Mother Earth

“Light!” By Algernon Charles Swinburne (From Songs Before Sunrise.)

Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder, And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind; There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder Nor are the links not malleable that wind Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder; The hands are mighty, were the head not blind.
Priest is the staff of king,
And chains and clouds one thing,
And fettered flesh with devastated mind.
Open thy soul to see,
Slave! and thy feet are free;
Thy bonds and thy belief are one in kind, And of thy fears thine irons wrought Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.

Observations and Comments

The new Immigration Law excludes Anarchists from citizenship. The Solomonian decision that one must believe in organized government in order to be admitted to our hospitable ports is now applied to those who want to be naturalized. Whosoever believeth not in the beneficial mission of State and Government is not worthy of citizenship.

Mutual aversion in matrimony is considered sufficient grounds for divorce. Such aversion exists between the State and Anarchism. Surely, the State will not deny it; much less the Anarchists. Citizenship has no meaning to the latter, since their ideal of human liberty and righteousness goes beyond the narrow bounds of nationality; it is the international republic of free spirits.

Every organized government embodies only the bureaucratic force of the privileged few; to participate in, or be a part of it, is not in keeping with Anarchism.

In reply to our expulsion from citizenship we make the following proposition:—Since the State denies us the rights of citizenship, it must, to be consistent, exempt us from the duties of citizenship, from the exercise of coercion and invasion. Government should exist for the law-abiding citizens only; those who neither approve, recognize or justify it, must have the right to secede. In appreciation thereof, we promise not to make use of any institution of organized force and violence; not to appeal for assistance or help therefrom; we guarantee that we shall under no circumstances call for the police and the protecting arm of the law; and in conclusion we declare ourselves willing to leave all laws, prisons, judges, jailers and hangmen to the respectable, goody, sensible section of the community.

The recent massacre of the Jews in Bialystock came up for discussion in the Duma the other day. There is no doubt that Tsarism is responsible for the awful persecution and slaughter of the Jews; through its agents it deliberately and carefully prepares the pogroms in order to divert the attention of its people from the real situation in Russia.

During the discussion, the chairman uttered the following very significant words: “It has been charged that the Jews are becoming Anarchists. That is partially true. The Government by oppression is driving the persecuted members of that race to Anarchy. The difference between their status and ours is illustrated by the fact that if a robber enters our homes we have the right to shoot him; but if a Jew resists, troops are summoned and he is shot down as a revolutionist. Lack of lawful protection will make any people the enemies, not only of the present Government, but of all governments.”

It is indeed the misfortune of all governments that they strengthen the very element they brutally attempt to suppress; namely, indignation, hatred and opposition in all classes of society to their bloody régime.

Public opinion had become quite seriously aroused over the Chicago meat-poisoners. It had almost begun to suspect that not only meat, but the entire food of the people, mental food included, is decayed and poisoned by our economy, the aim of which is not the welfare of humanity, but the profit of speculators.

Luckily for Armour, Swift and Nelson Morris, the paternal feelings of the State awakened into activity. Even Upton Sinclair, the Socialist, himself, in touching simplicity of heart, appealed to the President, expressing the hope that the highest magistrate of the land would spare no means to lay low the cattle- and men-destroyers of the stock-yards. Result, an investigation. Public opinion applauded. Oh, what bliss to have a strong government! One that always calls the millionaires to account. How naive! The entire matter will soon lose itself in smoke and dust.

The meat-investigation, led by the government, is actuated by patriotic motives, of course. Therefore the first consideration must be our export; the primal duty of a capitalistic State must be to conquer and hold markets and not to lose them. A government, the earnest attempt of which were to disclose the unclean methods of the privileged robbers, would have to declare itself bankrupt, and thereby sign its own death warrant.

The truth of the matter is that governmental investigation is always designed to pacify the popular anger over the criminal business practices of men like Armour, Swift et al.

We shall soon be informed that the investigation disclosed a few unpleasant features of the stockyards which really cannot be easily avoided in such a tremendous industry, but which will eventually be remedied.

People of this and other countries, you may now buy the stockyard products in good faith! The wisdom of paternal government stands sponsor for them.

In this way the good reputation of our national industry and commerce will be rescued from obloquy. The people will continue to be fed on carcasses and Government will again have proved itself the faithful agent and patron saint of Capitalism.

Too much common sense in this country! Common sense may suffice to discredit the story that the universe was created in six days or the legend of the Virgin Mary and the Child. Equally so may common sense be a necessary adjunct of horse-traders. But common sense is never sufficient to pave the way for great, liberating ideas. To accomplish the latter one must bear in mind the words of the father of Saint Simon. Every morning, when awakening his son, he greeted him with the following words, “Remember, my son, one must have enthusiasm to carry out great deeds.”

Several years ago the Italian king lamented the fact that his is a very dangerous profession. The same plaint was uttered by the Spanish king during the recent excitement in Madrid. The poor young man seems to eternally see the terrible bombs flying about his long kingly ears. Why will these reigning gentlemen not withdraw from their dangerous profession? Their parasite existence is as useless as it is injurious; it is neither necessary nor beneficial; it is a burden and a curse to humanity.

They really should welcome every bomb-thrower as an omen that their divine right has reached an end.

Authority

By Samuel Butler

Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy, proud and vain:
By this the fool commands the wise,
The noble with the base complies,
The sot assumes the rule of wit,
And cowards make the brave submit.

The Revolution in Russia

By Peter Kropotkin

The Russian Revolution has lately entered into a new phase. Dark gloom hung about the country during the months of January to April. Now it is all bright hopes owing to the unexpected results of the Duma elections all turning in favor of the Radicals. But before speaking of the new hopes, let us cast a glance on that terrible gloomy period which the country has just lived through.

In every revolution a number of local uprisings is always required to prepare the great successful effort of the people. So it has been in Russia. We have had the local uprisings at Moscow, in the Baltic provinces, in the Caucasus and in the villages of Central Russia. And each of these uprisings, remaining local, was followed by a terrible repression.

The General Strike, declared at Moscow in January last, did not succeed. The working men had suffered too much during the great General Strike in October, 1905, and the partial strikes which followed. And when the provocations of the Government compelled the Moscow workingmen to strike, the movement did not generalize. Only a few factories on the Presnya and a few railway lines joined it. The Grand Trunk—Moscow to St. Petersburg—continued to work, and troops were brought on it to Moscow.

As to the troops stationed at Moscow itself they showed signs of deep discontent, and probably would have sided with the people if the strike had been general and a crowd of 300,000 workingmen had flooded the streets, as they did flood in October last. But when they saw that the General Strike had failed they obeyed their commanders.

And yet the week during which a handful of armed revolutionists—less than 2,000—and the workers on strike in the Presnya fought against the artillery and the soldiers, and when several miles of barricades were built by the crowd—by the man and the boy in the street—this week proved how wrong were all the “fire-side revolutionists” when they proclaimed the impossibility of street warfare in a revolution.

As to the Letts and the Esthonians in the Baltic provinces, their uprising against their haughty and rapacious German landlords was a great movement. All over a large country the peasants and the artisans of the small towns rose up. They nominated their own municipalities, they sent away the German judges, refused to work for the landlords, paid no rents,—proceeded in short as if they were free. And if their uprising was finally drowned in blood, it has shown at least what the peasants must do all over Russia. In fact the latent insurrection continues still.

The repression which followed the uprising was terrible. The British press has not told one-tenth of the atrocities which were committed by the imperial troops in the Baltic provinces, along the Moscow to Kazan railway line, in the Caucasus, in Siberia, or in the Russian villages. And when we tried to tell the truth about these atrocities, either in some widely read English review, or before large public meetings, we always felt the dead wall of some inexplicable opposition rising against us. The treaty or agreement which has been concluded a few days ago between the Governments of Great Britain and Russia explains now the cause of the opposition to the divulgation in this country of facts which were openly published in the Russian papers, in Russia itself.

The repression was a story of a wholesale murder, accomplished by the troops systematically, in cold blood. Modern history knows only one similarly savage repression: the wholesale murders by the middle-class army at Paris after the defeat of the Commune, in May, 1871. And yet these murders were committed after a fierce fight, in the lurid light of burning Paris.

The detachment of the guard which was sent along the Moscow-Kazan line had not one single shot fired against it. The revolutionists had already left the line and disbanded when that regiment came. But at every station Colonel Minn, head of this detachment, and his officers shot from ten to thirty men, simply taking their names from lists supplied to the troops by the secret police. They shot them without any simulation of a trial, or even of identification. They shot them in batches, without any warning. Shot anyhow, from behind, into the heap. Colonel Minn shot them simply with his revolver.

As to the peasants in the Baltic provinces it was still worse. Whole villages were flogged. Those men whom a local landlord would name as “dangerous” were shot on the spot, without any further inquiries—very often a son for his father, one brother for another, an Ivanovsky for an Ivanitsky. . . . It was such an orgy of flogging and killing that a young officer, having himself executed several men in this way, shot himself next day when he realized what he had done.

In Siberia, in the Caucasus, the horrors were even more revolting. And in the villages of Russia, where the peasants had shown signs of unrest, the same executions went on, sometimes with an unimaginable cruelty, as was, for instance, the case in Tamboff, with that governor’s aid, Luzhenovsky, whom the heroic girl Spiridonova killed. “When I came to the villages and saw the old men who had grown insane after having been tortured under the whips, and when I had spoken to the mother of the girl who had flung herself into the well after the Cossacks had violated her, I felt that life was impossible so long as that man, Luzhenovsky, would go on unpunished.” Thus spoke this heroic girl on her trial.

But worse than that was in store. All the world has shuddered when it learned the tortures to which Miss Spiridonova was submitted by the police officer Zhdanoff and the Cossack officer Abramoff after her arrest. The tortures of our Montjuich comrades and brothers fade before the sufferings which were inflicted upon this girl. And all over Russia there was lately a sigh of satisfaction when that Abramoff was killed and the revolutionist who killed that beast made his escape, and again the other day when it was known that the other beast, Zhdanoff, had met the same fate.

The gloominess which prevailed in Russia when the Witte-Durnovo ministry had inaugurated the wholesale shooting of the rebels could not be described without quoting pages from the Russian newspapers. Over 70,000 people were arrested; the prisons were full to overflowing. Batches of exiles began to be sent, as of old, by mere order of the Administration, to Siberia. The old exiles, returning under the amnesty of November 2, 1905, meeting on their way home the batches of the Witte-Durnovo exiles. The revolutionists of all sections of the Socialist party, Revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, and even Social Democrats, took to revolver and bomb, and every day one could read in the Russian papers that one, two, or more functionaries of the Crown had been killed by the revolutionists in revenge for the atrocities they had committed. Scores of men and women, like Spiridonova, the sisters Izmailovitch, and so many other heroic women and young men, felt sick of life under such a system of Asiatic rule, and made the vow of taking revenge upon the executioners.

It was under such conditions that the elections to the Duma took place. And now the few supporters of the Tsar had to discover that their satraps had overdone the oppression. Various measures were taken by the Government to manipulate the elections so as to have a crushing majority in their favor. The Liberal candidates were arrested, the meetings forbidden, the newspapers confiscated—every governor of a province acting as a Persian satrap on his own responsibility. Those who spoke or went about for the advanced candidates were most unceremoniously searched and sent to jail. . . . And all that was—labor lost!

The reaction had developed within these three months such a bitter hatred against the Government that none but opposition candidates had any chance of being listened to and elected. “Are you against these wild beasts or for them?” This was the only question that was asked.

And the Constitutional Democrats obtained a crushing majority in the Duma (pronounce Dooma), such a majority that the Russian Government is now perplexed as to what is to be done next.

The Revolutionary Socialists and the Social Democrats abstained from taking any part in the elections, and therefore there are very few avowed Socialists in the Duma. But apart from that the Duma contains all those middle-class Radicals whose names have come to the front during the last thirty years as foes of autocracy.

The most interesting element in the Duma are the peasants, who have nearly 120 representatives elected. With the exception of some thirty men, who are of unsettled opinion, the peasant representatives are absolutely and entirely with the most advanced Radicals in political matters, and with the Socialist workingmen in all the labor demands. But, in addition to that, they put forward the great question—the greatest of our century—the land question.

“No one who does not till the land himself has any right to the land. Only those who work on it with their own hands, and every one of those who does so, must have access to the land. The land is the nation’s property, and the nation must dispose of it according to its needs.” This is their opinion—their faith, and no economists of any camp will shake it.

“Eighty years ago we were settled in these prairies,” one of those peasants said the other day. That land was a desert. “We have made the value of all this region; but half of it was taken by the landlords (in accordance with the law, of course; but we, peasants, do not admit that a law could be a law once it is unjust). It was taken by the landlords—we must have it back.”

“But if you take that land, and there are other villages in the neighborhood which have no land but their poor allotments, what then?”

“Then they have a right to it, just as we have. But not the landlords!”

There is all the Social Question, all the Socialist wisdom, in these plain words.

“If the peasants seize the land, then the factory hands will apply the same reasoning to the factories!” exclaim the terrified correspondents of the English papers in reporting such plain talk.

Yes, they will. Undoubtedly they will. They must. Because, if they don’t do it all our civilization must go to wreck and ruin—like the Roman, the Greek, the Egyptian, the Babylonian civilizations went to the ground.

Another important feature. The Russian peasants don’t trust their representatives. These men from the plough have understood the gist of parliamentarism better than those who have grown infected gradually by Parliament worship. Their election fell upon this or that man; but they knew they must not trust him. Election is somewhat of a piece of gambling. And therefore a number of private peasant delegates are now seen in the galleries of the Russian Duma, whom their villages have sent to keep watch over their representatives in Parliament. They know that these representatives will soon be spoiled and bribed one way or another. So they sent delegates—mostly old, respected peasants, not fine in words, not of the self-advertising class, men who never would be elected, but who will honestly keep their eye upon the M.P.'s.

However, although the Duma has been only a few days together, a general feeling grows in Russia that all this electioneering is not yet the proper thing. “What can the Duma do?” they ask all over Russia. “If the Government doesn’t want it they will send it away. How can 500 men resist the Government if they make up their minds to send them back to their homes?”

And so, all over Russia the feeling grows that the Parliament and its debates are not the right thing yet. It is only a preliminary to something else which is to come. “They will express our needs; they will agree upon certain things” . . . but a feeling grows in Russia that the action will have to come from the people.

And the underground work, the slow work of maturing convictions and of grouping together, goes on all over Russia as a preparation to something infinitely more important than all the debates of the Duma.

They don’t even pronounce the name of this more important thing. Perhaps most of them don’t know its name. But we know it and we may tell it. It is the Revolution: the only real remedy for the redress of wrong.

The Law of the “Survival of the Fittest”

By Emma Lee

The law of the “Survival of the Fittest” is the fetich with which every man who has succeeded in life at the expense of his less fortunate fellow-man conjures.

If he would only take the trouble to reason it out, he would find that this “law” is far from immutable. In prehistoric times, when the world was young, the “law” operated on the individual.

Learned men tell us that in this era of the world’s youth men were born, lived and died with no companionship save that which the (immutable) law of Being necessitated. Literally every man’s hand was against that of every other man.

Then came the era of the Patriarch, in which the weaker members of a family were protected by the stronger. The “law” shifted. It was no longer man against man, but family against family.

Next we find the Tribal era. Again the “law” shifted to meet the growing demands of human advancement. No longer family against family, but tribe against tribe.

Following the Tribal era came that of nations—countries. Again the “law” shifted. No longer was it tribe against tribe—but one nation against others.

This era is fast disappearing and the time is not far distant when the “law” will operate between but two classes in all the world—the class that hath and the class that hath not.

The ushering in of the dawn of the day when class distinctions no longer exist will sign the death warrant of that much vaunted “Law of the Survival of the Fittest.”

Life’s Gifts

By Olive Schreiner

(From Dreams.)

I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreamed Life stood before her, and held in each hand a gift—in the one Love, in the other Freedom. And she said to the woman, “Choose!”

And the woman waited long: and she said, “Freedom!”

And Life said, “Thou hast well chosen. If thou hadst said ‘Love,’ I would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that day I shall bear both gifts in one hand.”

I heard the woman laugh in her sleep.

The Ennobling Influence of Sorrow

(From Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis.”)

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things which are meant for me as much as for anybody else—the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver—would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colors of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passion of high import what in itself is base, cruel, and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.

The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I must frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem, one of the things I shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept it as a punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been punished, one might just as well never have been punished at all. Of course there were many things of which I was convicted that I had not done, but then there are many things of which I was convicted that I had done, and a still greater number of things in my life for which I was never indicted at all. And as the gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one is punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I have no doubt that it is quite right one should be. It helps one, or should help one, to realize both, and not to be too conceited about either. And if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live with freedom.

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong of society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duties towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irredeemable wrong. I can claim on my side that if I realize what I have suffered, society should realize what it has inflicted on me; and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.

Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made different for me than for others; must, indeed, by the very nature of the case be made so. The poor thieves and outcasts who are imprisoned here with me are in many respects more fortunate than I am. The little way in gray city or green field that saw their sin is small; to find those who know nothing of what they have done they need go no farther than a bird might fly between the twilight and the dawn; but for me the world is shrivelled to a hand’s-breadth, and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead. For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.

Still, in the very fact that people will recognize me wherever I go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass judgment both on themselves and me. I need not say I am not talking of particular individuals. The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so imperfect.

Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart. My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine. Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me. I remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater’s “Renaissance”—that book which has had such strange influence over my life—how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully live in sadness. I knew the church condemned accidia, but the whole idea seemed to me quite phantastic, just the sort of sin, I fancied a priest who knew nothing about real life would invent. Nor could I understand how Dante, who says that “sorrow remarries us to God,” could have been so harsh to those who were enamored of melancholy, if any such there really were. I had no idea that some day this would become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.

While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one desire. When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health, I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces still longer in order to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to entertain them, to invite them to sit down silently to bitter herbs and funeral-baked meats. I must learn how to be cheerful and happy.

The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends here, I tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my cheerfulness, in order to make them some slight return for their trouble in coming all the way from town to see me. It is only a slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel certain that pleases them most. I saw R—— for an hour on Saturday week, and I tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and ideas I am here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by the fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a real desire for life.

There is before me so much to do that I would regard it as a terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines—written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also—

“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
  Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for to-morrow,—
  He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.”

I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.

I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realized with perfect clearness of vision, and absolute intensity of apprehension.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such forms of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colors, modern landscape art is realizing for us pictorially what was realized in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a critical simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other; but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.

I remember talking once upon this subject to one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what she is—partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, but that of a child in some little garden weeping over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the City of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer’s day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realize a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep “heights that the soul is competent to gain.” We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one’s cell, and into the cell of one’s heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one’s house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one’s chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for me, who begins the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of which the Church is so fond—so rightly fond, I dare say—for in life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards “the gate which is called beautiful,” though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the mist go astray.

Anti-Militarian Documents

An American wrote to Tolstoy:—

"We are farmers, mechanics, merchants, manufacturers, teachers, and all we ask is the privilege of attending to our own business. We own our homes, love our friends, are devoted to our families, and do not interfere with our neighbors—we have work to do, and wish to work.

"Leave us alone!

"But they will not—these politicians. They insist on governing us and living off our labor. They tax us, eat our substance, conscript us, draft our boys into their wars. All the myriads of men who live off the government, depend upon the government to tax us, and in order to tax us successfully, standing armies are maintained. The plea that the army is needed for the protection of the country is pure fraud and pretence. The French Government affrights the people by telling them that the Germans are ready and anxious to fall upon them; the Russians fear the British; the British fear everybody; and now in America, we are told we must increase our navy and add to our army because Europe may at any moment combine against us.

"This is fraud and untruth. The plain people in France, Germany, England, and America are opposed to war. We only wish to be let alone. Men with wives, children, sweethearts, homes, aged parents, do not want to go off and fight some one. We are peaceable and we fear war; we hate it.

"We would like to obey the Golden Rule.

"War is the sure result of the existence of armed men. That country which maintains a large standing army will sooner or later have a war on hand. The man who prides himself on fisticuffs is going some day to meet a man who considers himself the better man, and they will fight. Germany and France have no issue save a desire to see which is the better man. They have fought many times—and they will fight again. Not that the people want to fight, but the Superior Class fan fright into fury, and make men think they must fight to protect their homes.

"So the people who wish to follow the teachings of Christ are not allowed to do so, but are taxed, outraged, deceived by governments.

"Christ taught humility, meekness, the forgiveness of one’s enemies, and that to kill was wrong. The Bible teaches men not to swear, but the Superior Class swear us on the Bible in which they do not believe.

"The question is, How are we to relieve ourselves of these cormorants who toil not, but who are clothed in broadcloth and blue, with brass buttons and many costly accoutrements; who feed upon our substance, and for whom we delve and dig?

"Shall we fight them?

"No, we do not believe in bloodshed; and besides that, they have the guns and the money, and they can hold out longer than we.

"But who composes this army that they would order to fire upon us?

"Why, our neighbors and brothers—deceived into the idea that they are doing God’s service by protecting their country from its enemies. When the fact is, our country has no enemies save the Superior Class, that pretends to look out for our interests, if we will only obey and consent to be taxed.

"Thus do they siphon our resources and turn our true brothers upon us to subdue and humiliate us. You cannot send a telegram to your wife, nor an express package to your friend, nor draw a cheque for your grocer until you first pay the tax to maintain armed men, who can quickly be used to kill you; and who surely will imprison you if you do not pay.

"The only relief lies in education. Educate men that it is wrong to kill. Teach them the Golden Rule, and yet again teach them the Golden Rule. Silently defy this Superior Class by refusing to bow down to their fetich of bullets. Cease supporting the preachers who cry for war, and spout patriotism for a consideration. Let them go to work as we do. We believe in Christ—they do not. Christ spoke what He thought; they speak what they think will please the men in power—the Superior Class.

"We will not enlist. We will not shoot on their order. We will not ‘charge bayonet’ upon a mild and gentle people. We will not fire upon shepherds and farmers, fighting for their firesides. Your false cry of ‘Wolf, wolf,’ shall not alarm us. We pay your taxes only because we have to, and we will pay no longer than we have to. We will pay no pew-rents, no tithes to your sham charities, and we will speak our minds upon occasion.

"We will educate men.

"And all the time our silent influence will be going out, and even the men who are conscripted will be half-hearted and refuse to fight. We will educate men into the thought that the Christ Life of Peace and Good-will is better than the Life of Strife, Bloodshed, and War.

“‘Peace on earth!’—it can only come when men do away with armies, and are willing to do unto other men as they would be done by.”

This is what a German soldier writes:—

"I went through two campaigns with the Prussian Guards (in 1866 and 1870), and I hate war from the bottom of my soul, for it has made me inexpressibly unfortunate. We wounded soldiers generally receive such a miserable recompense that we have indeed to be ashamed of having once been patriots. I, for instance, get ninepence a day for my right arm, which was shot through at the attack on St. Privat, 18th August, 1870. Some hunting dogs have more allowed for their keep. And I had suffered for years from my twice wounded arm. Already, in 1866, I took part in the war against Austria, and fought at Trautenau and Königgratz, and saw horrors enough. In 1870, being in the reserve, I was called out again; and, as I have already said, I was wounded in the attack at St. Privat: my right arm was twice shot through lengthwise. I had to leave a good place in a brewery, and was unable afterwards to regain it. Since then I have never been able to get on my feet again. My intoxication soon passed, and there was nothing left for the wounded invalid but to keep himself alive on a beggarly pittance eked out by charity . . .

"In a world in which people run round like trained animals, and are not capable of any other idea than that of over-reaching one another for the sake of mammon,—in such a world let people think me a crank; but, for all that, I feel in myself the divine idea of peace, which is so beautifully expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. My deepest conviction is that war is only trade on a larger scale—trade carried on by the ambitious and the powerful with the happiness of the peoples.

"And what horrors do we not suffer from it! Never shall I forget those pitiful groans that pierced one to the marrow!

"People who never did each other any harm begin to slaughter one another like wild animals, and petty slavish souls implicate the good God, making Him their confederate in such deeds.

“My neighbor in the ranks had his jaw broken by a bullet. The poor wretch went wild with pain. He ran like a madman, and in a scorching summer heat could not even get water to cool his horrible wound. Our commander, the Crown Prince, wrote in his diary: ‘War—is an irony on the Gospels.’”

The Skeleton

By Emma Clausen

I was alone, the day’s hard work was done, And every one had left the lecture-room; The last faint flashes of the dying sun Were slowly fading in the rising gloom, And gradually in the shades of night All things were wrapped, but through the darkness bleak Gazed still a skeleton, all bare and white, With sightless, empty eye, with hollow cheek; And deep within my heart a voice arose And spoke of days that passed midst fear and care; Of endless, wakeful nights without repose Which led to vaults of darkness and despair. A thousand questions, beating on my brain, Like furious winds beat on the ocean’s tides, Cried loud for answer—but they cried in vain, For who can tell what death or darkness hides? Who knows through what deep sorrow they have gone, Their age how lonely, and their youth how drear? Who knows the wrong the world to them has done— These bleak, bare bones, ere they have landed here? Who now can tell how hard the lot has been That they to bear once, and the road how steep? Who knows the terrors that these eyes have seen, The tears, who counted them, that they do weep? I wonder, oh, I wonder, did this chest Enclose a tender heart within its frame? Lived there a feeling soul once in this breast, Or did it hide but evil, rage and shame? What have they done, these white and slender hands? Did they appear to comfort, help and bless? Or did they come to curse and break the bands Of love and joy, of home and happiness? Was it the laborer’s shirt, the convict’s smut, Was it the tramp’s torn, faded coat he wore? The cloak, the students gave in jolly mood, Was it the first one that these shoulders bore? In vain I ask—but one thing I do know: He suffered—robbed of comfort, strength and health, Through want and misery he had to go, While others revell’d in the hoarded wealth.

At Night

By a Dreamer with Open Eyes

Wounded by love, too weary to hate or despise, I drag myself through the damp night along the streets of New York. Not that I am altogether shelterless, like the unfortunate tramp to whom a ten-cent lodging-house would seem a luxury—it is my soul, sore and bruised by the cruel touch of life, that vainly seeks shelter in the harmony of kindred spirits.

I possess enough for a night’s lodging, but all such places terrify me like the horrors of eternal damnation. Every inch of space from roof to basement seems to me to be filled with the groans and curses of aching hearts; the atmosphere is stifling with the breath of herded humanity, desperately seeking bread and affection.

For these beings, ever in a mad chase during the day, night means relief. They would be lost without it. If Providence exists in this confused life of ours, it purposely created darkness, realizing that the terrific struggle of the human species with one another cannot be endured longer than twelve hours. Yet there are many souls in pain to whom even the night brings no solace.

Broadway lies deserted in the semi-darkness. In the dim light of the street-lamps a group of sewer-workers are at work. One of them disappears into the dark opening and his fellow-workers are bending over him, passing the tools to him. In the flickering light their features appear haggard and distorted; equally distorted are their desires and passions.

In their presence I recollect a stereotyped argument against a social order based on economic independence: will man work if freed from the reins and the whip? Will not society perish because of insufficient production? As if man were but a spaniel or a mule, whom only slavish means of brutal force or famine and want could drive to work!

That a free being should love activity is not at all surprising; but that the man of to-day does not rebel with all his might against the terribly monotonous and deadening drudgery, in no way beneficial to any living creature, is wonderful indeed.

A gay party of well-dressed men and women are passing the group of laborers with contemptuous indifference. And yet it is the agony and despair of thousands like these that pay for such orgies.

I wearily tramp on. A woman, worn and withered with life, approaches me. Does she really represent Vice, so much denounced and fought by priests, puritans, and moralists? Sad, indeed, that Vice should stalk about with sunken eyes and such a weary expression. True Vice has neither conscience nor care; it is vivacious and reckless. The half-frightened, half-questioning look of this woman, however, speaks only of want and fatigue . . .

Puritans who imagine that any man could find joy and forgetfulness in the embrace of this unfortunate can be at ease. Out of this soul no one will ever drink the passion and ecstasy which a modern philosopher calls Arcadian bliss.

If this woman could bring love and passion, I should hail her as a liberator, a harbinger of gladness. But she trades only in wretched substitutes which poverty forces on sale.

Ye theologians and moralists, why not wage war against poverty rather than against sin? Ah, this teeth-chattering sin on the streets! How thin, how pale, how full of dread it is! Not at all seductive and tempting like Eve’s apple. Rather is it decrepit and musty like the soul of a Puritan.

But I am a pariah to-night. Myself in pain, I look into the eye of another soul in pain. She seeks the dollar, but at the bottom of her tortured being may be hidden an intense longing for sympathy and affection.

The clock strikes three. I turn into Forty-second Street, towards Grand Central Station. On the left side, in a large lighted show-window of a furniture store, stands a bed in Louis XV style. Over it, in large letters, is written:

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and St. John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.”

How sardonic life seems in the face of human suffering.

That Holy Law

Lord Bacon tells us that one of the seven sages of Greece was wont to say, that laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies were caught, and the great break through. Many hundreds of years after the Greek sages, to wit, A. D. 1699, Sir Samuel Garth wrote this: “Little villains must submit to fate, that great ones may enjoy the world in state.”

Over a century before Shakespeare expressed the same thought this wise: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robed and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags a pigmy’s straw can pierce it.”

In a recent issue of the N. Y. Sun District Attorney Jerome is quoted as follows:

"The reason that men of wealth who have committed crime are so comparatively seldom convicted is not because of the disinclination of the prosecuting attorney to proceed or of juries to convict, but it arises from the fact that the rich man does not have to personally be in as close relations to the fact constituting the crime as some poor fellow, the exigency of whose situation is grave.

“Crimes committed by wealthy men are generally in connection with trade, commerce and finance, and what is done wrong is not done by them personally, but is done by some subordinate employee, whose action has been ultimately controlled by the rich and powerful man. This leaves between the doer of the act and the man really responsible a chain of events and persons—the result of this is, not infrequently that the connection between the responsible is often remote. To bring the person really responsible to justice he has to be connected by legal evidence with the doer of the act, and as usually every one connected with the transaction is an accomplice and so has to be corroborated, it is often absolutely impossible to make out a case which will stand for a minute in a court.”

And yet the labor of the poor ultimately pays the entire cost of supporting a government which never punishes the criminal rich, the “captains of industry.”

A. T. Heist.

Aim and Tactics of the Trades-Union Movement

By Max Baginski

As I endeavored to prove in my article on this subject in the June number of “Mother Earth,” trades-unionism stood, from its very beginning, in extreme opposition to the existing political and economical powers. The latter not only suspected every labor organization of aiming to improve the condition of its members within the limits of the wage-system, but they also looked upon the trades-union as the deadly enemy of wage-slavery,—and they were right. Every labor organization of sincere character must needs wage war upon the existing economic conditions, since the continuation of the same is synonymous with the exploitation and enslavement of labor.

The enmity of these antagonistic forces is so deeply rooted that the very organizations which were created for the purpose of stemming the tide of revolutionary ideas, sooner or later, became influenced by the latter. In France and Germany the Church organized labor-unions to counteract the growth of Socialism and Anarchism. But these “yellow” organizations, as they were called, soon grew beyond the control of the clergy. They rapidly developed out of Christian prayer societies into proletarian fighting organizations. When confronted, during strikes and lockouts, with the necessity of either following the lead of the priests or joining forces with their brothers, their Christian foundation began to totter; they realized that their sympathies in the great economic struggle were not with the most benighted institution of all ages, the Church.

The clergy, too, learned a valuable lesson. They were like hens hatching duck eggs. When the young ones took to water, they realized, to their horror, that they had hatched not their own kind. The Church had hoped that Christian methods might drill the workingmen into servility under the banner of capitalism, but the spirit of discontent and revolt soon proved more powerful than the hope for the Hereafter. Much as economists may regret it, the workingman cannot continue to be a mere tool, a “hand”; the industrial and social pressure that rests so heavily upon him forces him to use his reason, to see and judge things for himself. A close examination of existing conditions will convince the workingmen that their liberation will never be effected in a society which treats the producer as a stepchild, as an inferior being.

The wealth that labor creates is labor’s strongest fetters. Enslaved, robbed of its independence and liberty, deprived of all that makes life beautiful and joyous, its sole function is to accumulate riches for the masters.

Woe to the tool if it awaken to consciousness, if it attempt to show a sign of own life! The entire machinery of government is brought to bear against it. Every attempt to secure better pay or shorter hours the law considers criminal. The same brutality that was employed to crush the slave uprising of ancient times is manifested to-day to crush strikes, to destroy them in the bud. Various labor massacres, as at Homestead, Hazelton and at numerous other labor centres, are based on the notion that the workingman has no right to shape his own life, to decide for himself, or to manifest his desires in any manner whatever. The force that compels hundreds and thousands to continue their life of hell is by no means less severe, less cutting than the whip or cat-o’-nine-tails which was used to lash the slaves into submission. It is the force of hunger, of poverty.

Whenever poverty raises a threatening hand, government intervenes in favor of capital. It becomes the servant of the latter, the active enemy of labor. As if its only function were the subjection of the people to the arbitrary will of Mammon or to crush every murmur of discontent and to drown the faintest indication of rebellion in a bath of human blood.

Not that clear-headed men had not always insisted that the mission of the State is the destruction of human life, but they were always met with the assurance that it is the abuse of Government which is responsible for its crimes. “The mission of the State, however, is to bring about a just settlement between the contending elements in society and to see that justice and fair play be given to all.”

A close study of the general history of Government disproves this assertion a thousandfold. Indeed, if one would take the trouble to make an examination of the various laws of the country, he would behold a chain of tremendous dimensions, every link of which was forged in the interest of the few, against the many. After all, law is but the legal form of conspiracy on the part of the possessing class against the non-possessing, and the State is the right arm, the brutal fist of that conspiracy.

To what extent Government exerts its powers for the protection of the money-bags has been illustrated by Governor Gooding, of Idaho. He recently issued a proclamation to the bankers of Idaho and Colorado, calling upon them to raise a fund of $25,000 to aid the prosecution of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. Just let us have enough money and there will not be the slightest difficulty of sending these obnoxious labor leaders to the gallows. Is not this confession sufficiently frank? Do we need a more candid avowal as to the venal character of our courts? We are greatly indebted to Governor Gooding for his brutal frankness; he has torn the mask of Justice and honesty from the face of Authority, and has revealed the monster in all its damning nakedness—cold, hard and shameless, ready to sell out to the highest bidder (or, ready to be prostituted for a respectable price).

In view of all this, what can the workingman expect from the State (government)? Nothing but treachery and deception; nothing but the cruelest injustice and inhuman brutality in its attitude toward labor and labor troubles.

The new conception of Right, which is not based upon the so-called equality before God, but which aims at social and economic equality on earth, is still to be conquered. It will not come down to us from heaven, nor need oppressed humanity hope to receive this right from Kings or Presidents, or from authority of any kind. The human race must become its own liberator; it must fight the good fight; and in that struggle for liberty one of the great factors will be a revolutionary trades-union movement, with uncompromising, revolutionary tactics. Such a movement must express the revolutionary spirit of the masses along economic lines; and eventually this revolutionary trades-union movement will become the arena where will be fought the battle for a new order of society—a society based upon the free expression of life in its deepest, richest form.

The work of the trades-union movement must, therefore, consist in the preparation of its members for that battle; it must cultivate in them strength, clear-headedness and energy. No one disputes the utility and necessity of wrestling as much as possible for higher pay and shorter hours; but that should be considered in the light of merely preparatory exercises, as training for the final event, the Social Revolution and the overthrow of wage-slavery.

This aim, needless to mention, necessitates a radical change of present-day trades-union tactics. It were absurd to expect that those who stand for the continuation of the capitalistic and governmental régime should by some miracle assist in the overthrow of that régime. It is, therefore, neither logical nor consistent to hope for any real results through legislative means; nor can the workingman achieve anything by the way of arbitration with his masters. On the other hand, organized labor will find the most effective weapon in the method of Direct Action. Nothing wounds Capitalism so deeply as the discontinuation of work. So long as the workingmen are willing to negotiate and arbitrate; so long as they tolerate their leaders to be dined and wined, just so long Capitalism need have no fear. But when the toiler awakens to the realization that direct action will bring him closer to his own kind, will develop the spirit of solidarity, and at the same time give a fatal blow to the system of exploitation and robbery, he will have gained a weapon that nothing can equal in efficacy. In that case the workingman would no longer be in the stupid position of a client who submits to be fleeced by his lawyer because he knows naught of the tricks and machinations of the law. Once they should learn the methods of war, they would no longer be depended on the chance and whims of jurisprudence, but on their own fighting ability. A revolutionary trades-union could never attack Capitalism upon legal grounds, realizing that the law has ever been in illicit relation with mammon. These attacks must, therefore, be grounded in the solidarity which unites and strengthens those that stand for a common cause, a noble ideal—only this can equip man for a great struggle.

Though the very basis of trades-unionism is solidarity, it has never yet been thoroughly understood nor practised. True, the unions help their sister in distress; material aid is given in times of strikes, in time of storm. But this giving has always borne an artificial, forced, obligatory character, and consequently it produced only artificial results. The various unions, though affiliated, often possessed but little mutual understanding or sympathy. As a result, strikes could not—nor did they—bring about radical results; the enemy triumphed and labor succumbed to his whip.

The thing most sadly needed in the labor movement of this country is a proper understanding of the importance and value of work. The powers that be have recognized that long ago. No wonder they dread the possibility of Direct Action—the general strike. They know that, should Labor cease to produce, the entire structure of our society would crumble to ashes.

In Europe the workingmen have accomplished not only external improvements through the widespread practice of Direct Action and the General Strike, but they have also achieved moral victories since they were able to prove that organized labor can bring every function in society to a standstill. When the General Strike was inaugurated in Barcelona, crippling the entire life of the city, the authorities quickly conceded the most important demands of the strikers. This and similar tests have proven how quickly all values of capitalistic economy turn into waste paper. The most daring speculator on the Stock Exchange loses heart when he sees the moving spirit of bonds and stocks disappear. Indeed, the entire humbug of so-called values ceases to exist, as soon as the sole, real value, the blood and nerves of the human system, stop their activity—labor.

The Russian revolutionary movement, for instance, has become a perilous menace to Russian autocracy; it has made the Russian Tzar tremble more violently since the workingmen and the peasants have awakened to the consciousness of their economic power than has been the case during the last fifty years. The numerous strikes, the peasant revolts and the labor uprisings are fated to bring about the downfall of the barbaric Russian régime far quicker than all the efforts of the liberals can ever accomplish.

Witte was one of the first Russians to realize how far-reaching labor and its influence can be. No wonder he always hastened to assure the Russian creditors, whenever he went begging for a new loan, that the industrial conditions were in perfect order.

Labor supports society. If society is unwilling to assign to labor its proper place, the people have the right to withdraw their support and use their best efforts in an endeavor to create a new form of social life, where each man can find his sphere and his highest expression. A correct trades-unionism will prove the most important factor in the fate of our social progress; Direct Action as well as the General Strike must be its methods of combat.

The Reporter

By Iwan Turgenyeff

Two friends sat at a table drinking tea.

Suddenly they were startled by the sounds of violent commotion on the street. They heard pitiful groans, loud curses, and boisterous, malicious laughter.

“Somebody’s getting a thrashing,” remarked one of the friends, looking out on the street.

“Who is it? A burglar? or a murderer, perhaps?” asked the other. “Look here, whoever it be, we can’t allow this thing to go on. The man is entitled to a fair trial. Come, let us intercede for the poor man.”

“Why, the fellow that’s getting thrashed is not a murderer at all.”

“Not a murderer?! Well, then a thief, perhaps? All the same, we must save him from the mob.”

“No, he is not a thief, either.”

“Well, then perhaps an absconding treasurer, or a railroad swindler or an army commissioner, or a lawyer, or, perhaps, a too-outspoken editor, one of those noble souls that sacrifice themselves for the common good. Whoever it be, we must save him.”

“My dear boy, you are wide of the mark. They are thrashing a reporter.”

“A reporter? Hm, well, I guess we’d better drink our tea first.”

If They Couldn’t Grow Flowers

By Grace Potter

“Plant the rose-tree here, gardener!” cried the brown pot of loam.

Yes, the gardener thought he would. He put the little tree in carefully. He watered it. He patted the loam about the roots, smiled approbation and went his way.

Flaming red roses grew on that tree. Beautiful, sweet-smelling roses. The tree and the loam were happy to have such flowers.

After quite a time the roses stopped blooming. The loam was troubled and so was the tree. If they couldn’t grow flowers, what was the use of being together?

“I could nourish pansies!” cried the brown pot of loam one day as he saw the gardener pass with some fine ones.

“I could bring forth roses again,” whispered the rose-tree, as she nodded sweetly in answer to the beckoning of a black pot of loam nearby, “if you take me over there, gardener!”

“For shame to you both!” cried the gardener. “Have I not planted you once, little rose-tree? Did you not receive her, loam of the brown pot? Yet you ask for change!”

“But we can grow no more flowers! Wasn’t that what we came to each other for?”

“You can grow them if you try hard,” said the gardener.

“But we didn’t grow the first ones by trying. They just came of themselves. Though we have put forth every effort since then, we can grow no more. Give me the pansies!”

“You are wicked things, all of you!” cried the gardener, thoroughly angry. And though the pansies sighed and the rose-tree cried, though the loam in the black pot begged and the loam in the brown pot pleaded, he planted the pansies, as he had intended at first, in the black pot.

There were only a few weak little blossoms that ever came on the pansies, and then they, too, stopped blooming.

One day a stranger walked in the garden. He saw how distressed the rose-tree and the pansies were, and when they asked his help he gave it cheerfully.

When the rose-tree had been transplanted she bloomed again even more beautifully than before. Big velvet pansies came out on the pansy plants. Every one who passed that way turned for refreshment to the beauty and fragrance of those flowers.

One day came the gardener. He stopped to look.

“What have you done?” he cried, in a rage.

They answered in one voice, “See our flowers, gardener!”

He cried that those flowers had no right to existence. And he threw the black pot and the brown pot and all they contained over the wall of the garden.

They fell in a wild field where lived the stranger who had befriended them. He tended them carefully. They bloomed, O, how they bloomed!

The stranger’s name is Freedom. He lets the flowers of love bloom in the lives of men and women. What use, he says, of their being together if they couldn’t grow flowers?

The Confiscated Picture

It was quite a while since the agents of Comstock had made an important raid. No wonder the royal chamberlain of governmental morals of the United States felt irritated and annoyed.

As if the land were not always endangered by the immoral: like the devil, sneaking through the smallest keyhole, they steal into all circles of society and plant the poisonous seeds in the cornfields of the pious and virtuous.

Life in this world of nudity and shamelessness was hard indeed; it offered nothing but straw and thistles to goodness and chastity; whereas those that had neither conscience nor care, feasted on rich wines and bathed in the glowing sun upon green meadows, full of sinful life’s joys.

Sin, in all her voluptuousness, saturated the entire human race; she had but to intone the ancient song of love and passion, and all were enraptured. Young and old, regardless of station or wealth, worshiped at her shrine. It was sad that the Lord, in all His severity, could calmly look upon the triumphal march of indecent humanity. . . .

Divine records prove that when His wrath was aroused He caused the entire human race to perish, saving only an old drunkard and his family. Why should not something similar be repeated? Has the Lord no courage, or has He lost all faith in the possible reformation of humanity by the help of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations?

Ah, if only I, Anthony B. Comstock, were the Lord, how different things would look! I should surround the entire universe, from dawn to sunset, with my emissaries, spies and detectives.

Woe to the moon, if she dare to appear from behind the clouds without proper garments! Woe also to the sun, if he dared to rise without completing his toilet behind the heavenly screens!

In a corner of the office hung a picture which one of the agents had stolen on a raid. Its face was turned to the wall.

The Royal Chamberlain scrutinized it closely. It was a frightfully indecent affair; it represented the naked, voluptuous body of a woman. He frowned. The entire Creation seemed a botched job to him. In vain he asked himself, again and again, why the Lord did not create men in the image of the seven lean years of Egypt. In vain, too, he asked himself, what one can possibly find to admire in a woman. Pink cheeks, tempting dimples, white arms, snowy breasts and legs—bah, is there really any truth in the theory that Nature knows no morality? In that case the entire scheme of the world is wrong, indecent and in perverse contravention of the postal laws of the United States.

One who would blush at the nudity of a broomstick has no other course but suicide—a heroic death, indeed. All the newspapers would report that A. B. Comstock had committed suicide out of decency, and because he could endure the thought no longer that every human being stood naked in his boots.

He meditated a moment, and then concluded that, hateful as life seemed in these immoral days, he had to live, if only for the enemy’s sake. In his imagination he could see long articles in publications like “Lucifer,” “The Truth Seeker,” “Liberty” and “Mother Earth,” heaping coals of fire upon his head. His terrified fantasy could actually see the mad cancan-dance of the letters. With wild eyes he followed their movements, and what he read threw him into convulsions.

"Anthony B. Comstock’s suicide is a new argument for those optimists who forever seek for a redeeming feature in the greatest scoundrel. The mission of this man Comstock will remain an eternal blot upon the escutcheon of the Republic. Future generations will be unable to understand that the entire legislative body of America had not half a dozen honest and determined men in their midst to lay Comstock low. Men that, cowed by the conspiracy of hypocrites, swine and eunuchs, dared not bring this national nuisance to account.

"However, we want to give the devil his due. Comstock has rendered the country a great service by his suicide. It is only to be regretted that he did not take this useful step twenty years ago.

“May his soul enter that heaven where angels are dressed in overalls, sweaters and double-breasted coats!”

This sarcasm was too venomous. No, he could not die. He must remain and drink the bitter cup to the last drop.

The world shall yet learn that he was a Hercules, whose nose braved the odors of the Augean Stables. Vice and indecency must be exterminated at all costs. If only his agents were not so deucedly stupid. More than once have they placed him in an embarrassing position. Why, only the other day one of them confiscated a little booklet named “Food for Pious Souls.” The agent thought it was a purposely misleading title; but he would not be fooled. In triumph he carried the booklet to his chief, in happy anticipation of the praise he would receive for his zeal. But his joy was of short duration. A few hours later one of the managers of a Bible Association stormed into the office, and in loud, angry tones demanded to know whether Comstock and his staff had gone mad, that they dared lay sacrilegious hands on the Gospel. Oh, horrors! The confiscated booklet consisted of quotations from Holy Writ.

Comstock was furious. He was ready to strangle the whole office force, himself included. The very thought of it made his blood boil.

To regain his equanimity he decided to take a stroll through the streets. He knew that the devil was at work, doing mischief; and who but he himself could battle successfully with Satan?! He leisurely walked about, scrutinizing the windows of every book and picture store. In one of them he beheld an illustrated postal card that fairly made his hair rise. It represented a danseuse, her bodice cut low, shamelessly displaying faultless arms and tempting shoulders; her skirt was outrageously abbreviated, exposing charming, well-formed legs, and—her eyes! My, what glowing passion, what fatal seductiveness! . . .

In less than one second the Vandal of the 20th Century rushed into the store, seized the offending picture and then hastened back to his office.

This case must be attended to at once, if the world is to continue.

Such damning evidence should suffice to send the best man to State’s prison.

Our Torquemada quivered with the joy of anticipation. When he reached the office, he showed the confiscated card to his secretary; the latter scrutinized it closely; a malicious smile struggled on his face, as he pointed to the rift upon the neck of the danseuse. With one twist of his hand the secretary folded the face of the woman; behold! another face appeared. Horrors! It was the face of Anthony B. Comstock.

Unfortunate man, he had confiscated his own image!

The Revolutionary Spirit in French Literature

By Alvan F. Sanborn

Whatever may be the verdict of posterity regarding the literary and philosophical activity of this restless, problematic period, the verdict of the contemporary world seems to be that Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola are the three biggest literary philosophers (or philosophical litérateurs) of their day and generation; and it is a noteworthy fact, to put it mildly, that the attitude towards society of each one of these three intellectual giants is, more or less openly, revolutionary. All three may be claimed by the parties of revolt without any considerable forcing of the note.

Tolstoy, by reason of his adoration of Jesus, his insistence on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, his advocacy of non-resistance as the most effective form of resistance, and his attempts to incorporate liberty in education and, by education, in life, seems to fall naturally enough into the category of the “Christian Anarchist.” But, whether Tolstoy be a “Christian Anarchist” or a “Christian Socialist,” as certain Christian Socialists rather presumptuously claim, is immaterial. He is opposed to the established order, and belongs indisputably with the revolutionists.

Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either to themselves or to him.

The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so easy to define.

Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness, bordering on advocacy, the sufferings and struggles of the laborers, and stated with perfect fairness the most revolutionary ideas and ideals. That he had in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works, and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, the propagandiste par le fait.

Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine of Germinal to the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincere propagandiste par le fait was explained, excused, admired, extolled by him.

This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an advocate of the propagande par le fait. He extended an equal cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic, in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative, that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.

Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a poet than either. His later works, and Germinal at least among his earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had of instituting devil-worship.

It is not normal for the poet to have a coherent system, and it is extremely doubtful if Zola had one. Still, the poet must have, like other mortals, his personal point of view; and Zola’s personal point of view (which is not for a moment to be confounded with his point of view as a poet) seems to have been that of the scientists of his novels,—anarchistic as to end, but evolutionary as to means: the attitude of Guillaume Froment in Paris, who saw in “unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by attraction, by free and ardent love, the only scientific theory of society,” and who “dreamed of the emancipated individual evolving, expanding without any restraint whatsoever, for his own good and for the good of all.” The attitude of Bertheroy (Paris), “who worked, in the seclusion of his laboratory, for the ruin of the present superannuated and abominable régime, with its God, its dogmas, its laws, but who desired also repose, too disdainful of useless acts to join in the tumults of the street, preferring to live tranquil, rich, recompensed, in peace with the government (whatever it might be), all in foreseeing and preparing the formidable issue of to-morrow,”—the Bertheroy who says: “I have only contempt for the vain agitations of politics, revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Of what use is it to wish to hurry things when a single step of science does more to advance humanity towards the city of justice and truth than a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Science alone is revolutionary: it alone can make not only truth, but justice prevail, if justice is ever possible here below. Of a certainty it alone brushes away dogmas, expels the gods, creates light and happiness. It is I, member of the Institute, rich and decorated, who am the only revolutionist.” The attitude of Jordan (Travail), “a completely emancipated spirit, a tranquil and terrible evolutionist, sure that his labor will ravage and renew the world. . . . According to Jordan, it is science solely that leads humanity to truth, to justice, to final happiness, to the perfect city of the future towards which the peoples are so slowly and painfully advancing.”

All things considered, it would not be unfair, perhaps, to address to Zola himself the words which he made this Jordan speak to the reforming hero of Travail, Luc Froment: “Only, my noble friend, you are nothing more nor less than an anarchist, complete evolutionist as you believe yourself; and you have every reason to say that, while it is with the formula of Fourier that we must begin, it is by l’homme libre dans la commune libre that we must end.” And, if Zola had been thus addressed, it is not unlikely that he would have replied laughingly, as he made his Luc reply, “At any rate, let’s begin; and we shall see in due time whither logic leads us.”

There is no doubt possible regarding Zola’s belief in a good time coming. His later books were fairly saturated with a sublime faith almost childlike. There is also no doubt that he believed that science, consecrated to the service of humanity is quite capable of regenerating the world, as he indicated by the communistic experiment of Luc in Travail. But whether he believed that science will be consecrated to the service of humanity, or whether he was presenting a method which might be employed, and which he simply hoped, almost against hope, would be employed, is not so clear. Thus, in the last chapter of Travail, after giving a beautiful picture of the superb results of the peaceable revolution accomplished through the altruistic initiative of Luc in the commune of Beauclair, he added a sort of apocalyptic vision of the happenings in the principal divisions of the big world outside, in which the same superb results have been secured by violence,—by a bloody, socialistic coup d’état, by the multiplication of anarchistic bombs, by a universal war,—quite as if he would say to the classes in power: “I have shown you how society may be renewed. I have shown you the way of your salvation, the only way. If you would but walk in this way, you might save yourselves and the world with you. But you will not. You are too stupid, too selfish, too obstinate, too corrupt. You will not. I have known you only too long, and I know you will not. Well, then, so much the worse for you! Expropriation, massacre, annihilation, await you!”

If you ask intellectual Frenchmen, without distinction of social position or political faith, who is the foremost living French man of letters, five out of six will answer, without an instant’s hesitation, Anatole France. Less pictorial, less colossal, and less epic than Zola, but more penetrating and more profound; esthetic and erudite (in the good old-fashioned sense of the latter word), subtile, suave, and refined; abundantly endowed with the humor and the wit in which Zola was deficient; as impeccable in point of language and style as Zola was careless, as measured as Zola was violent, as gentle as Zola was brutal, as finished as Zola was crude; as perfect an embodiment of the Greek spirit as Zola, if he had only a keener sense of the grotesque, would have been of the Gothic,—Anatole France is none the less a redoubtable iconoclast,—the most redoubtable iconoclast of his generation, perhaps. A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” M. France is one of these rare men. He combines the amiable doubt of Montaigne with the mocking irreverence of Voltaire and the subversive grace of Renan. “The end which M. France seems to pursue persistently,” says one of his literary brethren, “is the demolition of the social edifice by the force of a logic tinctured with irony, without anger, and without phrases. By as much as Zola, Tailhade, and Mirbeau are ardent and passionate when they attack society, by so much is M. France calm and feline; but he is not, on that account, the less to be feared.”

As the most eminent living representative of the best classic traditions of French prose, M. France is the idol of the lettered youth of France. From admiration of form to acceptance of the substance underlying the form is but a step. His ideas insinuate themselves consequently into the very penetralia of culture,—that exquisite culture which brooks the presence of nothing common or unclean,—and they act as a disintegrating force in circles where downright revolutionary propaganda cannot enter.

In his writings, Anatole France is the precise intellectual counterpart—at every point but that of Catholicism, and even here his passion for Augustine, Chrysostom, and the other Church Fathers deters him from displaying an uncomely asperity—of his own adorable creation, the Abbé Coignard (from “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard,” M. Coignard belongs to the eighteenth century), the delicious Catholic révolté, who juggles with principles and human institutions as if they were Merry Andrew’s painted spheres; the railing anarchist who lashes with jests and whose only bombs are bons mots. And the best characterization it is possible to give of M. France, the genial iconoclast, is to repeat certain of his observations on the character of his Abbé and certain of the sayings he puts into his Abbé’s mouth,—which I accordingly do in the following detached paragraphs, making no pretence of preserving in the translation the peculiar savor and charm of the original:—

Of the Character of Jerome Coignard

“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and never accepted without examination the common opinion.”

“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi . . . He preserved, in his boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful promenader. . . . It is certain that the world, to his eyes, resembled less the deserts of the Thébaide than the gardens of Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character and the elemental principle of his teaching.”

“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness. . . . He despised men with tenderness. He endeavored to teach them that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”

“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically, and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”

“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part, it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”

“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”

Some of Jerome Coignard’s Sayings

Of Society and Governments:

“After the destruction of all the false principles, society will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall have dethroned Jupiter.”

“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor prevent us from living.”

“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are governed in one fashion or another, and ministers are imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”

“These assemblies (parliaments) will be founded upon the confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They will impose on the heads of the government the task of executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them. They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”

Of the Army:

“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will be content. The military condition has this also in keeping with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein; and it is clear that we were not made to think.”

“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the end of the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to glory.”

“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessities of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that Christians should continue to honor the trade of butcher and headsman, when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a word, among civilized peoples the illustriousness of the citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”

Of the Academy:

“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”

"If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends to control usage and which can only follow it?

“The Académistes or Académiciens were instituted, as you know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity, and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another Montaigne, tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la province.”

“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrat?”

Of Justice, Courts, and Judges:

“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it; but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order, and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often little part, and which are sometimes accomplished unconsciously.”

“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which is generally opposed to it.”

“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine hands.” (Since M. France wrote these words, the images of the Christ have been removed from the French courts.)

“What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the interests of this mass of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses which constitute communities, and of which they (the judges) are the blind conservators.”

“Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and their justice is crude and superficial. . . . They are men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether they are excellent or detestable. . . . Furthermore, it should be observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever so little meditative and free that does not feel how much there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the right to feel it.”

“By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so terrible to certain European peoples that they have them assisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot. From which it appears that chance, in its blindness, guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are held well outside the affair of which they see only the exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simply to decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply them. We are told that assizes of this sort give absurd results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts rendered in this fashion which may be inept and cruel, but of which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak, attributable to nobody. Injustice seems tolerable when it is sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary.”

"Just now the little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves and assassins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and assassination that I cannot endure even the copy of them regularized by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and homicides than by imitating them. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling misdemeanors and crimes in the name of equilibrium and symmetry?

“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanor and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route.”

Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is prone to them. He fears nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in nothing, not even in his own unbelief. “If ever M. Anatole France,” says Gaston Deschamps, “seeks martyrdom, it will be to confess the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no truth”; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M. Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of this chapter.

In spite of the dilettante humor or, to be more accurate, the dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not remain within his tour d’ivoire during that strange Dreyfus affair which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator—for one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of Jérôme Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired why he would “reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies”—

“My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults. It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the pick here and there to the walls of the cellar and garden to frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins.”

M. France is a member of the executive committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organization of the Universités Populaires; he presided on the occasion of the Victor Hugo Centennial over a gigantic mass meeting of the latter, in which he gave “a little blow of the pick” to clericalism; and in 1903 he contributed an introduction to Premier Combes’ volume Campagne Laïque, in defence of anti-clericalism.

At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the anarchists, he said:—

"Citoyens, master-spirits who are our friends have come here to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher. As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.

"He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious aristocracies.

"Citoyens, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge, of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have had a happy inspiration in singling out for honor the memory of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work, knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future, announced the new era, the coming of the proletariat into a pacified and comforted world.

“His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot, whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the proletariat.”

Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave Mirbeau (to whom M. France’s Jérôme Coignard was dedicated) is the fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as either. He surpasses every living French writer in portraying the monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and disgust; and his irony—too often fulminated, in violation of the commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic to him—rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying to the last degree; “one of those combative natures,” says Eugène Montfort, “who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the nature of an animate being, breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life.”

His Calvaire, as he himself puts it, “strips war of all its heroism.” His Journal d’une Femme de Chambre is the most complete and awful arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,—and here his resemblance to Swift ceases,—infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and chivalry for the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardor, high aspiration, and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.

M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean Grave’s most famous volume, and played a leading rôle in the Dreyfus affair.

His chroniques are daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile, insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are passionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels, though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the anarchist library lists.

Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.

Descaves demonstrated in his first volume—a collection of short stories entitled Le Calvaire d’Héloïse Pajadin—the depressing and degrading influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; his La Colonne portrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and his Soupes exposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves’ specialty is the army; it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by these works he is best known.

In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds of pages he holds the reader’s attention to the flat, stale, and unprofitable barrack life,—to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony, physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,—a life entirely lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar become alternately tragic and grimly comic; and his Sous-Offs and Emmurés, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of the Académie Goncourt, are almost classics of their kind. Less exalted and less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite destitute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpasses Zola in the latter’s much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic details.

Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog’s fixity of purpose in the matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events of the last few years. His Sous-Offs, though entirely free from doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations, an encounter with the law. No other novel—indeed, no other work of this generation, unless it be Bruant’s chanson, Biribi—has exerted so profound an anti-militarist influence in France.

In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in the Revue Blanche a series of articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of “Le Pain Gratuit” (free bread); and on the occasion of the municipal elections of that year he placarded the principal communes of France with the following appeal:—

"FREE BREAD

"The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always been to create division in order to reign.

"WORKERS!

"Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are the dupes.

"Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.

"Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior power, ‘GIVE US (Donnes-nous) OUR DAILY BREAD’; for manna will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres. We can, if we will it, affirm with solidarity true LIBERTY FOR ALL.

"Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies, and let us constitute the great party of men with hearts upon this question of bread, proclaiming THE RIGHT TO LIVE without humiliating conditions.

"Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like the water of the fountains, the light of the streets, and the streets themselves.

"We have free instruction, which profits only those who can receive instruction. Let us organize, more justly, LE PAIN GRATUIT for the profit and the liberty of all the workers.

"Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms. Let it be no more the derisive price with which the laborer, nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has not found a way to sell himself.

"THE PEOPLE MUST SPEAK OUT LOUD AND FIRM! THEY MUST DICTATE THEIR TERMS!

"Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated programmes. Let us vote for Le Pain Gratuit! Let there be no political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who are with us, and be on our guard against the false philanthropists who promise more butter than bread.

"Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.

"Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of the masses) by a finely human organization of things. Let us vote for the idea which cannot betray us.

"LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!

“VICTOR BARRUCAND.”

In Avec le Feu, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M. Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual élite, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.

The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterized by its restlessness and yearning:—

“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern, the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity, his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that labor had brutalized the species, and he sought the secret of lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly, dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A savor of death blended with his charity and perfumed his heroic sleep.”

Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.” “I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.

Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:—

Georges Darien, author of Biribi-Armée d’Afrique, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigors of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle, author of Sous la Casaque, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of Sous le Sabre; Marcel Lami, author of La Débandade; Louis Lamarque, author of Un An de Caserne; Paul Brulat, author of La Faiseuse de Gloire, Le Nouveau Candide, La Gangue, and Eldorado, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of the Congrès Régional of Paris (1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of En l’Anarchie; Henri Rainaldy, author of Delcros, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author of Le Régicide; Marcel Schwob, author of Spicilège; Mme. Séverine, author of Pages Rouges; Frantz Jourdain, author of L’Atelier Chanterel; Zéphirin Raganasse, author of Fabrique de Pions; Louis Lumet, author of La Fièvre; M. Reepmaker, author of Vengeance; Théodore Chèze, Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the feuilletoniste Michel Zévacco.

A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sébastien Faure with his romans-feuilletons and Jean Grave with his Malfaiteurs, his military romance, La Famille, and his book for boys, Les Aventures de Nono.

The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J. H. Rosny’s (the signature of the Rosny brothers, who have to be treated as one person in their relations to thought and literature) romance, Le Bilatéral. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professed révoltés, to protest against “La Cruauté Contemporaine,” is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be classed as an agitator.

Like the hero of this romance (Hélier, the “Bilatéral,” who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impassive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equally far from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.

“To think,” says the Bilatéral to his doctrinaire socialist and anarchist friends, “that there are multitudes of brave souls like you who, like you, see only white and black. Nothing but white and black! Why, citoyens, the complex is gray, all shades of gray.”

Again he says: “You see, my dear” (he is speaking to an ardent socialist girl), “that in the things of the social order we meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to assert;—‘it is this’ or ‘it is that.’ Generally between this and that there are an endless number of points to elucidate. . . . There is a high civilization with plenty of grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a nest and nourishment; . . . and those above are stupid, and those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My God! dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might indeed hope for a consoling solution.”

Still again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: “History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly—oh, so slowly!—through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,—you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, bloody, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of '93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.”

"‘Bravo!’ exclaimed the bourgeois.

“‘I have nothing to do with your bravos!’ cried the Bilatéral, with a shade of nervousness. ‘If their ignorance saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-scrapers and the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a button to annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.’”

Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny’s, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudère, Augustin Léger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Chennevière. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.

It seems that Emile Henry’s favorite book, his “livre de chevet,” the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes’ Don Quixote. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humorists Meilhac, Halévy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courteline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet’s Jack, Goncourt’s Fille Elisa, and Loti’s Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort; books of aspiration, like Prévost’s Confessions d’un Amant and Bourget’s Terre Promise; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’s Morticoles; of “revolt against Puritanism,” like Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite; of energy, like Barrès’ Déracinés; of searching, like Huysmans’ Cathédrale; of regret, like Bazin’s Terre qui Meurt; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupassant’s Bel-Ami; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,—may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners of violent change,—of revolt and revolution!

In the Treadmill

By M. B.

No one could possibly doubt that Margaret and Richard were very fond of each other. Their acquaintance was of long standing, it was over three years since they met for the first time at some affair.

Both had felt quite forlorn and lonely in the large city, like some devouring monster, staring them in the face. It was this terrible gloom that affects the soul like the gray of a fog that drew them closer; later they grew to like one another.

The two were of the same age, three and twenty; they often quietly wondered how it is that young people had so few inner experiences to draw from, and how they would pass life with all its enticing warmth and with none of its golden rays or love’s joys in store for them.

Margaret was employed as a sales girl in one of the big department stores, and Richard held a position as a clerk, at a very small salary, at a stationery house.

Each dragged his own life together with other human beings during the day, never alone, each human wheel driving the other.

The business demand was the only sovereign, like a press roller, pressing everything and everybody within reach into flatness.

Shoppers and salespeople, subordinates and superiors, employees, nay even the chief of the firm, Mr. Warshauer, who would come and go with the same stereotyped calculating face—appeared more like parts of a great machine than managers or owners thereof.

Wheels, wheels, wheels, all day long, put into motion by some unseen, spook-like power.

It was a pity that these human wheels were unlike their brother of steel and iron, composed of flesh and blood, with thoughts, inclinations and desires, so that they could not fail to look upon themselves as crippled human beings, moulded by dull necessity.

Under such conditions it was fortunate for some of Margaret’s fellow-sufferers that they lacked the consciousness of their condition and personality. The eternal monotony of their existence benumbed their inner life and dulled their senses.

No, Margaret and Richard were not alone, but, when they left their places of work and reached the street, after a day’s drudgery, they felt that they had escaped from some bewitched place, in which strange human beings moved about mechanically and without will-power, during the day, waiting for the evening as the only possibility for independent association and with some independent thought and choice.

The two would look forward to their meeting with joy and as a redemption from Purgatory, but, strange as it seemed, after a few moments they would notice that their conversation was but a continuation and a repetition of the impressions of the day. Their heads felt dull and heavy and were incapable of conceiving anything new and refreshing, or to reproduce new pictures. Everything was but a reflex of occurrences and moods that they rather would have banished from their presence.

Their conversation was a weary, dragging flow, like water at low tide, as if their longing hearts were buried under the weight of sandbanks. These poor hearts were weary from all their useless, unsatisfied emotions. Was that love, happiness, the beauty and rapture of which books speak of so enthusiastically?

Richard would sometimes grow impatient. Were they not fond of each other, why then make so many difficulties? True, his earnings were not big enough to establish a home, still it was sufficient to rent a furnished room; could they not be happy there? Wedding ceremonies, dowries, presents and carriages may be necessities for the rich; poor people must live their life and love in the plainest possible way, if they do not wish to be cheated out of that joy which love has in store even for the humblest.

But Margaret opposed these ideas with all her might. She came of a family with well-regulated notions of propriety. She had considered the possibility of their marriage more than once, since nothing would have pleased her better than to escape from behind the counter, but Richard’s wages shattered all such considerations. Her taste recoiled before a home in a furnished room, where one could never feel at home, or develop as much devotion to it as a sparrow to its nest. Oh, if she could have but a few small rooms, simply but harmoniously furnished, to make up her own household. Surely that was not at all an extravagant wish; but, as this could not be, she would rather wait.

Such opposition Richard would meet impatiently and lightly. Wait, wait, wait! And even if they waited until doomsday, he would not earn more, and does Margaret hold him responsible for not earning more? Again and again he would return to his project. To have one room together, was that not preferable to their present condition where they could never meet or talk undisturbed? Common decency did not permit him to visit her at her lodgings, less did common decency permit her to visit him at his. Wherever they met, they were exposed to the influences, thoughts, speculations, and even vulgar insinuations of people. The only place where they were spared too close observation was on the sidewalk.

It was Sunday that they longed for most, and which they looked forward to as to a feast. They spent the week in planning trips to the museums, parks and outskirts of the city, but the much-longed-for day rarely passed without a cloud.

The routine of their daily existence was too deeply rooted in their system, casting its shadows over the natural joyousness of youth. Only occasionally they would experience absolute forgetfulness, in freedom from all care and worry. These were exquisite moments, moments of real oneness and deep affection. Moments one ought to seize upon like a streak of warm sunshine breaking through a gray and wintry sky. At such moments the two would walk together, their hands tightly clasped, with the joy of life singing in their souls and mysterious longings beating in their veins. But the evening would bring them back to reality, to its commonplace moods, surrounded by gray thoughts and plagued by nervous feelings of impatience. Sometimes they would even secretly long for Monday, only to deaden the growing restlessness within them through their mechanical occupation.

One evening Richard met Margaret with the firm decision to come to a final understanding with her. Life under such conditions was simply unendurable. They went to a cheap restaurant, as they were wont to do, looking for some unoccupied table. Occasionally they would find other couples there in search for a quiet corner, and then their eyes would meet understandingly, as if to say, “We, too, are weary, homeless wanderers, in need of a resting place, a place of undisturbed peace.”

On that particular evening Margaret and Richard found three couples seated at various tables, each absorbed in their own cares. One of the couples were engaged in a rather animated discussion, the voice of the man sounded hard and irritated. “So you think me wrong?” he said to his companion, a young, good-looking blonde. “Very well, you will see the consequences.” The girl was mortified, trying to pacify him. “Please do not make a scandal here, do you not see that we are being observed?” Her escort jumped up and angrily rushed out. The eyes of the poor, forsaken girl filled with tears, and all trembling, with her gaze cast down, she followed after him.

Richard could not get rid of the foreboding that this unpleasant scene between the two people was but a prelude to the final settlement of his own love affair. Margaret, on the other hand, was indignant over the young man, who displayed so little tact and could so far forget himself as to cause a scandal in a public place. She turned to Richard full of anger, but he was sulky and noncommunicative.

After a few moments of cold silence, that sometimes suddenly arises out of a close relationship like an insurmountable wall, they began to discuss their own affairs. The tone of their talk became angry and hard. Some of their sentences sounded like bitter reproaches, though both were convinced in their innermost depths that neither of them were to blame for the confusion in their young lives. The fault lay altogether in the contrast between the external, material demands and their emotions, which brought about an irreconcilable discord in their inner lives. The fault lies also with the life that humiliates man into a mechanism that takes possession of his being, body and soul, and that brings him neither satisfaction nor cheer. Man stakes his very best for the benefit of others. What is there left to deepen or beautify his personality?

Such reflections never found an echo in Margaret’s world of thought. Whenever Richard expressed these ideas, she feared for his wellbeing and considered it her duty to lead him back to the right path, which only brought about new misunderstandings.

On this evening Margaret again brought forth a lot of argument, but each opposition on her part only embittered him more. A wild, passionate longing to cause pain took possession of the two, to be disagreeable and to hurt each other. Pretty soon, they realized with sorrow that their talk was becoming as loud and bitter a quarrel as that of the couple whose conduct they condemned. Both loathed publicity; they rose and left the restaurant quietly. They walked along like strangers, unable to find a word that would break the ice between them. They avoided each other’s eyes. At the door Richard stretched out his hand into which Margaret put her cold and lifeless fingers. Both stood there in dead silence, with wild despair in their eyes, and with agonizing pain in their souls at the prospect of a solitary, gloomy life before them.

Both were supersensitive and shy, never quite at ease when they approached their own affair, and though their hearts craved affection, they were rarely able to strike the psychological moment when their young hearts could meet. At this moment, when a tender word might have softened the storm within them, there was no one near to say it, and the young people, zealously watching lest the other should not see his soul in pain, each went his way.

Margaret’s suffering over their separation was more intense. Men have more elbow space than women.

Richard apparently recovered from his experience, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of the desire to live; for he was young. He found his way to places which maintain themselves through a business in poisonous drink and still more poisonous substitutes for love. Richard was too fine to find joy or recreation in that form of forgetfulness, but he was young and full of youthful cravings and was driven thereto by the grinding mill of commercialism and an erroneous conception of nature’s forces.

Margaret could not even do that. She grew shy and helpless and soon was not unlike an orange that had been overlooked in some dusty corner. She became a withered and embittered old maid.

Once only did she hear from Richard. He wrote to bid her farewell and said that their affection had been killed. And she felt relieved as if from a dead weight. All the love and happiness her nature might have yielded was deadened by the harshness and emptiness of our time.

In later years, when she read the long lamentations in the newspapers of the corruption, the lack of morality and decency in the young generation, she shook her head without understanding. The terrible weight of a commonplace existence gave her neither inclination, time or occasion to taste of that prohibited morsel of life’s essence, which the world calls immoral.

Books to be had through Mother Earth

The Doukhobors: Their History in Russia; Their Migration to Canada. By Joseph Elkins — $2.00

Moribund Society and Anarchism. By Jean Grave — 25c.

Education and Heredity. By J. M. Guyau — $1.25

A Sketch of Morality—Independent of Obligation and Sanction. By J. M. Guyau — $1.00

American Communities: New and Old Communistic, Semi-Communistic, and Co-Operative. By W. A. Hinds — $1.00

History of the French Revolution. (An excellent work for students. It begins with a sketch of history of the earliest times; the decline of the ancient empires, the rise of the French monarchy, and traces the causes which made the Revolution inevitable. The philosophic conclusion is unsurpassed, and the position taken, laying a foundation for the philosophy of freedom, is bound to attract the attention of thinkers.) By C. L. James. Reduced to — 50c.

Origin of Anarchism. By C. L. James — 5c.

Fields, Factories, and Workshops. By Peter Kropotkin — 50c.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. By Peter Kropotkin. Reduced to — $1.20

Memoirs of a Revolutionist. By Peter Kropotkin. Reduced to — $1.60

Modern Science and Anarchism. By Peter Kropotkin — 25c.

Ideals of Russian Literature. By Peter Kropotkin — $2.00

The State: Its Rôle in History. By Peter Kropotkin — 10c.

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal. By Peter Kropotkin — 5c.

The Wage System. By P. Kropotkin — 5c.

Anarchist Morality. By P. Kropotkin — 5c.

History of Civilization in England. By Henry Thomas Buckle — $2.00

England’s Ideal and other Papers on Social Subjects. By Ed. Carpenter — $1.00

Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. By Ed. Carpenter — $1.00

Love’s Coming of Age. By Ed. Carpenter — $1.00

Towards Democracy. By Ed. Carpenter — $2.50

The Chicago Martyrs: The Famous Speeches of the Eight Anarchists in Judge Gary’s Court, and Gov. Altgeld’s Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab — 25c.

The Books of Ernest Crosby

Garrison the Non-Resistant. 16mo, cloth, 144 pages, with photogravure portrait — 50c.; by mail, 55c.

Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable. A collection of chants in the cause of justice and brotherhood. 12mo, cloth, 188 pages, $1.50; by mail, $1.62. Paper, 40c.; by mail, 44c.

Captain Jinks, Hero. A keen satire on our recent wars, in which the parallel between savagery and soldiery is unerringly drawn. Profusely illustrated by Dan Beard. 12mo, cloth, 400 pages, postpaid — $1.50

Swords and Plowshares. A collection of poems filled with the hatred of war and the love of nature. (Not sold by us in Great Britain.) 12mo, cloth, 126 pages, $1.20; by mail, $1.29

Tolstoy and His Message. “A concise and sympathetic account of the life, character and philosophy of the great Russian.”—New York Press. “A genuinely illuminative interpretation of the great philosopher’s being and purpose.”—Philadelphia Item. (Not sold by us in Great Britain.) 16mo, cloth, 93 pages, 50c.; by mail, 53c.

Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster. An essay on education and punishment with Tolstoy’s curious experiments in teaching as a text. 16mo, cloth, 94 pages, 50c.; by mail, 53c.

Broad-Cast. New chants and songs of labor, life and freedom. This latest volume of poems by the author of “Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable” and “Swords and Plowshares” conveys the same message delivered with equal power. 12mo, cloth, 128 pages, 50c.; by mail, 55c.

Edward Carpenter, Poet and Prophet. An illuminative essay, with selections and a bibliography of Carpenter. 12mo, paper, 64 pages, with portrait of Carpenter on cover, postpaid — 20c.

The Books of Bolton Hall

The Game of Life. A new volume of 111 fables. Most of them have been published from time to time in Life, Collier’s, The Outlook, The Century, The Independent, The Ram’s Horn, The Pilgrim, The Christian Endeavor World, The Rubric, The New Voice, The Philistine and other papers and magazines. 16mo, cloth, ornamental, postpaid — 80c.

Even as You and I. This is a presentation, by means of popular and simple allegories, of the doctrine of Henry George and the principle which underlies it. A part of the volume is an account of Tolstoy’s philosophy, drawn largely from the Russian’s difficult work, “Of Life.” This section is called “True Life,” and follows a series of thirty-three clever parables. Count Tolstoy wrote to Mr. Hall: “I have received your book, and have read it. I think it is very good, and renders in a concise form quite truly the chief ideas of my book.” 16mo, cloth, ornamental, gilt top, 50c.; by mail, 55c.