled creature, and his energy

will force itself into some abnormal channel or be killed altogether.

Now I do not mean that he has a "natural right" to do these things

inscribed on any lawbook of Nature. Nature knows nothing of rights, she

knows power only, and a louse has as much natural right as a man to the

extent of its power. What I do mean to say is that man, in common with

many other animals, has found that by associative life he conquers the

rest of nature, and that this society is slowly being perfected; and

that this perfectionment consists in realizing that the solidarity and

safety of the whole arises from the freedom of the parts; that such

freedom constitutes Man's Social Right; and that any institution which

interferes with this right will be destructive of the association, will

breed criminals, will work its own ruin. This is the word of the

sociologist, of the greatest of them, Herbert Spencer.

Now do we see that all men eat,--eat well? You know we do not. Some have

so much that they are sickened with the extravagance of dishes, and know

not where next to turn for a new palatal sensation. They cannot even

waste their wealth. Some, and they are mostly the hardest workers, eat

poorly and fast, for their work allows them no time to enjoy even what

they have. Some,--I have seen them myself in the streets of New York

this winter, and the look of their wolfish eyes was not pleasant to

see--stand in long lines waiting for midnight and the plate of soup

dealt out by some great newspaper office, stretching out, whole blocks

of them, as other men wait on the first night of some famous star at the

theater! Some die because they cannot eat at all. Pray tell me what

these last have to lose by becoming thieves. And why shall they not

become thieves? And is the action of the man who takes the necessities

which have been denied to him really criminal? Is he morally worse than

the man who crawls in a cellar and dies of starvation? I think not. He

is only a little more assertive. Cardinal Manning said: "A starving man

has a natural right to his neighbor's bread." The Anarchist says: "A

hungry man has a social right to bread." And there have been whole

societies and races among whom that right was never questioned. And

whatever were the mistakes of those societies, whereby they perished,

this was not a mistake, and we shall do well to take so much wisdom

from the dead and gone, the simple ethics of the stomach which with all

our achievement we cannot despise, or despising, shall perish as our

reward.

"But," you will say, and say truly, "to begin by taking loaves means to

end by taking everything and murdering, too, very often." And in that

you draw the indictment against your own system. If there is no

alternative between starving and stealing (and for thousands there is

none), then there is no alternative between society's murdering its

members, or the members disintegrating society. Let Society consider its

own mistakes, then: let it answer itself for all these people it has

robbed and killed: let it cease its own crimes first!

To return to the faculties of Man. All would breathe; and some do

breathe. They breathe the air of the mountains, of the seas, of the

lakes,--even the atmosphere in the gambling dens of Monte Carlo, for a

change! Some, packed thickly together in closed rooms where men must

sweat and faint to save tobacco, breathe the noisome reek that rises

from the spittle of their consumptive neighbors. Some, mostly babies,

lie on the cellar doors along Bainbridge street, on summer nights, and

bathe their lungs in that putrid air where a thousand lungs have

breathed before, and grow up pale and decayed looking as the rotting

vegetables whose exhalations they draw in. Some, far down underground,

meet the choke-damp, and--do not breathe at all! Do you expect healthy

morals out of all these poisoned bodies?

Some sleep. They have so much time that they take all manner of

expensive drugs to try what sleeping it off a different way is like!

Some sleep upon none too easy beds a few short hours, too few not to

waken more tired than ever, and resume the endless grind of waking

life. Some sleep bent over the books they are too tired to study, though

the mind clamors for food after the long day's physical toil. Some sleep

with hand upon the throttle of the engine, after twenty-six hours of

duty, and--crash!--they have sleep enough!

Some use their muscles: they use them to punch bags, and other

gentlemen's stomachs when their heads are full of wine. Some use them to

club other men and women, at $2.50 a day. Some exhaust them welding them

into iron, or weaving them into wool, for ten or eleven hours a day. And

some become atrophied sitting at desks till they are mere specters of

men and women.

Some love; and there is no end to the sensualities of their love,

because all normal expressions have lost their savor through excess.

Some love, and see their love tried and worn and threadbare, a skeleton

of love, because the practicality of life is always there to repress the

purely emotional. Some are stricken in health, so robbed of power to

feel, that they never love at all.

And some dream, think, create; and the world is filled with the glory of

their dreams. But who knows the glory of the dream that never was born,

lost and dead and buried away somewhere there under the roofs where the

exquisite brain was ruined by the heavy labor of life? And what of the

dream that turned to madness and destroyed the thing it loved the best?

These are the things that make criminals, the perverted forces of man,

turned aside by the institution of property, which is the giant social

mistake to-day. It is your law which keeps men from using the sources

and the means of wealth production unless they pay tribute to other men;

it is this, and nothing else, which is responsible for all the second

class of crimes and all those crimes of violence incidentally committed

while carrying out a robbery. Let me quote here a most sensible and

appropriate editorial which recently appeared in the Philadelphia _North

American_, in comment upon the proposition of some foolish preacher to

limit the right of reproduction to rich families:

"The earth was constructed, made habitable, and populated without the

advice of a commission of superior persons, and until they appeared and

began meddling with affairs, making laws and setting themselves up as

rulers, poverty and its evil consequences were unknown to humanity. When

social science finds a way to remove obstructions to the operation of

natural law and to the equitable distribution of the products of labor,

poverty will cease to be the condition of the masses of people, and

misery, CRIME and problems of population will disappear."

And they will never disappear until it does. All hunting down of men,

all punishments, are but so many ineffective efforts to sweep back the

tide with a broom. The tide will fling you, broom and all, against the

idle walls that you have built to fence it in. Tear down those walls or

the sea will tear them down for you.

Have you ever watched it coming in,--the sea? When the wind comes

roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing thunders up from the

water? Have you watched the white lions chasing each other towards the

walls, and leaping up with foaming anger as they strike, and turn and

chase each other along the black bars of their cage in rage to devour

each other? And tear back? And leap in again? Have you ever wondered in

the midst of it all _which particular drops of water_ would strike the

wall? If one could know all the factors one might calculate even that.

But who can know them all? Of one thing only we are sure: _some must

strike it_.

They are the criminals, those drops of water pitching against that silly

wall and broken. Just why it was these particular ones we cannot know;

but some had to go. Do not curse them; you have cursed them enough. Let

the people free.

There is a class of crimes of violence which arises from another set of

causes than economic slavery--acts which are the result of an antiquated

moral notion of the true relations of men and women. These are the

Nemesis of the institution of property in love. If every one would learn

that the limit of his right to demand a certain course of conduct in sex

relations is himself; that the relation of his beloved ones to others is

not a matter for him to regulate, any more than the relations of those

whom he does not love; if the freedom of each is unquestioned, and

whatever moral rigors are exacted are exacted of oneself only; if this

principle is accepted and followed, crimes of jealousy will cease. But

religions and governments uphold this institution and constantly tend to

create the spirit of ownership, with all its horrible consequences.

Ah, you will say, perhaps it is true; perhaps when this better social

condition is evolved, and this freer social spirit, we shall be rid of

crime,--at least nine-tenths of it. But meanwhile must we not punish to

protect ourselves?

The protection does not protect. The violent man does not communicate

his intention; when he executes it, or attempts its execution, more

often than otherwise it is some unofficial person who catches or stops

him. If he is a born criminal, or in other words an insane man, he

should, I reiterate, be treated as a sick person--not punished, not made

to suffer. If he is one of the accidental criminals, his act will not be

repeated; his punishment will always be with him. If he is of the

middle class, your punishment will not reform him, it will only harden

him; and it will not deter others.

As for thieves, the great thief is within the law, or he buys it; and as

for the small one, see what you do! To protect yourself against him, you

create a class of persons who are sworn to the service of the club and

the revolver; a set of spies; a set whose business it is to deal

constantly with these unhappy beings, who in rare instances are softened

thereby, but in the majority of cases become hardened to their work as

butchers to the use of the knife; a set whose business it is to serve

cell and lock and key; and lastly, the lowest infamy of all, the

hangman. Does any one want to shake his hand, the hand that kills for

pay?

Now against all these persons individually there is nothing to be said:

they may probably be very humane, well-intentioned persons when they

start in; but the end of all this is imbrutement. One of our dailies

recently observed that "the men in charge of prisons have but too often

been men who ought themselves to have been prisoners." The Anarchist

does not agree with that. He would have no prisons at all. But I am

quite sure that if that editor himself were put in the prison-keeper's

place, he too would turn hard. And the opportunities of the official

criminal are much greater than those of the unofficial one. Lawyer and

governmentalist as he was, Ingersoll said: "It is safe to say that

governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented."

Then why create a second class of parasites worse than the first? Why

not put up with the original one?

Moreover, you have another thing to consider than the simple problem of

a wrong inflicted upon a guilty man. How many times has it happened that

the innocent man has been convicted! I remember an instance of a man so

convicted of murder in Michigan. He had served twenty-seven years in

Jackson penitentiary (for Michigan is not a hang-State) when the real

murderer, dying, confessed. And the State _pardoned_ that innocent man!

Because it was the quickest legal way to let him out! I hope he has been

able to pardon the State.

Not very long ago a man was hanged here in this city. He had killed his

superintendent. Some doctors said he was insane; the government experts

said he was not. They said he was faking insanity when he proclaimed

himself Jesus Christ. And he was hanged. Afterwards the doctors found

two cysts in his brain. The State of Pennsylvania had killed a sick man!

And as long as punishments exist, these mistakes will occur. If you

accept the principle at all, you must accept with it the blood-guilt of

innocent men.

Not only this, but you must accept also the responsibility for all the

misery which results to others whose lives are bound up with that of the

convict, for even he is loved by some one, much loved perhaps. It is a

foolish thing to turn adrift a house full of children, to become

criminals in turn, perhaps, in order to frighten some indefinite future

offender by making an example of their father or mother. Yet how many

times has it not happened!

And this is speaking only from the practical, selfish side of the

matter. There is another, one from which I would rather appeal to you,

and from which I think you would after all prefer to be appealed to. Ask

yourselves, each of you, whether you are quite sure that you have

feeling enough, understanding enough, and _have you suffered_ enough, to

be able to weigh and measure out another man's life or liberty, no

matter what he has done? And if you have not yourself, are you able to

delegate to any judge the power which you have not? The great Russian

novelist, Dostoyevsky, in his psychological study of this same subject,

traces the sufferings of a man who had committed a shocking murder; his

whole body and brain are a continual prey to torture. He gives himself

up, seeking relief in confession. He goes to prison, for in barbarous

Russia they have not the barbarity of capital punishment for murderers,

unless political ones. But he finds no relief. He remains for a year,

bitter, resentful, a prey to all miserable feelings. But at last he is

touched by love, the silent, unobtrusive, all-conquering love of one who

knew it all and forgave it all. And the regeneration of his soul began.

"The criminal slew," says Tolstoy: "are you better, then, when you slay?

He took another's liberty; and is it the right way, therefore, for you

to take his? Violence is no answer to violence."

"Have good will

To all that lives, letting unkindness die,

And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made

As soft airs passing by."

So said Lord Buddha, the Light of Asia.

And another said: "Ye have heard that it hath been said 'an eye for an

eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but I say unto you, resist not him that

is evil."

Yet the vengeance that the great psychologist saw was futile, the

violence that the greatest living religious teacher and the greatest

dead ones advised no man to wreak, that violence is done daily and

hourly by every little-hearted prosecutor who prosecutes at so much a

day, by every petty judge who buys his way into office with common

politicians' tricks, and deals in men's lives and liberties as a trader

deals in pins, by every neat-souled and cheap-souled member of the "unco

guid" whose respectable bargain-counter maxims of morality have as much

effect to stem the great floods and storms that shake the human will as

the waving of a lady's kid glove against the tempest. Those who have not

suffered cannot understand how to punish; those who have understanding

_will_ not.

I said at the beginning and I say again, I believe that in every one of

us all things are germinal: in judge and prosecutor and prison-keeper

too, and even in those small moral souls who cut out one undeviating

pattern for all men to fit, even in them there are the germs of passion

and crime and sympathy and forgiveness. And some day things will stir in

them and accuse them and awaken them. And that awakening will come when

suddenly one day there breaks upon them with realizing force the sense

of the unison of life, the irrevocable relationship of the saint to the

sinner, the judge to the criminal; that all personalities are

intertwined and rushing upon doom together. Once in my life it was given

to me to see the outward manifestation of this unison. It was in 1897.

We stood upon the base of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square. Below

were ten thousand people packed together with upturned faces. They had

gathered to hear and see men and women whose hands and limbs were

scarred all over with the red-hot irons of the tortures in the fortress

of Montjuich. For the crime of an unknown person these twenty-eight men

and women, together with four hundred others, had been cast into that

terrible den and tortured with the infamies of the inquisition to make

them reveal that of which they knew nothing. After a year of such

suffering as makes the decent human heart sick only to contemplate, with

nothing proven against them, some even without trial, they were suddenly

released with orders to leave the country within twenty-four hours. They

were then in Trafalgar Square, and to the credit of old England be it

said, harlot and mother of harlots though she is, for there was not

another country among the great nations of the earth to which those

twenty-eight innocent people could go. For they were paupers

impoverished by that cruel State of Spain in the terrible battle for

their freedom; they would not have been admitted to free America. When

Francesco Gana, speaking in a language which most of them did not

understand, lifted his poor, scarred hands, the faces of those ten

thousand people moved together like the leaves of a forest in the wind.

They waved to and fro, they rose and fell; the visible moved in the

breath of the invisible. It was the revelation of the action of the

Unconscious, the fatalistic unity of man.