Mother Earth

Russell Sage By Emma Goldman

WHAT an indictment against Society! Impure and poisonous, indeed, must have been the soil that nurtured such a plant.

The champions of the capitalistic system assert that the majority will ever have to live in poverty and misery, and that millions of backs are to remain forever bent, to sustain the magnificent structure called civilization.

Were we all to toil to produce the mere necessities of life—they say—who would foster art, poetry, and literature? Surely, there must be a select few. By their culture and æstheticism, by their refinement and beauty, they illuminate and elevate those predestined to a life of darkness and despair.

Such is the philosophy of capitalism. But even this philosophy, absurd as it is, will fail to justify the life of Russell Sage. It would search in vain for even the faintest reflex of himself, or of his tremendous wealth, in the lives of those that dwell in the abyss.

Russell Sage! Accumulation, with him, was not a means, but rather the sole aim of life. The notion that the social mission of wealth is philanthropy and charity was brutally caricatured by the personality of this man. Not even his own life derived any benefit from his riches, let alone the lives of others. Indeed, he serves as the most striking proof of our social insanity, which suffers thousands to starve, that a few calculating human machines may pile dividends upon dividends.

Russell Sage undoubtedly considered himself indispensably valuable to society. Several years ago a man, crazed by poverty and exposure, came to his office with the intention of taking the valuable life of the great benefactor of the human family. Does a Sage outweigh the countless lives his greed has crushed?

When Uncle Russell realized the character of his visitor’s mission, he acted in a truly Christian spirit. He called his secretary and placed him between himself and the attacker. Naturally, the bomb did not strike the right person. Sage was saved and continued to indulge in his criminal proclivities; the secretary remained a cripple for life. The most humble human being would have felt indebted to the savior of his life, but dear Russell would have reproached himself for the rest of his existence, were he to waste money on his poor victim. The latter carried the case to the courts. But where are the men in American Halls of Justice that would dare to decide against a Russell Sage?

He left a hundred million dollars, but the case of his victim is still pending in the courts.

Sage was the most worthy, most consistent representative of our system of robbery and theft. Unlike the dilettant philanthropists, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, he never feigned any hypocritical humanitarianism. In this respect, at least, Sage was superior to the Oil King of Sunday-school fame, and to the Homestead slave-driver, immortalized by libraries and the blood-bath of July 6, 1892. He never donned the garb of beneficence. Had he undertaken the building of the Panama Canal, for instance, he would not have called it a work of progress and civilization. His keen eye would have beheld only the long row of figures and the profits.

If an artist had suggested a great masterpiece as a memorial, Russell would have shown him the door. Why this nonsensical enthusiasm for art and science? There is only one thing of consequence in life, and that is to “earn” the highest interest on money safely invested.

He was not far from the truth, with regard to his co-gamblers, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Probably he suspected that their pretended interest in art and science was but a feeble attempt to quiet their consciences. At least his attitude was more frank, more honest. And he was more self-centred. He was not so stupid as Morgan, who invests fortunes in poor copies of great masters, to the amusement of European artists and art connoisseurs.

This character-study of Russell Sage is, in a small measure, a portrayal of our social economy,—cold, cruel, heartless; with no other purpose than the accumulation of fortunes by the few, the grinding to death of the many.

The Kingdom of Peace

By Milo A. Townsend

Within, are the Fountains of Peace,
    Within, are the riches of soul—
The riches alone that can last,
    While billows of ocean shall roll.
The riches which dwell in the mind
    We may take wherever we go—
While money which men seek and hoard,
    Proves often the soul’s overthrow.

Though millions a man may possess,
    Very poor he still may remain,
Poor in all that is noble and great—
    Rich only in gewgaws and gain.
Within is the Kingdom of Peace,
    Which only the true soul can know—
This kingdom enthroned in “the light,”
    Truth alone can ever bestow.

Without are the deserts of Care,
    Where Mammon sits brooding and grim—
Then seek for the Kingdom of Peace—
    The world’s lights are fleeting and dim.

Observations and Comments

THE religion and philosophy of the enslaved lean towards fatalism. Self-humiliation is a source of satisfaction to those that see the cause of their misery in destiny or in some supreme power, rather than in their own cowardice and weakness.

We throw our responsibilities into the refuse of metaphysics, which are supposed to hide somewhere beyond the drawn draperies of this world.

Fatalism is the most convenient excuse for all those that are unable or unwilling to strive for freedom.

“But, surely, fatalism is not to be found here. Is it not rather an Oriental growth?”

“You are mistaken, ladies and gentlemen. We are much more fatalistic than the East. There, Allah is Providence; here, conditions are Almighty.”

We continually prate about the inexorability of conditions; we assert that man is their product. What does he want? Liberty? Independence? How stupid! He is not a free agent, and therefore he must submit to conditions. But as the latter are notorious for their caprice, it often happens that they transform political mountebanks into presidents of the Republic, while genius and talent go begging at the doors.

This barbaric belief in the superiority of conditions and the helplessness of the individual is our greatest curse. It robs men of hope and strength; it deprives them of all power to hate and love. It makes submissive slaves of them.

Man must cease to look upon himself as a mere tool; he must break the fetters that leave him no space for initiative; thus he will become the creator, instead of the created.

Our highest aim should be to master conditions, rather than remain subservient to them.

Christ is the type of martyrs that burden and enslave, rather than liberate.

The gospel teaches that he suffered for humanity and that he died on the cross to save men from sin. Mankind has paid dearly for it since. In the name of the one that was crucified all have to do penance. His disciples carried his agony all over the world, preaching hatred of joy. How dared life’s joy to raise its head! Has he not shed tears of blood? Has he not called, in despair, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”?

This Saviour disproves the idea that man can be redeemed through external forces. From the proclaimed redemption he has inherited only the duty to renounce and to chastise himself. If he dares to refuse participation in the martyrdom of the Nazarene, he is condemned as vicious, impure, and immoral.

There is no redemption; there is only sanctified self-abnegation, self-humiliation.

Only saints and puritans find satisfaction in ashes and sackcloth.

Was Christ really confident that his sacrifice would be appreciated? What if the sinners were proud, proud of having sinned? What if they disdained to listen to him who persisted in bearing the cross for all? What if they proclaimed their courage to be all-sufficient unto themselves?

A full and strong personality may succumb to its own rich and insatiable nature, to its inability to bow and submit; it never can break or crumble because of forces outside itself.

The attempt on the part of the Russian Government to appear modern by checking the Revolution through parliamentary methods has proved a dismal failure.

Edged in on all sides, her industrial and business life crippled, her financial heart deeply wounded, she deemed it diplomatic to throw a bone to the Revolution. This sumptuous meal might so elate the people, that they would cease to rebel.

There are the Liberals and the Constitutional Democrats, for instance, who really desire nothing more for Russia than a government according to the political pattern of Western Europe. A few concessions might enlist their co-operation, which would tend to isolate the Revolution and stamp it as a crime against the Government, so eager and ready to consider all modern political demands.

The intention, however, was to continue her despotic régime,—the Duma could prate to its heart’s content, so long as it gave the monster on the Russian throne a chance to recuperate from the horrors of the barricades.

If the Duma could be used as a shield, to check the anger and hatred of the people, it will have served its purpose.

This speculation of the Russian autocracy was based upon the experience of other Governments with revolutions. The West-European revolutionary movement of 1848 failed miserably: then, too, the people were promised political rights; popular representation was the arena for acrobatic exercises; while the constituents searched for worthy men to represent the nation, the reactionaries prepared a counter revolution, which culminated in the forcible expulsion of the representatives of the people from the halls of Parliament. The autocracy hoped for a similar development of events. It failed to realize that economic and social motives of revolutions have grown more powerful within the last decades than the political.

The Russian revolution, unlike the revolution of '48, is not to be checked with a constitution on paper. It is much more concerned with the economic and social, rather than the political reconstruction of Russia. It is because of this that the Duma failed to enthuse the great majority of the revolutionists. The latter have grasped the truth that the Parliament is a hindrance, rather than an incentive, to the organization of society.

The battle between the old and the new social powers can not be fought in the Chamber of Deputies. The question is no longer, “Will the Conservatives or the Democrats triumph?” but rather, “Is the possessing class to continue to exploit society for its own benefit?” It would seem that the people have reached that stage of development which must end in the overthrow of the system of tyranny and robbery.

It is this spirit which carried the Duma far beyond the boundary line of their original intentions.

Had the Government to deal with the representatives only, a compromise might have been brought about. But beyond the Duma-by-the Grace-of-the-Tsar rose the revolutionary waves, the peasant, and the workingman. These care little for political theories: the one demands the land, the other the product of his labor—Socialism or Anarchist communism. They have no desire to patch up the sores on the social body with petty political court plaster, as was the ambition of Witte and his colleagues. Their aim is the expropriation of the wealth stolen from them.

The Duma was compelled to flirt with the revolution. As the latter’s child it could not very well aid Tsarism in its barbaric overthrow of the insurrection. Its popular leanings aroused the ire of the decaying autocracy and thus the Duma was abolished.

It was not a very clever move. It will only hasten the downfall of Tsarism with all its horrors.

A Hero of the Russian Revolution

As to those who fought in the insurgent bands and those who were most compromised as members of the strike committee, their lives were saved by a courageous engine-driver, Ukhtomsky. At the last moment, when the insurrection was crushed and it seemed already impossible to pierce the ring of troops which held all the outlet from Moscow, Ukhtomsky offered to take the most compromised insurgents and strikers on a train and to break through the iron ring. This he did most successfully under a hail of bullets from the machine guns. He was arrested later on quite accidentally, having come to a railway station while a Semenovsk detachment was there. The officer looked through the portraits supplied to the troops by the spies, and at once recognized him. “You are the engine-driver Ukhtomsky,” said he; “you will be shot.” “So I thought,” calmly replied the prisoner, and before dying he narrated the following: “When all roads leading out of Moscow were occupied by the troops, I undertook to take the insurgents and our strike committee men in a train through your ring. You had already placed machine guns in the orchards—menacing the line. In this dangerous—quite open—space on the railway curve I developed a speed of sixty miles per hour. I myself drove the engine. The pressure in the boiler I brought up to fifteen atmospheres—the very limit for the boiler. The danger was not from machine guns, but from the boiler bursting. I went not only with open draught doors, but also with an accelerated speed of the syphon. And as we ran at this speed along the curve the machine guns began to rattle. Still, the real danger lay in our speed, in the possibility of being thrown off the metals down the embankment. However, I regulated the steam with an experienced hand, feeling that I had on my responsibility the lives of those whom you tracked. You wounded six men, but nobody was killed. All are now safe and far away. You will not have them.”

He quietly spoke before his death to the soldiers and won their sympathies. He stood upright and calmly looked on them. When the first volley was fired the three workers with whom he was shot fell dead, but not one single bullet had been fired at Ukhtomsky. None of the soldiers would kill him. The officer ordered a second volley to be fired—and then he fell on the snow with a terrible expression of agony in his eyes. The captain discharged a revolver at his head.

Modern Science and Anarchism

By Peter Kropotkin

I.

ANARCHISM, like Socialism in general, and like every other social movement, has not, of course, developed out of science or out of some philosophical school. The social sciences are still very far removed from the time when they shall be as exact as are physics and chemistry. Even in meteorology we cannot yet predict the weather a month, or even one week, in advance. It would be unreasonable, therefore, to expect of the young social sciences, which are concerned with phenomena much more complex than winds and rain, that they should foretell social events with any approach to certainty. Besides, it must not be forgotten that men of science, too, are but human, and that most of them either belong by descent to the possessing classes, and are steeped in the prejudices of their class, or else are in the actual service of the government. Not out of the universities, therefore, does Anarchism come.

As Socialism in general, Anarchism was born among the people; and it will continue to be full of life and creative power only as long as it remains a thing of the people.

At all times two tendencies were continually at war in human society. On the one hand, the masses were developing, in the form of customs, a number of institutions which were necessary to make social life at all possible—to insure peace amongst men, to settle any disputes that might arise, and to help one another in everything requiring co-operative effort. The savage clan at its earliest stage, the village community, the hunters’, and, later on, the industrial guilds, the free-town republics of the middle ages, the beginnings of international law which were worked out in those early periods, and many other institutions,—were elaborated, not by legislators, but by the creative power of the people.

And at all times, too, there appeared sorcerers, prophets, priests, and heads of military organizations, who endeavored to establish and to strengthen their authority over the people. They supported one another, concluded alliances, in order that they might reign over the people, hold them in subjection, and compel them to work for the masters.

Anarchism is obviously the representative of the first tendency—that is, of the creative, constructive power of the people themselves, which aimed at developing institutions of common law in order to protect them from the power-seeking minority. By means of the same popular creative power and constructive activity, based upon modern science and technics, Anarchism tries now as well to develop institutions which would insure a free evolution of society. In this sense, therefore, Anarchists and Governmentalists have existed through all historic times.

Then, again, it always happened also that institutions—even the most excellent so far as their original purpose was concerned, and established originally with the object of securing equality, peace and mutual aid—in the course of time became petrified, lost their original meaning, came under the control of the ruling minority, and became in the end a constraint upon the individual in his endeavors for further development. Then men would rise against these institutions. But, while some of these discontented endeavored to throw off the yoke of the old institutions—of caste, commune or guild—only in order that they themselves might rise over the rest and enrich themselves at their expense; others aimed at a modification of the institutions in the interest of all, and especially in order to shake off the authority which had fixed its hold upon society. All reformers—political, religious, and economic—have belonged to this class. And among them there always appeared persons who, without abiding the time when all their fellow-countrymen, or even a majority of them, shall have become imbued with the same views, moved onward in the struggle against oppression, in mass where it was possible, and single-handed where it could not be done otherwise. These were the revolutionists, and them, too, we meet at all times.

But the revolutionists themselves generally appeared under two different aspects. Some of them, in rising against the established authority, endeavored, not to abolish it, but to take it in their own hands. In place of the authority which had become oppressive, these reformers sought to create a new one, promising that if they exercised it they would have the interests of the people dearly at heart, and would ever represent the people themselves. In this way, however, the authority of the Cæsars was established in Imperial Rome, the power of the Church rose in the first centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the tyranny of dictators grew up in the mediæval communes at the time of their decay. Of the same tendency, too, the kings and the tsars availed themselves to constitute their power at the end of the feudal period. The belief in a popular emperor, that is, Cæsarism, has not died out even yet.

But all the while another tendency was ever manifest. At all times, beginning with Ancient Greece, there were persons and popular movements that aimed, not at the substitution of one government for another, but at the abolition of authority altogether. They proclaimed the supreme rights of the individual and the people, and endeavored to free popular institutions from forces which were foreign and harmful to them, in order that the unhampered creative genius of the people might remould these institutions in accordance with the new requirements. In the history of the ancient Greek republics, and especially in that of the mediæval commonwealths, we find numerous examples of this struggle (Florence and Pskov are especially interesting in this connection). In this sense, therefore, Jacobinists and Anarchists have existed at all times among reformers and revolutionists.

In past ages there were even great popular movements of this latter (Anarchist) character. Many thousands of people then rose against authority—its tools, its courts and its laws—and proclaimed the supreme rights of man. Discarding all written laws, the promoters of these movements endeavored to establish a new society based on equality and labor and on the government of each by his own conscience. In the Christian movement against Roman law, Roman government, and Roman morality (or, rather, Roman immorality), which began in Judea in the reign of Augustus, there undoubtedly existed much that was essentially Anarchistic. Only by degrees it degenerated into an ecclesiastical movement, modeled upon the ancient Hebrew church and upon Imperial Rome itself, which killed the Anarchistic germ, assumed Roman governmental forms, and became in time the chief bulwark of government authority, slavery, and oppression.

Likewise, in the Anabaptist movement (which really laid the foundation for the Reformation) there was a considerable element of Anarchism. But, stifled as it was by those of the reformers who, under Luther’s leadership, joined the princes against the revolting peasants, it died out after wholesale massacres of the peasants had been carried out in Holland and Germany. Thereupon the moderate reformers degenerated by degrees into those compromisers between conscience and government who exist to-day under the name of Protestants.

Anarchism, consequently, owes its origin to the constructive, creative activity of the people, by which all institutions of communal life were developed in the past, and to a protest—a revolt against the external force which had thrust itself upon these institutions; the aim of this protest being to give new scope to the creative activity of the people, in order that it might work out the necessary institutions with fresh vigor.

In our own time Anarchism arose from the same critical and revolutionary protest that called forth Socialism in general. Only that some of the Socialists, having reached the negation of Capital and of our social organization based upon the exploitation of labor, went no further. They did not denounce what, in our opinion, constitutes the chief bulwark of Capital, namely, Government and its chief supports; centralization, law (always written by a minority in the interest of that minority), and Courts of Justice (established mainly for the defence of Authority and Capital).

Anarchism does not exclude these institutions from its criticism. It attacks not only Capital, but also the main sources of the power of Capitalism.

II.

But, although Anarchism, like all other revolutionary movements, was born among the people—in the struggles of real life, and not in the philosopher’s studio,—it is none the less important to know what place it occupies among the various scientific and philosophic streams of thought now prevalent: what is its relation to them; upon which of them principally does it rest; what method it employs in its researches—in other words, to which school of philosophy of law it belongs, and to which of the now existing tendencies in science it has the greatest affinity.

We have heard of late so much about economic metaphysics that this question naturally presents a certain interest; and I shall endeavor to answer it as plainly as possible, avoiding difficult phraseology wherever it can be avoided.

The intellectual movement of our own times originated in the writings of the Scotch and the French philosophers of the middle and end of the eighteenth century. The universal awakening of thought which began at that time stimulated these thinkers to desire to embody all human knowledge in one general system. Casting aside mediæval scholasticism and metaphysics, till then supreme, they decided to look upon the whole of Nature—the world of the stars, the life of the solar system and of our planet, the development of the animal world and of human societies—as upon phenomena open to scientific investigation and constituting so many branches of natural science.

Freely availing themselves of the truly scientific, inductive-deductive method, they approached the study of every group of phenomena—whether of the starry realm, of the animal world, or of the world of human beliefs and institutions—just as the naturalist approaches the study of any physical problem. They carefully investigated the phenomena, and attained their generalizations by means of induction. Deduction helped them in framing certain hypotheses; but these they considered as no more final than, for instance, Darwin regarded his hypothesis concerning the origin of new species by means of the struggle for existence, or Mendeléeff his “periodic law.” They saw in these hypotheses suppositions that were very convenient for the classification of facts and their further study, but which were subject to verification by inductive means, and which would become laws—that is, verified generalizations—only after they have stood this test, and after an explanation of cause and effect had been given.

When the centre of the philosophic movement had shifted from Scotland and England to France, the French philosophers, with their natural sense of harmony, betook themselves to a systematic rebuilding of all the human sciences—the natural and the humanitarian sciences—on the same principles. From this resulted their attempt to construct a generalization of all knowledge, that is, a philosophy of the whole world and all its life. To this they endeavored to give a harmonious, scientific form, discarding all metaphysical constructions and explaining all phenomena by the action of the same mechanical forces which had proved adequate to the explanation of the origin and the development of the earth.

It is said that, in answer to Napoleon’s remark to Laplace that in his “System of the World” God was nowhere mentioned, Laplace replied, “I had no need of this hypothesis.” But Laplace not only succeeded in writing his work without this supposition: he nowhere in this work resorted to metaphysical entities; to words which conceal a very vague understanding of phenomena and the inability to represent them in concrete material forms—in terms of measurable quantities. He constructed his system without metaphysics. And although in his “System of the World” there are no mathematical calculations, and it is written in so simple a style as to be accessible to every intelligent reader, yet the mathematicians were able subsequently to express every separate thought of this book in the form of an exact mathematical equation—in terms, that is, of measurable quantities. So rigorously did Laplace reason and so lucidly did he express himself.

* Kant’s version of the ethical maxim, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” reads: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”—Translator.

The French eighteenth-century philosophers did exactly the same with regard to the phenomena of the spiritual world. In their writings one never meets with such metaphysical statements as are found, say, in Kant. Kant, as is well known, explained the moral sense of man by a “categorical imperative” which might at the same time be considered desirable as a universal law.* But in this dictum every word (“imperative,” “categorical,” “law,” “universal”) is a vague verbal substitute for the material fact which is to be explained. The French encyclopædists, on the contrary, endeavored to explain, just as their English predecessors had done, whence came the ideas of good and evil to man, without substituting “a word for the missing conception,” as Goethe put it. They took the living man as he is. They studied him and found, as did Hutcheson (in 1725) and, after him, Adam Smith in his best work, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,”—that the moral sentiments have developed in man from the feeling of pity (sympathy), through his ability to put himself in another’s place; from the fact that we almost feel pain and grow indignant when a child is beaten in our presence. From simple observations of common facts like these, they gradually attained to the broadest generalizations. In this manner they actually did explain the complex moral sense by facts more simple, and did not substitute for moral facts well known to and understood by us, obscure terms like “the categorical imperative,” or “universal law,” which do not explain anything. The merit of such a treatment is self-evident. Instead of the “inspiration from above” and a superhuman, miraculous origin of the moral sense, they dealt with the feeling of pity, of sympathy—derived by man through experience and inheritance, and subsequently perfected by further observation of social life.

When the thinkers of the eighteenth century turned from the realm of stars and physical phenomena to the world of chemical changes, or from physics and chemistry to the study of plants and animals, or from botany and zoölogy to the development of economical and political forms of social life and to religions among men,—they never thought of changing their method of investigation. To all branches of knowledge they applied that same inductive method. And nowhere, not even in the domain of moral concepts, did they come upon any point where this method proved inadequate. Even in the sphere of moral concepts they felt no need of resorting again either to metaphysical suppositions (“God,” “immortal soul,” “vital force,” “a categorical imperative” decreed from above, and the like), or of exchanging the inductive method for some other, scholastic method. They thus endeavor to explain the whole world—all its phenomena—in the same natural-scientific way. The encyclopædists compiled their monumental encyclopædia, Laplace wrote his “System of the World,” and Holbach “The System of Nature”; Lavoisier brought forward the theory of the indestructibility of matter, and therefore also of energy or motion (Lomonósoff was at the same time outlining the mechanical theory of heat*); Lamarck undertook to explain the formation of new species through the accumulation of variations due to environment; Diderot was furnishing an explanation of morality, customs, and religions requiring no inspiration from without; Rousseau was attempting to explain the origin of political institutions by means of a social contract—that is, an act of man’s free will. . . . In short, there was no branch of science which the thinkers of the eighteenth century had not begun to treat on the basis of material phenomena—and all by that same inductive method.

* Readers of Russian literature to whom Lomonósoff is known only by his literary work, may be surprised as much as I was to find his name mentioned in connection with the theory of heat. On seeing the name in the original, I promptly consulted the library—so sure was I that I was confronted with a typographical error. There was no mistake, however. For, Mikhail Vassilievich Lomonósoff (1712-1765), by far the most broadly gifted Russian of his time, was—I have thus been led to discover—even more ardently devoted to science than to the muses. His accomplishments in the physical sciences alone, in which he experimented and upon which he wrote and lectured extensively, would have won for him lasting fame in the history of Russian culture and first mention among its devotees.—Translator.

Of course, some palpable blunders were made in this daring attempt. Where knowledge was lacking, hypotheses—often very bold, but sometimes entirely erroneous—were put forth. But a new method was being applied to the development of all branches of science, and, thanks to it, these very mistakes were subsequently readily detected and pointed out. And at the same time a means of investigation was handed down to our nineteenth century which has enabled us to build up our entire conception of the world upon scientific bases, having freed it alike from the superstitions bequeathed to us and from the habit of disposing of scientific questions by resorting to mere verbiage.

However, after the defeat of the French Revolution, a general reaction set in—in politics, in science, and in philosophy. Of course the fundamental principles of the great Revolution did not die out. The emancipation of the peasants and townspeople from feudal servitude, equality before the law, and representative (constitutional) government, proclaimed by the Revolution, slowly gaining ground in and out of France. After the Revolution, which had proclaimed the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, a slow evolution began—that is, a gradual reorganization which introduced into life and law the principles marked out, but only partly realized, by the Revolution. (Such a realization through evolution of principles proclaimed by the preceding revolution, may even be regarded as a general law of social development). Although the Church, the State, and even Science trampled on the banner upon which the Revolution had inscribed the words “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”; although to be reconciled to the existing state of things became for a time a universal watchword; still the principles of freedom were slowly entering into the affairs of life. It is true that the feudal obligations abolished by the republican armies of Italy and Spain were again restored in these countries, and that even the inquisition itself was revived. But a mortal blow had already been dealt them—and their doom was sealed. The wave of emancipation from the feudal yoke reached, first, Western, and then Eastern Germany, and spread over the peninsulas. Slowly moving eastward, it reached Prussia in 1848, Russia in 1861, and the Balkans in 1878. Slavery disappeared in America in 1863. At the same time the ideas of the equality of all citizens before the law, and of representative government were also spreading from west to east, and by the end of the century Russia alone remained under the yoke of autocracy, already much impaired.

On the other hand, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, the ideas of economic emancipation had already been proclaimed. In England, Godwin published in 1793 his remarkable work, “An Enquiry into Political Justice,” in which he was the first to establish the theory of non-governmental socialism, that is, Anarchism; and Babeuf—especially influenced, as it seems, by Buonarotti—came forward in 1796 as the first theorist of centralized State-socialism.

Then, developing the principles already laid down in the eighteenth century, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen came forward as the three founders of modern socialism in its three chief schools; and in the forties Proudhon, unacquainted with the work of Godwin, laid down anew the bases of Anarchism.

The scientific foundations of both governmental and non-governmental socialism were thus laid down at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a thoroughness wholly unappreciated by our contemporaries. Only in two respects, doubtless very important ones, has modern socialism materially advanced. It has become revolutionary, and has severed all connection with the Christian religion. It realized that for the attainment of its ideals a Social Revolution is necessary—not in the sense in which people sometimes speak of an “industrial revolution” or of “a revolution in science,” but in the real, material sense of the word “Revolution”—in the sense of rapidly changing the fundamental principles of present society by means which, in the usual run of events, are considered illegal. And it ceased to confuse its views with the optimist reforming tendencies of the Christian religion. But this latter step had already been taken by Godwin and R. Owen. As regards the admiration of centralized authority and the preaching of discipline, for which man is historically indebted chiefly to the mediæval church and to church rule generally—these survivals have been retained among the mass of the State socialists, who have thus failed to rise to the level of their two English forerunners.

Of the influence which the reaction that set in after the Great Revolution has had upon the development of the sciences, it would be difficult to speak in this essay.* Suffice it to say, that by far the greater part of what modern science prides itself on was already marked out, and more than marked out—sometimes even expressed in a definite scientific form—at the end of the eighteenth century. The mechanical theory of heat and the indestructibility of motion (the conservation of energy); the modification of species by the action of environment; physiological psychology; the anthropological view of history, religion and legislation; the laws of development of thought—in short, the whole mechanical conception of the world and all the elements of a synthetic philosophy (a philosophy which embraces all physical, chemical, living and social phenomena),—were already outlined and partly formulated in the preceding century.

* Something in this line is set forth in my lecture “On the Scientific Development in the XIX. Century.”

But, owing to the reaction which set in, these discoveries were kept in the background during a full half-century. Men of science suppressed them or else declared them “unscientific.” Under the pretext of “studying facts” and “gathering scientific material,” even such exact measurements as the determination of the mechanical power necessary for obtaining a given amount of heat (the determination by Séguin and Joule of the mechanical equivalent of heat) were set aside by the scientists. The English Royal Society even declined to publish the results of Joule’s investigations into this subject on the ground that they were “unscientific.” And the excellent work of Grove upon the unity of physical forces, written in 1843, remained up to 1856 in complete obscurity. Only on consulting the history of the exact sciences can one fully understand the forces of reaction which then swept over Europe.

The curtain was suddely rent at the end of the fifties, when that liberal, intellectual movement began in Western Europe which led in Russia to the abolition of serfdom, and deposed Schelling and Hegel in philosophy, while in life it called forth the bold negation of intellectual slavery and submission to habit and authority, which is known under the name of Nihilism.

It is interesting to note in this connection the extent to which the socialist teachings of the thirties and forties, and also the revolution of 1848, have helped science to throw off the fetters placed upon it by the post-revolutionary reaction. Without entering here into detail, it is sufficient to say that the above-mentioned Séguin and Augustin Thierry (the historian who laid the foundations for the study of the folkmote régime and of federalism) were Saint-Simonists, that Darwin’s fellow-worker, A. R. Wallace, was in his younger days an enthusiastic follower of Robert Owen; that Auguste Comte was a Saint-Simonist, and Ricardo and Bentham were Owenists; and that the materialists Charles Vogt and George Lewis, as well as Grove, Mill, Spencer, and many others, had lived under the influence of the radical socialistic movement of the thirties and forties. It was to this very influence that they owed their scientific boldness.

The simultaneous appearance of the works of Grove, Joule, Berthollet and Helmholtz; of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Moleschott and Vogt; of Lyell, Bain, Mill and Burnouf—all in the brief space of five or six years (1856-1862),—radically changed the most fundamental views of science. Science suddenly started upon a new path. Entirely new fields of investigation were opened with amazing rapidity. The science of life (Biology), of human institutions (Anthropology), of reason, will and emotions (Psychology), of the history of rights and religions, and so on—grew up under our very eyes, staggering the mind with the boldness of their generalizations and the audacity of their deductions. What in the preceding century was only an ingenious guess, now came forth proved by the scales and the microscope, verified by thousands of applications. The very manner of writing changed, and science returned to the clearness, the precision, and the beauty of exposition which are peculiar to the inductive method and which characterized those of the thinkers of the eighteenth century who had broken away from metaphysics.

(Will be Continued.)

The Beggar

By Iwan Turgenjeff

I was strolling along the street. A beggar, old and bent, approached me.

His tearful eyes inflamed; his lips blue; in tattered rags exposing his loathsome sores—oh, the frightful effect of want and distress upon this unfortunate creature.

Feebly he stretched out his hand, swollen, red, filthy. Sighing and moaning, he begged my help.

I searched my pockets in vain. I could find nothing; neither money, nor watch; not even my kerchief had I with me.

The beggar stood there, waiting. His outstretched hand trembled and shook.

Confused and embarrassed, I firmly seized his soiled, trembling hand.

“Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing to give you.”

His inflamed eyes looked into mine, a smile began to play about his lips, and I felt his pressure upon my cold fingers.

“Do not mind it, brother,” he lisped; “thanks even for that; it is also a gift, brother.”

I, too, had received a gift from my brother.

The Inheritors

By Valter

We are the Inheritors.
For aeons past
King, slave, and worried sage,
Ruled, toiled and burned
The midnight oil
For “Us”—for Us.

We come a puissant few
With quiet resolve
Compared with which
Ambition is a meteor,
From Ghetto, slum and peasant’s cot
As regents of the Power that Is
To dominate the world,
And mold the future
Of the generations yet to Be.

Nothing has been given Us;
So We take, take, take
Until there’s nothing
Left to take—
And—We give, give, give
Just as freely as We take—
Only, not to those who Want,
But those who Need.

The gorgeous panorama
Of the Day unrolls for Us;
The mystic tragedy of Night
Expands Our dreams.
No book is made,
Or will be made,
Whose charm we cannot find;
No picture limned,
Or marble plied,
Whose thrill We miss.
The tom-tom’s throb—
The symphony of the spheres—
Alike—each finds re-echo in Our breasts.

Prisons and Crime

By Alexander Berkman

MODERN philanthropy has added a new rôle to the répertoire of penal institutions. While, formerly, the alleged necessity of prisons rested, solely, upon their penal and protective character, to-day a new function, claiming primary importance, has become embodied in these institutions—that of reformation.

Hence, three objects—reformative, penal, and protective—are now sought to be accomplished by means of enforced physical restraint, by incarceration of a more or less solitary character, for a specific, or more or less indefinite period.

Seeking to promote its own safety, society debars certain elements, called criminals, from participation in social life, by means of imprisonment. This temporary isolation of the offender exhausts the protective rôle of prisons. Entirely negative in character, does this protection benefit society? Does it protect?

Let us study some of its results.

First, let us investigate the penal and reformative phases of the prison question.

Punishment, as a social institution, has its origin in two sources; first, in the assumption that man is a free moral agent and, consequently, responsible for his demeanor, so far as he is supposed to be compos mentis; and, second, in the spirit of revenge, the retaliation of injury. Waiving, for the present, the debatable question as to man’s free agency, let us analyze the second source.

The spirit of revenge is a purely animal proclivity, primarily manifesting itself where comparative physical development is combined with a certain degree of intelligence. Primitive man is compelled, by the conditions of his environment, to take the law into his own hands, so to speak, in furtherance of his instinctive desire of self-assertion, or protection, in coping with the animal or human aggressor, who is wont to injure or jeopardize his person or his interests. This proclivity, born of the instinct of self-preservation and developed in the battle for existence and supremacy, has become, with uncivilized man, a second instinct, almost as potent in its vitality as the source it primarily developed from, and occasionally even transcending the same in its ferocity and conquering, for the moment, the dictates of self-preservation.

Even animals possess the spirit of revenge. The ingenious methods frequently adopted by elephants in captivity, in avenging themselves upon some particularly hectoring spectator, are well known. Dogs and various other animals also often manifest the spirit of revenge. But it is with man, at certain stages of his intellectual development, that the spirit of revenge reaches its most pronounced character. Among barbaric and semi-civilized races the practice of personally avenging one’s wrongs—actual or imaginary—plays an all-important rôle in the life of the individual. With them, revenge is a most vital matter, often attaining the character of religious fanaticism, the holy duty of avenging a particularly flagrant injury descending from father to son, from generation to generation, until the insult is extirpated with the blood of the offender or of his progeny. Whole tribes have often combined in assisting one of their members to avenge the death of a relative upon a hostile neighbor, and it is always the special privilege of the wronged to give the death-blow to the offender.

Even in certain European countries the old spirit of blood-revenge is still very strong. The semi-barbarians of the Caucasus, the ignorant peasants of Southern Italy, of Corsica and Sicily, still practice this form of personal vengeance; some of them, as the Tsherkessy, for instance, quite openly; others, as the Corsicans, seeking safety in secrecy. Even in our so-called enlightened countries the spirit of personal revenge, of sworn, eternal enmity, still exists. What are the secret organizations of the Mafia type, so common in all South European lands, but the manifestations of this spirit?! And what is the underlying principle of duelling in its various forms—from the armed combat to the fistic encounter—but this spirit of direct vengeance, the desire to personally avenge an insult or an injury, fancied or real; to wipe out the same, even with the blood of the antagonist. It is this spirit that actuates the enraged husband in attempting the life of the “robber of his honor and happiness.” It is this spirit that is at the bottom of all lynch-law atrocities, the frenzied mob seeking to avenge the bereaved parent, the young widow or the outraged child.

Social progress, however, tends to check and eliminate the practice of direct, personal revenge. In so-called civilized communities the individual does not, as a rule, personally avenge his wrongs. He has delegated his “rights” in that direction to the State, the government; and it is one of the “duties” of the latter to avenge the wrongs of its citizens by punishing the guilty parties. Thus we see that punishment, as a social institution, is but another form of revenge, with the State in the rôle of the sole legal avenger of the collective citizen—the same well-defined spirit of barbarism in disguise. The penal powers of the State rest, theoretically, on the principle that, in organized society, “an injury to one is the concern of all”; in the wronged citizen society as a whole is attacked. The culprit must be punished in order to avenge outraged society, that “the majesty of the Law be vindicated.” The principle that the punishment must be adequate to the crime still further proves the real character of the institution of punishment: it reveals the Old-Testamental spirit of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,”—a spirit still alive in almost all so-called civilized countries, as witness capital punishment: a life for a life. The “criminal” is not punished for his offence, as such, but rather according to the nature, circumstances and character of the same, as viewed by society; in other words, the penalty is of a nature calculated to balance the intensity of the local spirit of revenge, aroused by the particular offence.

This, then, is the nature of punishment. Yet, strange to say—or naturally, perhaps—the results attained by penal institutions are the very opposite of the ends sought. The modern form of “civilized” revenge kills, figuratively speaking, the enemy of the individual citizen, but breeds in his place the enemy of society. The prisoner of the State no longer regards the person he injured as his particular enemy, as the barbarian does, fearing the wrath and revenge of the wronged one. Instead, he looks upon the State as his direct punisher; in the representatives of the law he sees his personal enemies. He nurtures his wrath, and wild thoughts of revenge fill his mind. His hate toward the persons, directly responsible, in his estimation, for his misfortune—the arresting officer, the jailer, the prosecuting attorney, judge and jury— gradually widens in scope, and the poor unfortunate becomes an enemy of society as a whole. Thus, while the penal institutions on the one hand protect society from the prisoner so long as he remains one, they cultivate, on the other hand, the germs of social hatred and enmity.

Deprived of his liberty, his rights, and the enjoyment of life; all his natural impulses, good and bad alike, suppressed; subjected to indignities and disciplined by harsh and often inhumanely severe methods, and generally maltreated and abused by official brutes whom he despises and hates, the young prisoner, utterly miserable, comes to curse the fact of his birth, the woman that bore him, and all those responsible, in his eyes, for his misery. He is brutalized by the treatment he receives and by the revolting sights he is forced to witness in prison. What manhood he may have possessed is soon eradicated by the “discipline.” His impotent rage and bitterness are turned into hatred toward everything and everybody, growing in intensity as the years of misery come and go. He broods over his troubles and the desire to revenge himself grows in intensity, his until then perhaps undefined inclinations are turned into strong anti-social desires, which gradually become a fixed determination. Society had made him an outcast; it is his natural enemy. Nobody had shown him either kindness or mercy; he will be merciless to the world.

Then he is released. His former friends spurn him; he is no more recognized by his acquaintances; society points its finger at the ex-convict; he is looked upon with scorn, derision, and disgust; he is distrusted and abused. He has no money, and there is no charity for the “moral leper.” He finds himself a social Ishmael, with everybody’s hand turned against him—and he turns his hand against everybody else.

The penal and protective functions of prisons thus defeat their own ends. Their work is not merely unprofitable, it is worse than useless; it is positively and absolutely detrimental to the best interests of society.

It is no better with the reformative phase of penal institutions. The penal character of all prisons—workhouses, penitentiaries, state prisons—excludes all possibility of a reformative nature. The promiscuous mingling of prisoners in the same institution, without regard to the relative criminality of the inmates, converts prisons into veritable schools of crime and immorality.

The same is true of reformatories. These institutions, specifically designed to reform, do as a rule produce the vilest degeneration. The reason is obvious. Reformatories, the same as ordinary prisons, use physical restraint and are purely penal institutions—the very idea of punishment precludes true reformation. Reformation that does not emanate from the voluntary impulse of the inmate, one which is the result of fear—the fear of consequences and of probable punishment—is no real reformation; it lacks the very essentials of the latter, and so soon as the fear has been conquered, or temporarily emancipated from, the influence of the pseudo-reformation will vanish like smoke. Kindness alone is truly reformative, but this quality is an unknown quantity in the treatment of prisoners, both young and old.

Some time ago* I read the account of a boy, thirteen years old, who had been confined in chains, night and day for three consecutive weeks, his particular offence being the terrible crime of an attempted escape from the Westchester, N. Y., Home for Indigent Children (Weeks case, Superintendent Pierce, Christmas, 1895). That was by no means an exceptional instance in that institution. Nor is the penal character of the latter exceptional. There is not a single prison or reformatory in the United States where either flogging and clubbing, or the straight-jacket, solitary confinement, and “reduced” diet (semi-starvation) are not practiced upon the unfortunate inmates. And though reformatories do not, as a rule, use the “means of persuasion” of the notorious Brockway, of Elmira, N. Y., yet flogging is practiced in some, and starvation and the dungeon are a permanent institution in all of them.

* The above article is compiled from notes made by me in prison, in 1895. A. B.

Aside from the penal character of reformatories and the derogatory influence the deprivation of liberty and enjoyment exercise on the youthful mind, the associations in those institutions preclude, in the majority of cases, all reformation. Even in the reformatories no attempt is made to classify the inmates according to the comparative gravity of their offenses, necessitating different modes of treatment and suitable companionship. In the so-called reform schools and reformatories children of all ages—from 5 to 25—are kept in the same institution, congregated for the several purposes of labor, learning and religious service, and allowed to mingle on the playing grounds and associate in the dormitories. The inmates are often classified according to age or stature, but no attention is paid to their relative depravity. The absurdity of such methods is simply astounding. Pause and consider. The youthful culprit who is such probably chiefly in consequence of bad associations, is put among the choicest assortment of viciousness and is expected to reform! And the fathers and mothers of the nation calmly look on, and either directly further this species of insanity or by their silence approve and encourage the State’s work of breeding criminals. But such is human nature—we swear it is day-time, though it be pitch-dark; the old spirit of credo quia absurdum est.

It is unnecessary, however, to enlarge further upon the debasing influence those steeped in crime exert over their more innocent companions. Nor is it necessary to discuss further the reformative claims of reformatories. The fact that fully 60 per cent of the male prison population of the United States are graduates of “Reformatories” conclusively proves the reformative pretentions of the latter absolutely groundless. The rare cases of youthful prisoners having really reformed are in no sense due to the “beneficial” influence of imprisonment and of penal restraint, but rather to the innate powers of the individual himself.

Doubtless there exists no other institution among the diversified “achievements” of modern society, which, while assuming a most important rôle in the destinies of mankind, has proven a more reprehensible failure in point of attainment than the penal institutions. Millions of dollars are annually expended throughout the “civilized” world for the maintenance of these institutions, and notwithstanding each successive year witnesses additional appropriations for their improvement, yet the results tend to retrogade rather than advance the purports of their founding.

The money annually expended for the maintenance of prisons could be invested, with as much profit and less injury, in government bonds of the planet Mars, or sunk in the Atlantic. No amount of punishment can obviate crime, so long as prevailing conditions, in and out of prison, drive men to it.

Aphorisms

By J. M. Gottesman

If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously; if you do it, it laughs at you. Such is the stage of civilization at which we have arrived!

There is nothing in the world like a good government. It is a thing nobody knows anything about.

The basis of every commercial exposure nowadays is an absolute criminal certainty.

Modern education consists in knowing everything, except what is worth knowing.

There is only one thing worse than a bad government, that is a good government.

Governments are so cowardly. They outrage everything that is sweet and beautiful in men, and are afraid of the world’s tongue.

The most obvious things in life are the most difficult things for the people to discover.

“Survival of the fittest”—what a misleading phrase! Survival of the vulgarest would be better.

The only possible morality is to have none.

The most dangerous things in life are those that have the truest intellectual value.

People believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, because they have always believed in the incredible.

Modesty

By Margaret Grant

IT is so well understood that modesty becomes a woman that it behooves us as women to know just what modesty really is. If we open the dictionary, we find according to Webster that modesty is “natural delicacy or shame regarding personal charms and the sexual relation; purity of thought and manners.” Of course every woman will understand that this definition refers especially to her; the rule for men will vary considerably from this, as is no more than right, considering the subordinate position we hold in relation to them.

Certainly it was with a sigh of relief that I read that modesty was a “natural” delicacy or shame, for as a woman I wished a sure guide for my inquiring mind. If modesty were an affair of nature and not of art, then my way would be smoothed before me; and if I might not trust my own instincts, which perhaps were perverted, I might study a child, in whom there was no art, and so come to the truth.

I may as well admit, at the outset, that I had no clear ideas of modesty. There was this in my favor, however, that I earnestly longed to know what modesty was, in order that I might successfully practice it.

Well, I set about the study of a child’s conduct. You can imagine the result. I was shocked, appalled; the little wretch had no notions whatever of—I was going to say modesty; but, perhaps, it will be better to say—the rules of the game. That is a phrase men use, and it ought to please them. It was of no use to study more than one child, in the hope of finding a difference, for the abandoned creatures, without regard to sex or color, or previous condition of servitude, all behaved themselves in the same way, that is to say, most immodestly. They did what they were functionally moved to do, or exposed their nakedness, without any evidence of that sense of shame which is necessary to modesty.

But if nature were at fault in children, I argued, no doubt it would assert itself in savages; so I turned to them. Alas! what a strange and disconcerting state of affairs I found. It seemed as if each race, if not each tribe, had its own different notions of what was modest. I found that there were women in Africa who would brave death itself rather than be seen without a shred of cloth or skin hanging down behind from the waist; others who would have felt it equally infamous to appear in public without a narrow strip of some material hanging from the neck between the breasts; others who satisfied their sense of modesty completely by a dozen strips of hide hung from the waist in front, but without hiding any part of the body; others, again, who jeered at any shred of clothing, saying that the person using it must have some deformity to conceal.

In South Africa were women who held it immodest to appear in public unless their naked bodies were painted; others who were equally ashamed without a belt two inches broad about the waist. In the South Sea Islands if a woman were tattooed she was sufficiently clad, and her modesty was satisfied.

So it was with all the savage people living in warm climates; they went naked and were unashamed. Was not that astonishing? I made up my mind at last that Webster was wrong in saying that modesty was a natural delicacy or shame. Still, I was not to be balked; I must know what modesty truly was; so I turned to the people of another civilization than ours, thinking there might be some help there for me. Turkish and kindred Oriental women had a modesty that would not permit them to show their faces in public; but the creatures wore trousers, betraying the fact that they had legs—or should I say limbs? Can a woman be modest who does not hide her le—limbs, I mean? Chinese women were too modest to expose any part of the body but the face, and that well covered with paint. Even their hands kept under cover for the most part of the time; and as for showing their wrists!—not they. All of which was encouraging, but in the midst of my delight over the exquisite modesty, I was told that their private morals were terrible, and that the hussies wore trousers. There remained the Japanese women. Well, the least said of them the better, in this connection. Actually they wore clothing when it was convenient, and went without when that suited them better!

But the worst feature of all this was that travelers insisted that in those countries where women went naked they were more moral and chaste than in those countries where they clothed themselves. Japanese women, for example, are declared to be models of shyness, gentleness and modesty. And they wear clothing or go without, as it suits their convenience—not as suits modesty, mind you, but convenience! Is the thing credible. H. Crawford Angus, the African traveler, goes so far as to say this: “It has been my experience that the more naked the people and the more, to us, obscene and shameless in their manner and customs, the more moral and strict they are in matters of sexual intercourse.” But who wants to pay such a price for mere morality?

Then he goes on to describe what may be called the initiation into womanhood of girls who arrive at puberty, and says these shocking things: “The whole matter is looked upon as a matter of course, and not a thing to be ashamed of and to hide; and being thus openly treated of, and no secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are very virtuous. They know from the first all that is to be known, and cannot see any reason for secrecy concerning natural laws or the powers, and senses that have been given them from birth.”

Wallace, the famous traveler and scientist, has the presumption to say of the women of the wild tribes of the Amazon: “There is far more immodesty in the transparent and flesh-colored garments of our stage dancers than in the perfect nudity of these daughters of the forest.” Now, of course, stage dancers may be, and very likely, are immodest, but what do you think of a man saying anything in favor of nudity? A respectable gentleman and a scientist, too! For shame!

Do you wonder that I abandoned all ideas of learning anything about modesty, from either children, savages or peoples of other civilizations? Of course, I no longer had Webster for a guide, since it was certain that there was no such thing as a “natural” delicacy or shame. Consequently, I made up my mind that modesty was a thing of our civilization, and quite artificial it might be, but no less necessary for that reason; so I set about discovering what conduct was modest and what was not.

This was not as easy as you might suppose, but I finally made up a list which received general endorsement, and then set about verifying it by the conduct of those who should know what to do and what not to do. This is the list, which I made as short as possible: A woman may not expose her le—limbs to view; nor her breasts; nor any part of her body nude excepting her hands and face. She must not betray by word or sign or act that she has any bodily functions to perform, save only eating and drinking. She must not be aware that differences of sex consist of anything more than a difference in style of clothing. She must shudder at the thought of anything distinctly sexual. Actual maternity may be referred to, but possible maternity, being noticed even indirectly, is cause for a change of color, or fainting, if possible. It is better that a girl’s health should be ruined than that her mother should be so indelicate as to speak to her of the especial functions of her sex. A young woman should pretend that she has no thought whatever about being a wife or mother, but secretly must devote her whole mind to winning a husband. She should strive with all her might to destroy every symptom of animal passion within herself, and should know nothing of wifely relations except as she can learn of them in secret and stealthy talks with ignorant servants or other girls.

I admit, at once, that the list is not complete, and that some of the rules of modesty laid down are somewhat subject to change under conditions not altogether to be defined. For example, a woman may expose her breasts very freely in the evening, although it would be bad form to do so in the day time; and a woman who would permit herself to be seen nursing her baby could not hope to retain the respect of anyone. Then she may not only betray the fact of being a biped, but may even show her legs with perfect frankness at the seashore, while to do so in mountain climbing or in search of health through any exercise, would be shameful. Also, while on the streets, she may draw her skirts so tightly about her lower limbs as to leave the imagination no opportunity for exercise. Also, while she may not display her breasts nude on the streets, she may wear a girdle, which while it injures her internal organs, leaves the breasts to move about in a manner which she has learned is very provocative to men.

I find that some of the rules of modesty lead to ill-health and physical weakness, so that few women are well because of them; but if to be modest is necessary, who can complain of the results?

Of course we all know that health demands proper attention to the excretory processes of the body, but what right-minded female would not rather suffer any anguish of mind and body than even hint to a male any such need on her part? Modesty must be maintained though the most serious of internal injuries and permanent illness result.

Hundreds and thousands of girls injure themselves for life by ignorant conduct at the age of puberty; but what modest mother would save her child one pang by soiling her lips with words that would dispel the child’s ignorance? And, of course, a young woman would be saved inexpressible suffering if her male companions only knew that once a month she was subject to a functional change; but what girl would consent to share such indecent knowledge with a boy?

I will not say that I know, now, what makes an act modest or the reverse; but I do know and believe that we women will never have good health until we throw modesty to the winds, and conduct ourselves like some of those shameless creatures who really seem to glory in their sex. Shall we do so? Indeed, we shall not. Do I not know your answer? Let us go on in the good old modest way; sick and ailing all our lives, but not sacrificing one shred of the precious conventions that we have collected about us at such a terrible cost.

Let us live maimed, deformed, decrepit, ignorant, half-sexed caricatures of women—but let us be modest!

Zola’s Vision of the Future

THE last works of Zola found little mercy in the eyes of the literary critics. They maintained that his later productions proved him much more of an agitator than an artist. Some of them were even quite indignant that the author should play such an important rôle in revolutionizing society. They could not forgive him for having taken his stand with the oppressed, nor for unfolding the banner of revolt. That seemed to them beneath the dignity of a litterateur.

But Zola was big enough to combine agitation and art. He never followed the superficial motto, “L’art pour l’art.” Neither did he become a mere scribbler of brochures. He combined the penetration of the critic with the broad view of the artist,—one who would not allow himself to be caught in the meshes of party programs.

He beheld not only one path leading to the goal, but many rivers flowing into the ocean of regenerated humanity.

The dying Luc Froment in “Labor” reviews his life’s work. His unfaltering courage and passionate devotion to the cause of the unfortunate millions transformed Beauclair, the place of his activity, into a city, where solidarity and kindness replaced brutality, hatred and selfishness.

He is discussing with his friends, Josine, Zouzanne and Sœurette, the terrible struggles and pain that preceed the birth of a new society.

The sun was sinking below the horizon, a bright, beautiful summer sun, which had lit up the whole city, and still shone into the chamber of death which seemed touched up with gold. Luc, in this splendor, seated in his easy-chair, remained long without speaking, his eyes fixed upon the wide horizon. There was deep silence, Josine and Sœurette did not speak; they knelt, one on each side of his chair, while Suzanne, seated beside him, seemed like him to be in a deep reverie. She spoke at last in a slow voice which seemed as if it came from afar:

“Yes, our city is yonder. Beauclair regenerated sparkles in the sunshine and has a pure atmosphere; I know, too, that neighboring places—Brias, Magnolles, Formeries, and Saint Oran—have followed our example and have been rebuilt and reorganized. But yonder, beyond the Monts Bleuses, there are other places, and farther still, beyond the termination of the great plain of Roumagne, there lies a vast world in the provinces and countries of which nations are engaged in a fierce struggle as they march onward towards the happy city.”

He was again silent and absorbed in thought. He very well knew that the changes he had inaugurated at La Orecherie and Beauclair were going on in other places everywhere with increased rapidity. The movement begun in manufacturing towns soon spread to the provinces, then to the whole nation, then to neighboring countries. There were no more frontiers, no more chains of mountains, no more impassible oceans; deliverance was flying from one continent to another, sweeping away superstition, and drawing all people together.

Finally Luc again spoke, in a weak voice:

“Ah, yes; would that I could know before giving up my work how far its great end has by this time been accomplished! I think that I should sleep better and should take with me into the grave more certainty and hope.”

There was another silence. Josine, Sœurette and Suzanne sat, as he did, looking, as it were, into the future.

At last Josine spoke:

“I have heard something. A traveller has told me that in the great republic the collectivists have become the masters of power. They have for years been fighting bloody political battles to gain possession of the legislative assembly and of the government. Legally they could not succeed, but had to make a coup d’état, after they felt that they were strong enough, and were certain of a strong support in the people. As soon as the revolution succeeded they made laws according to their own theoretical programme, or put forth decrees. All private property was confiscated, all the wealth of individuals became the property of the nation, and all tools and machinery were given over to the laborers. There were no more landowners, no capitalists, no owners of factories. The state reigned master of all, and sole owner and capitalist. It regulated all social life, and distributed benefits to whom it would. But this immense revolution, this universal overthrow, these sudden radical changes, did not, of course, take place without a dreadful struggle. Classes do not let themselves be despoiled, even though their wealth may have been ill-gotten. Dreadful outbreaks took place all over the country. Landowners preferred to be killed on their own doorsteps rather than surrender their land. Some destroyed their own wealth, flooded their mines, broke up the railroads, and blew up their factories; while investors burned up their bonds and certificates, and flung their gold and silver into the sea. Some houses had to be besieged; whole cities had to be taken by storm. There was for years a frightful civil war, during which the streets were red with blood, and corpses were carried off by the rivers. After that the sovereign state encountered all kinds of difficulties before it could set the new state of things on foot. Values were regulated by the worth of each hour of man’s labor, and the system of bourse de travail was adopted. At first they appointed a committee to superintend production, and to divide its profits pro rata, according to the work of each man. Afterwards they found that they must have other bureaus of control, and a complicated organization was created which impeded the wheels of the new system. They fell back on the old plan of quartering men in barracks, and no system ever bore more hard on men, or left them less freedom. And yet the change was in the end accomplished; it was one step onward on the way of justice. Labor had become honorable, and wealth daily increased and was more equitably distributed. So at last the wage-earning system violently disappeared, together with capital, money, and commerce. My traveller told me that the collectivist state, once overwhelmed by so many catastrophes and watered by so much blood, is now finally becoming peaceful, and is entering on a period of solidarity and fraternity, with a population industrious and free.”

Josine ended, and looked again thoughtfully into the horizon. Luc gently remarked:

“Yes, that is one of the ways of blood, with which I would never take any part. But now, what matters the shedding of blood, since it has led man to harmony and peace?”

Then, after a silence, Sœurette spoke, her large eyes looking out on the scene before her across the gigantic ridges of the Monts Bleuses:

“I, too, have learned something,” said she. “People who were eye-witnesses have told me frightful things. There is a great empire not far from here, where anarchists have succeeded in blowing up the old structure by bombs and dynamite. The people had suffered long; so they joined the anarchists and completed the liberating work of destruction. They swept away the very fragments of the old rotten social system. For a long time towns flamed every night like torches, and in them perished the wicked old councillors who refused to give in. Then came that deluge of blood of which the prophets of Anarchy had long spoken as a necessity. After that new times came. The watchword was no longer, ‘Give to each man according to his work,’ but, ‘All men have a right to life and shelter, food and clothing.’ At first they put all the wealth into one mass, and afterwards began to divide it, not giving anything to any one until they were certain that there was enough for all. Men went to work, and nature, by aid of science, was made so productive that it furnished enormous wealth. They enjoyed great prosperity. There was enough to satisfy the appetites of all, even had there been a tenfold larger population. When the thievish and parasitical society has disappeared, and money, the source of all crime, has been abolished, with all our savage laws of repression and restriction, which are also responsible for much iniquity, peace will reign in a liberated community, where the happiness of each should be the happiness of all. There will be no more authority of any kind, no more laws will be wanted, no more government. If the nihilists availed themselves of fire and sword to make a first extermination, it was because they knew that they could not otherwise destroy completely the old hereditary belief in monarchy and religion, and crush authority forever, root and branch, without this brutal cauterization of the world’s sore. They thought it necessary to cut with one blow the links of hereditary belief in the old errors of the past, and make an end of despotism. They did this thoroughly, hoping that the links they cut apart might never again be united. All politics, they held, were bad and poisoned because they were made up of compromises and concessions—bargains of which the weaker party always got the worst. And on the ruins of the old world, when they had been swept away, they thought the pure and noble dream of Anarchy would at length be realized. It was the largest, most ideal conception of a state of peace and happiness for man—man free under a free social system, every creature free from every bond, free to follow its own instincts, to enlarge all his faculties, and to be happy in the possession of his own part in the general wealth.”

Sœurette ceased to speak, and stood thoughtful and silent, with her elbow leaning on the back of Luc’s chair. After a few moments Luc spoke again, though his voice was slower and weaker:

“Yes, in those last days, on the borders of the promised land, the Anarchists will rejoin the disciples of Fourier, even as the collectivists themselves will join with others. Their roads may have been different; but their end will be the same—the happiness of all under justice and liberty.”

Then, after musing for a few moments, he resumed:

“How many tears, how much bloodshed, what abominable wars there have been to conquer the fraternal peace desired equally by all! How many centuries of fratricide have there been, when the main question was merely who should pass to the right and who to the left, in order to reach first the bower of final happiness.”

Suzanne, who till then had sat silent, gazing like the rest into the horizon, spoke at last, but her vision had filled her heart with a great thrill of pity:

“Ah! the last war!” said she. “The world’s last battle! It will be so terrible that men forever will break their swords and spike their cannon. At first it was great social crises that were to reconstruct the world, and I have heard fearful accounts from men who came near losing their senses by reason of the fearful shock these things produced in the world. In the mad struggle, when nations were big with projects for a future social system, half Europe arrayed itself on land against the other half, and whole continents engaged in strife; whole squadrons put to sea to establish the authority of their people over the whole earth. No nation had been able to resist the impulse; they were drawn into it by others; they drew up in line; two great armies, burning with race hatred, resolved to annihilate each other, as if in their empty and uncultivated fields where there were two men at work there was one too many. And two great armies of brothers turned to foes met somewhere in the centre of Europe upon vast plains where millions of human beings conveniently could slay each other. The troops spread out over miles and miles, followed by their reserves, such a torrent of men that the fighting lasted for a month. Every day more human flesh was food for bullets and bombs. They even did not have time to carry off the dead. Heaps of bodies served as walls, behind which fresh regiments fought and were killed. Night did not stay the carnage; they killed each other in the darkness. The sun, as it rose each day, shone upon pools of blood, on a field of carnage covered with stacks of dead. There was a roar like thunder everywhere, and whole regiments seemed to disappear in a flash. The men who fought had no need to draw near each other, since cannon threw their shells for miles, and each of such shells swept bare an acre of the earth, poisoning and asphyxiating the very heavens. Balloons, too, sent down balls and bombs to set fire to the cities. Science had invented fresh explosives, murderous engines able to carry death to enormous distances or to swallow many people at once like an earthquake. And what a monstrous massacre took place on the last night of that tremendous battle! Never had such a human sacrifice smoked under heaven. More than a million of men lay there in the great devastated fields, beside the rivers and scattered over the meadows. A man could have walked for hours, seeing everywhere was a harvest of dead bodies, lying with staring eyes and open mouths, seeming to reproach men for their madness. This was the world’s last battle, so completely have its horrors impressed mankind. People woke up from their mad intoxication, and all felt the certainty that war was no longer possible, for science that was meant to make life prosperous was not to be employed in the work of death.”

Suzanne was once more silent, but was trembling, and her eyes were bright. She was dreaming of peace in the future. Luc spoke once more, though he could not raise his voice above a breath:

“War,” he said, “is dead. The world has reached its last stage. Brothers may now give each other the fraternal kiss; they are in port after their long, rough voyage. My day is done, and now I may go to sleep.”

He spoke no more, and Josine, Sœurette, and Suzanne, without moving, waited for his last sigh. They were not sad. They watched with tender fervor in the death chamber, that was so calm and cheerful, so full of sunshine and of flowers. Below the window the happy children were joyously romping. They could hear the voices of the babes and the laughter of the older ones; it was a foretaste of the future happiness of the race upon its march to joy in the future. The great blue sky was over them, and the kindly sun, the father and fertilizer, whose fire had been captured and turned to domestic uses, was shining in the horizon. And under the gleam of its rays of glory sparkled the roofs of Beauclair triumphant, at this time of the day a bee-hive of active workers whom regenerated labor had made happy because there was a just division of wealth among them. And beyond the plain of Roumagne, beyond the Monts Bleuses, a federation of nations was in progress, so that all might be at last one brotherly people, and so the human race should fulfil its destiny of love and truth and peace.

Then Luc, with one last look, took in the town, the horizon and the fields, where the reform that he had begun was going on so prosperously. His work was done. He had founded his city. And so he died, passing into the unmeasured flood of universal love and life eternal.

Morality as Antinaturalness

By Friedrich Nietzsche

(Translated by Alexander Tille.)

1

ALL passions have a time when they are fatal only, when, with the weight of their folly, they drag their victim down; and they have a later, very much later period, when they wed with spirit, when they are “spiritualized.” Formerly, people waged war against passion itself, on account of the folly involved in it, they conspired for its annihilation. The most notable formula for that view stands in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, let us say in passing, things are not at all regarded from an elevated point of view. For example, it is there said with application to sexuality, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Fortunately no Christian acts according to this precept. To annihilate passions and desires merely in order to obviate their folly and its unpleasant results appears to us at present simply as an acute form of folly. We no longer admire the dentist who pulls out the teeth, that they may no longer cause pain. It may be acknowledged, on the other hand, with some reasonableness that, on the soil out of which Christianity has grown, the notion of a “spiritualization” of passion could not at all be conceived. The primitive Church, as is well known, battled against the “intelligent” in favor of the “poor in spirit”: how could we expect from it an intelligent war against passion?—The Church fights against passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its “cure” is castration. It never asks, “How to spiritualize, beautify, and deify a desire?”—it has, at all times, laid the emphasis of discipline upon extermination (of sensuality, of pride, of ambition, of avarice, of revenge).—But to attack the passions at the root means to attack life itself at the root: the praxis of the Church is inimical to life. . . .

2

The same means, castration, extirpation, is instinctively chosen in the struggle with the desire by those who are too weak of will and too degenerate to be able to impose due moderation upon themselves; those natures, which, to speak with a simile (and without a simile), need la Trappe,—any definite declaration of hostility, a gap between themselves and a passion. The radical means are indispensable only to the degenerate: weakness of will, or to speak more definitely, the incabability of not reacting in response to a stimulus, is itself merely another form of degeneration. Radical hostility, deadly hostility against sensuality is always a critical symptom; one is thereby justified in making conjectures with regard to the general condition of such an extremist. Moreover, that hostility, that hatred, only reaches its height when such natures no longer possess sufficient strength for a radical cure,—for abjuring their “devil.” Survey the whole history of priests and philosophers, that of artists also included, and you will see: the most virulent attacks on the senses are not made by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by impossible ascetics, those who would have required ascetic life.

3

The spiritualization of sensuousness is called love; it is a grand triumph over Christianity. Our spiritualization of hostility is another triumph. It consists in profoundly understanding the importance of having enemies: in short, in acting and reasoning the reverse of the former acting and reasoning. The Church always wanted to exterminate its enemies: we, the immoralists and Anti-Christians, see our advantage in the existence of the Church. . . . In political matters also hostility has now become more spiritualized,—much more prudent, much more critical, much more forbearing. Almost every party conceives that it is advantageous for its self-maintenance if the opposite party does not lose its power; the same is true in grand politics. A new creation especially, e. g. the new Empire, has more need of enemies than of friends: it is only in opposition that it feels itself indispensable, that it becomes indispensable. . . . Not otherwise do we comport ourselves towards the “inner enemy”; there also we have spiritualized hostility, there also we have understood its worth. People are productive only at the cost of having abundant opposition; they only remain young provided the soul does not relax, does not long after peace. . . . Nothing has become more alien to us than the desirability of former times, that of “peace of soul,” Christian desirability; nothing makes us less envious than the moral cow and the plump comfortableness of good conscience. One has renounced grand life, when one has renounced war. . . . In many cases, to be sure, “peace of soul” is merely a misunderstanding—something different, which does not just know how to name itself more honestly. Without circumlocution and prejudice let us take a few cases. “Peace of soul” may, for example, be the mild radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) domain. Or the beginning of fatigue, the first shadow which the evening—every sort of evening—casts. Or a sign that the air is moist, that southern winds arrive. Or unconscious gratitude for a good digestion (occasionally called “charitableness”). Or the quieting down of the convalescent to whom all things have a new taste and who is waiting in expectancy. Or the condition which follows upon a full gratification of our ruling passion, the agreeable feeling of a rare satiety. Or the senile weakness of our will, of our desires, of our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by conceit to deck itself out in moral guise. Or the attainment of a certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after long suspense and torture through uncertainty. Or the expression of proficiency and mastery in doing, creating, effecting, and willing, tranquil breathing, attained “freedom of will.” . . . Twilight of the Idols: who knows? perhaps also just a modification of “peace of soul.” . . .

4

— I formulate a principle. All naturalism in morality, i. e. all healthy morality, is ruled by an instinct of life,—some command of life is fulfilled by adopting a certain canon of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” some hindrance and inimical agency on the way of life is thereby removed. Antinatural morality, on the other hand (i. e. almost every morality which has hitherto been taught, reverenced, and preached), directs itself straight against the instincts of life,—it condemns those instincts, sometimes secretly, at other times loudly and insolently. Saying that “God looks on the heart,” it negatives the lowest and the highest vital desirings, and takes God as the enemy of life. . . . The saint in whom God finds his highest satisfaction is the ideal castrate. . . . Life is at an end where the “Kingdom of God” begins. . . .

5

If the wickedness of such a mutiny against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality has been understood, something else has, fortunately, been understood besides: the uselessness, the unreality, the absurdity, and the deceitfulness of such a mutiny. For a condemnation of life on the part of a living being is ultimately just the symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether rightly or wrongly is not at all raised thereby. We would have to have a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as each and all who have lived it, to be authorized to touch on the problem of the worth of life at all: sufficient reason to convince us that for us the problem is inaccessible. Speaking of values, we speak under the influence of the inspiration and the optics of life: life itself compels us to fix values; life itself values through us, when we fix values. . . . It follows therefrom that even that antinaturalness in morality (which takes God as the counter-principle and condemnation of life) is but an evaluation of life—of which life? of which kind of life?—But I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, fatigued, condemned life. Morality, as it has hitherto been understood—as it was last formulated by Schopenhauer as “denial of will to life”—is the actual décadence instinct which makes out of itself an imperative: it says “Perish!”—it is the valuation of the condemned. . . .

6

Let us consider in the last place what naïveté it manifests to say, “Man ought to be so and so!” Reality exhibits to us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigalitly of forms and transformations; and some paltry hod-man of a moralist says with regard to it, “No! man ought to be different!” . . . He even knows how man ought to be, this parasite and bigot: he paints himself on the wall and says, “Ecce homo!” . . . But even if the moralist directs himself merely to the individual and says, “You ought to be so and so,” he still continues to make himself ridiculous. The individual, in his antecedents and in his consequents, is a piece of fate, an additional law, an additional necessity for all that now takes place and will take place in the future. To say to him, “Alter thyself,” is to require everything to alter itself, even backward also. . . . And in reality there have been consistent moralists; they wanted man to be otherwise,—namely, virtuous; they wanted him fashioned in their likeness, as a bigot: For that purpose they denied the world. No insignificant madness! No modest form of presumption! . . . Morality, in as far as it condemns in itself, and not from regards, considerations, or purposes of life, is a specific error with which we must have no sympathy, it is a degenerate idiosyncrasy which has caused an unutterable amount of harm! . . . We others, we immoralists, on the contrary, have opened our hearts for the reception of every kind of intelligence, conception and approbation. We do not readily deny, we glory in being affirmative. Our eyes have always opened more and more for that economy which still uses and knows how to use for its advantage all that is rejected by the holy delirium of the priest, of the diseased reason of the priest; for that economy in the law of life which even derives advantage from the offensive species of bigots, priests, and the virtuous,—what advantage?— But we immoralists ourselves are the answer. . . .

The Revolutionary Spirit in French Literature

By Alvan F. Sanborn

(Continuation.)

All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.

Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers who are more or less militant iconoclasts and révoltés, the most important are:—

A. Ferdinand Hérold, who expounds his attitude as follows: “From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,—ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself”; Camille Mauclair, who says: “If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself. . . . Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honor for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world”; Bernard Lazare, who says: “Authority, its value and its raison d’être are things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circumstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously, or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all”; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, entitled L’Enfermé; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in the Mercure de France, “We are all anarchists, thank God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author of L’Armée contre la Nation; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor of La Raison, and Henri Bérenger, editor of L’Action, who have acted together in exciting the masses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux; Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles of l’amour libre; Christian Cornélissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Léopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue, B. Guineaudau, Augusts Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fournière, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Félix Fénéon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer, Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressensé, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugène Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.

In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication called L’Endehors (The Outsider) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d’Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Félix Fénélon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fèvre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Hérold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Méry, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin.

It explained its purpose as follows: “We belong neither to a party nor to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is endehors, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves over to our compassions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being ourselves.”

The first number of L’Endehors appeared in May, 1891, immediately after the massacre of Fourmies,—in which old men, women, and children, among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,—and dealt bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.

The staff of L’Endehors defended and even glorified Ravachol. Mirbeau’s “Apologie de Ravachol” is one of the finest bits of impassioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam’s “Eloge de Ravachol” is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:—

"Politics would have been banished completely from our preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol. . . . At the end of all these judicial proceedings, chroniques, and calls to legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the world,—the abnegation of one’s self, of one’s life, and one’s good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor. Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential sacrifice. . . .

“He saw suffering round about him, and he has ennobled the suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which fresh courage and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated. An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open a new era.”

L’Endehors prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article entitled “Notre Complot,” Vaillant’s attempt against the Chamber; and the ex-members of its staff participated, after its supposition had become a fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant’s tomb. The indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so intense that M. Magnard in Le Figaro uttered a vigorous protest against “la Vaillantolatrie”; and the most orthodox writers in the most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which L’Endehors had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and social reforms.

The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Léger’s novel, Le Jaurnal d’un Anarchiste appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la Roche-Sableuse, of which L’Endehors may well have been the model, in the following fashion:—

* Henri Fouquier, an older conservative journalist (recently deceased), of so much distinction that he was considered a possible Academician, published about this time an article in the XIXe Siècle in which he ridiculed the blowing up of the house of the bourgeois as an act devoid of common sense, but declared comprehensible a desire to blow up the Chamber of Deputies, the Prefecture of Police, or the Palace of the President.

“After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the jeunes gens lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little messieurs are not in the least anxious at heart for the triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogisms they pronounce on the noble victims our cause already counts. In short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a little from them.”

L’Endehors was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer, Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:—

“This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a few æsthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more passions than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary, subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the influence of L’Endehors was exerted effectively. . . . But, aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo d’Axa realized an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke it.”

It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontificial attitude before his judges even his bitterest antagonists found “something atrociously superior and disquieting,” and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations, his perpetual raticcination, his hatred of action up to the moment of supreme action, his disgust with life,* and his brooding on death), a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the Endehors group who has committed an overt act of violence.

* “I surely have the right,” he said, “to quit the theatre when the piece becomes odious to me, and even to slam the doors behind me in going out, at the risk of troubling the tranquility of those who are satisfied.”

Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some have held themselves scrupulously “endehors.”

Most have remained révoltés of one sort or another. Only a few have conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has seemed several times by reason of the enormous range of his interests and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which might have been written the very same day as his “Eloge” of Ravachol, and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.

Of those who have remained strictly “endehors,” Zo d’Axa, uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his assault upon the abuses of society in his now famous Feuilles with a fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been matched in revolutionary pamphleteering—and privateering. It was as if Mirbau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended into the street, or as if Père Peinard had attained the level of literature.

The Feuilles de Zo d’Axa appeared irregularly in the form of placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899, and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt.

“To the argument of the mutitude,” he wrote in his salutatory, “to the catechism of the crowds, behold the personal reasons of the Individual oppose themselves! . . . He goes his way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders of the code he poaches the big game,—the officers and judges, bucks or carnivori. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the domesticated gent de lettres, fur and feathers; all the debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the police.”

Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d’Axa’s writings to “a beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and revolt.”

He says further of him: “Zo d’Axa’s phrase is rapid. The fuse of his articles is short. When a match is applied to them, something is bound to explode; and D’Axa is quite capable of sacrificing himself, if need be, in the explosion. He has proved it.”

The suppression of L’Endehors (whose complete file is now one of the rarities of the book-mart) and the consequent dispersion of the Endehors band were soon followed by the formation of another revolutionary coterie of young poets, men of letters, and sociologists, called “Le Groupe de l’Idée Nouvelle.” This group (of whom Paul Adam, A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carrière were the most prominent figures) organized a series of soirées-conférences, which were given at the Hôtel Continental, during the winter of 1893-94, with great success.

L’Idée Nouvelle (somewhat tamed by time, it is true) still exists.

To the former committee of L’Idée Nouvelle, composed of men of letters, among whom were Paul Adam, Jules Cazes, Lucien Descaves, Louis de Grammont, Georges Lecomte, and Léopold Lacour, the artists Eugène Carrière, Jules Dalou, and Steinlen, and the geographer Elisée Reclus, consented to join themselves at the time of the adoption of its new name.

Here is the text of the declarations by means of which Le Rénovation Sociale par le Travail quickly rallied to its support many of those of the intellectual élite who are thinking and acting along the lines of the better aspirations of humanity:—

“Believing that the action of money as a medium of exchange is universally injurious, that it is the source of all the turpitudes and all the infamies of society; that almost all the crimes, the enmities, the divisions, have for their initial cause a question of interest,—namely, money; believing also that money, far from being, as some pretend, a stimulus to production, is rather an obstacle to it; that venality and mercantilism dishonor and paralyze art, kill noble dreams and generous ambitions; that too often, in the actual condition of society, we propose to ourselves as the end of life, not an ideal of beauty, of truth, of justice, but money; believing, further, that there is no other means for counteracting such a situation than by glorifying, rehabilitating, and equitably apportioning labor, and by insisting strenuously on this law of nature, that every consumer should be a producer, the consumption being proportioned to the need, and the production to the faculty and the aptitude,—the members of the committee for La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail pledge themselves to spread these ideas by every means in their power,—by the pen, by word, and by example.”

The Noël Humaine (Human Christmas) is celebrated annually by another group of emancipated men of letters, under the auspices of Victor Charbonnel’s journal La Raison.

The revolutionary fervor of a considerable portion of the intellectual élite has found further expression during the last ten years in a score or more of reviews, “which,” says Paul Adam, “have created, promulgated, sustained, and caused to triumph almost two-thirds of the ideas upon which the new century is beginning its life.” “In each,” says the same writer, “a group of disinterested spirits, extraordinarily erudite, indifferent to success and fortune, eager for knowledge and proud in its acquisition, have cultivated the most beautiful garden of mentality which has been seen in France since the Pléïade and Port-Royal. Poets, sociologists, romancers, and critics have disseminated thereby marvellous beauties.”

M. Adam exaggerates, as he is very apt to do. Nevertheless, in spite of a great deal that is immature, amateurish, intemperate, and fantastic about most of them, the revues des jeunes are one of the most significant phenomena of these latter years.

Furthermore, such publications as Le Mercure de France, La Grande Revue (edited by Fernand Labori, defender of anarchists and of Dreyfus), La Plume, La Revue de Paris, La Revue, La Contemporaine, La Vogue, L’Hermitage, and La Grande France, by extending the hospitality of their columns to the exploitation of the most advanced theories and ideas, have—without claiming to be revolutionary or, at any rate, without limiting themselves to propaganda—effectively supplemented the efforts of the propagandist mediums.

The revolutionary sentiments prevalent among the intellectual élite of France have found abundant expression in the French drama, as was to be expected in a country which has a literary stage and in which nearly every man of letters is something of a playwright. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the stage, by reason of its superior capacity for giving vividness to ideas, were quite as efficacious an instrument of revolutionary propaganda as the press, the chanson, or the novel.

Octave Mirbeau is the author of several plays, three of which, Les Mauvais Bergers, L’Epidémie, and L’Acquitté, teem with caustic, uncompromising anarchism.

Les Mauvais Bergers was successfully produced by Bernhardt’s company in 1897. Its hero, Jean Roule, is a young, thoughtful, aspiring workman, who has suffered so much at the hands of the capitalists and the authorities and has seen so much suffering imposed on others from the same sources that he is possessed with a colossal, implacable hatred of everybody and everything that has to do with power. On the other hand, his heart is full to bursting with unselfish love for the unfortunate proletariat. “I want to live,” he cries, “to live in my flesh, in my brain, in the expansion of all my organs, of all my faculties, instead of remaining the beast of burden that is flogged and the unthinking machine that is turned for others. I want to be a man, in short—a man in my own eyes. . . . We also need some poetry and some art in our lives; for, poor as he may be, a man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty. . . . These flames, this smoke, these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty, by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social puissance of a single man! Extinguish all that, I entreat you! Blow up all that! Annihilate all that!”

(To be Continued.)

The Triumph of Youth

THE afternoon blazed and glittered along the motionless tree-tops and down into the yellow dust of the road. Under the shadows of the trees, among the powdered grass and bushes sat a woman and a man. The man was young and handsome in a way, with a lean eager face and burning eyes, a forehead in the old poetic mould crowned by loose dark waves of hair; his chin was long, his lips parted devouringly and his glances seemed to eat his companion’s face. It was not a pretty face, not even ordinarily good looking,—sallow, not young, only youngish; but there was a peculiar mobility about it, that made one notice it. She waved her hand slowly from East to West, indicating the horizon, and said dreamingly: “How wide it is, how far it is! One can get one’s breath. In the city I always feel that the walls are squeezing my chest.” After a little silence she asked without looking at him: “What are you thinking of, Bernard?”

“You,” he murmured.

She glanced at him under her lids musingly, stretched out her hand and touched his eyelids with her finger-tips and turned aside with a curious fleeting smile. He caught at her hand, but failing to touch it as she drew it away, bit his lip and forcedly looked off at the sky and the landscape: “Yes,” he said in a strained voice, “it is beautiful, after the city. I wish we could stay in it.”

The woman sighed: “That’s what I have been wishing for the last fifteen years.”

He bent towards her eagerly: “Do you think—” he stopped and stammered, “You know we have been planning, a few of us, to club together and get a little farm somewhere near—would you—do you think—would you be one of us?”

She laughed a little low, sad laugh: “I wouldn’t be any good, you know. I couldn’t do the work that ought to be done. I would come fast enough and I would try. But I’m a little too old, Bernard. The rest are young enough to make mistakes and live to make them good; but when I would have my lesson learned my strength would be gone. It’s half gone now.”

“No, it isn’t,” burst out the youth. “You’re worth half a dozen of those young ones. Old, old—one would think you were seventy. And you’re not old; you will never be old.”

She looked up where a crow was wheeling in the air: “If,” she said slowly, following its motions with her eyes, “you once plant your feet on my face, and you will, you impish bird—my Bernard will sing a different song.”

“No, Bernard won’t,” retorted the youth: “Bernard knows his own mind, even if he is ‘only a boy.’ I don’t love you for your face, you—”

She interrupted him with a shrug and a bitter sneer. “Evidently! Who would?”

A look of mingled pain and annoyance overspread his features: “How you twist my words. You are beautiful to me; and you know what I meant.”

“Well,” she said, throwing herself backward against a tree-trunk and stretching out her feet on the grass, ripples of amusement wavering through the cloudy expression, “tell me what do you love in me.”

He was silent, biting his lower lip.

“I’ll tell you then,” she said. “It’s my energy, the life in me. That is youth, and my youth has overlived its time. I’ve had a long lease, but it’s going to expire soon. So long as you don’t see it, so long as my life seems fuller than yours—well—; but when the failure of life becomes visible, while your own is still in its growth, you will turn away. When my feet won’t spring any more, yours will still be dancing. And you will want dancing feet with you.”

“I will not,” he answered shortly: “I’ve seen plenty of other women; I saw all the crowd coming up this morning and there wasn’t a woman there to compare with you. I don’t say I’ll never love others, but now I don’t; if I see another woman like you— But I never could love one of those young girls.”

“Sh—sh,” she said glancing down the road where a whirl of dust was making towards them, in the center of which moved a band of bright young figures, “there they come now. Don’t they look beautiful?” There were four young girls in front, their faces radiant with sun and air, and daisy wreaths in their gleaming hair; they had their arms around each other’s waists and sang as they walked with neither more accord nor discord than the birds about them. The voices were delicious in their youth and joy; one heard that they were singing not to produce a musical effect, but from the mere wish to sing. Behind them came a troop of young fellows, coats off, heads bare, racing all over the roadside, jostling each other and purposely provoking scrambles. The tallest one had a nimbus of bright curls crowning a glowing face, dimpled and sparkling as a child’s. The girls glanced shyly at him under their lashes as he danced about now in front and now behind them, occasionally tossing them a flower, but mostly hustling his comrades about. Behind these came older people with three or four very little children riding on their backs.

As the group came abreast of our couple they stopped to exchange a few words, then went on. When they had passed out of hearing the woman sat with a sphynx-like stare in her eyes, looking steadily at the spot where the bright head had nodded to her as it passed.

“Like a wildflower on a stalk,” she murmured softly, narrowing her eyes as if to fix the vision, “like a tall tiger-lily.”

Her companion’s face darkened perceptibly. “What do you mean? What do you see?” he asked.

“The vision of Youth and Beauty,” she answered in the tone of a sleep-walker, “and the glory and triumph of it,—the immortality of it—its splendid indifference to its ruined temples, and all its humble worshippers. Do you know,” turning suddenly to him with a sharp change in face and voice, “what I would be wicked enough to do, if I could.”

He smiled tolerantly: “You, wicked? Dear one, you couldn’t be wicked.”

“Oh, but I could! If there were any way to fix Davy’s head forever, just as he passed us now,—forever, so that all the world might keep it and see it for all time, I would cut it off with this hand! Yes, I would.” Her eyes glittered mercilessly.

He shook his head smiling: “You wouldn’t kill a bug, let alone Davy.” “I tell you I would. Do you remember when Nathaniel died? I felt bad enough, but do you know the week before when he was so very sick I went out one day to a beautiful glen we used to visit together. They have been improving it; they had improved it so much that the water is all dying out of the creek; the little boats that used to float like pond lillies lie all helpless in the mud and hardly a ribbon of water goes over the fall and the old giant trees are withering. Oh, it hurt me so to think the glory of a thousand years was vanishing before my eyes and I couldn’t hold it. And suddenly the question came into my head: ‘If you had the power would you save Nathaniel’s life or bring back the water to the glen?’ And I didn’t hesitate a minute. I said, 'Let Nathaniel die and all my best loved ones and I myself, but bring back the glory of the glen!”

“When I think,” she went on turning away and becoming dreamy again, “of all the beauty that is gone that I can never see, that is lost forever—the beauty that had to alter and die,—it stifles me with the pain of it. Why must it all die?”

He looked at her wonderingly. “It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that beauty worship is almost a disease with you. I wouldn’t like to care so much for mere outsides.”

“We never long for the thing we are rich in,” she answered in a dry changed voice. Nevertheless his face lighted, it was pleasant to be rich in the thing she worshipped. He had gradually drawn near her feet and now suddenly bent forward and kissed them passionately. “Don’t,” she cried sharply, “it’s too much like self-abasement. And besides—”

His face was white and quivering, his voice choked. “Well—what besides—”

“The time will come when you will wish you had reserved that kiss for some other foot. Some one to whom it will all be new, who will shudder with the joy of it, who will meet you half way, who will believe all that you say, and say like things in fullness of heart. And I perhaps will see you and know that in your heart you are sorry you gave something to me that you would have ungiven if you could.”

He buried his face in his hands. “You do not love me at all,” he said. “You do not believe me.”

A curious softness came into the answer: “Oh, yes, dear, I believe you. Years ago I believed myself when I said the same sort of thing. But I told you I am getting old. I can not unmake what the years have made, nor bring back what they have stolen. I love you for your face (the words had a sting in them), and for your soul too. And I am glad to be loved by you. But, do you know what I am thinking?” He did not answer.

“I am thinking that as I sit here, beloved by you and others who are young and beautiful—it is no lie—in a—well in a triumph I have not sought but which I am human enough to be glad of, envied no doubt by those young girls,—I am thinking how the remorseless feet of Youth will tramp on me soon, and carry you away. And”—very slowly—“in my day of pain, you will not be near, nor the others. I shall be alone; age and pain are unlovely.”

“You won’t let me come near you,” he said wildly. “I would do anything for you. I always want to do things for you to spare you, and you never let me. When you are in pain you will push me away.”

A fairly exultant glitter flashed in her face: “Yes,” she said, “I know my secret. That is how I have stayed young so long. See,” she said, stretching out her arms, “other women at my age are past the love of men. Their affections have gone to children. And I have broken the law of nature and prolonged the love of youth because—I have been strong and stood alone. But there is an end. Things change, seasons change, you, I, all change, what’s the use of saying ‘Never—forever, forever—never,’ like the old clock on the stairs? It’s a big lie.”

“I won’t talk any more,” he said, “but when the time comes you will see.”

She nodded: “Yes, I will see.”

“Do you think all people alike?”

“As like as ants. People are vessels which life fills and breaks, as it does trees and bees and other sorts of vessels. They play when they are little, and then they love and then they have children and then they die. Ants do the same.”

“And you are the woman that preaches individuality?”

“To be sure. But I don’t deceive myself as to the scope of it.”

The crowd were returning now and by tacit consent they arose and joined the group. Down the road they jumped a fence into a field and had to cross a little stream. “Where is our bridge?” called the boys. “We made a bridge. Some one has stolen our bridge.”

“Oh, come on,” cried Davy, “let’s jump it.” Three ran and sprang, they landed laughing and taunting the rest. Bernard sought out his beloved: “Shall I help you over?” he asked.

“No,” she said shortly, “help the girls,” and brushing past him she jumped, falling a little short and muddying a foot, but scrambling up unaided. The rest debated seeking an advantageous point. At last they found a big stone in the middle, and pulling off his shoes, Bernard waded in the creek, helping the girls across. The smallest one, large-eyed and timid, clung to his arm and let him almost carry her over.

“He does it real natural,” observed Davy, who was whisking about in the daisy field like some flashing butterfly.

They gathered daisies and laughed and sang and chattered till the sun went low. Then they gathered under a big tree and spread their lunch on the ground. And after they had eaten the conversation lay between the sallow-faced woman and one of the older men, a clever conversation filled with quaint observations and curious sidelights. The boys sat all about the woman questioning her eagerly, but behind in the shadow of the drooping branches sat the girls, silent, unobtrusive, holding each other’s hands. Now and then the talker cast a furtive glance from Bernard’s rather withdrawn face to the faces in the shadow, and the enigmatic smile hovered and flitted over her lips.

Three years later on the anniversary of that summer day the woman sat at an upstairs window in the house on the little farm that was a reality now, the little co-operative farm where ten free men and women labored and loved. She had come with the others and done her best, but the cost of it, hard labor and merciless pain, was stamped on the face that looked from the window. She was watching Bernard’s figure as it came swinging through the orchard. Presently he came in and up the stairs. His feet went past her door, then turned back irresolutely and a low knock followed. Her eyebrows bent together almost sternly as she answered, “Come in.”

He entered with a smile: “Can I do anything for you, this morning?”

“No,” she said quietly, “you know I like my own cranky ways. I—I’d rather do things myself.” He nodded: “I know. I always get the same answer. Shall you go to the picnic? You surely will keep our foundation-day picnic?”

“Perhaps—later. And perhaps not.” There was a curious tone of repression in the words.

“Well,” he answered good naturedly, “if you won’t let me do anything for you I’ll have to find some one who will. Is Bella ready to go?”

“This half hour. Bella. Here is Bernard.” And Bella came in. Bella, the timid girl with the brilliant complexion and gazelle soft eyes, Bella radiant in her youth and feminine daintiness, more lovely than she had been three years before.

She gave Bernard a lunch basket to carry and a shawl and a workbag and a sun umbrella, and when they went out she clung to his arm besides. She stopped near one of their own rose bushes and told him to choose a bud for her and she put it coquettishly in her dark hair. The woman watched them till they disappeared down the lane; he had never once looked back. Then her mouth settled in a quiet sneer and she murmured: “How long is forever? Three years.” After a while she rose and crossed to an old mirror that hung on the opposite wall. Staring at the reflection it gave back she whispered drearily: “You are ugly, you are eaten with pain! Do you still expect the due of youth and beauty? Did you not know it all long ago?” Then something flashed in the image, something as if the features had caught fire and burned. “I will not,” she said hoarsely, her fingers clenching. “I will not surrender. Was it he I loved? It was his youth, his beauty, his life. And younger youth shall love me still, stronger life. I will not, I will not die alive.” She turned away and ran down into the yard and out into the fields. She would not go on the common highway where all went, she would find a hard way through woods and over hills, and she would come there before them and sit and wait for them where the ways met. Bareheaded, ill-dressed and careless she ran along, finding a fierce pleasure in trampling and breaking the brush that impeded her. There was the road at last and just ahead of her an old, old man hobbling along with bent back and eyes upon the ground. Just before him was a bad hole in the road, he stopped, irresolute, and looked around like a crippled insect stretching its antennæ to find a way for its mangled feet. She called cheerily, “Let me help you.” He looked up with dim blue eyes helplessly seeking. She led him slowly around the dangerous place and then they sat down together on the little covered wooden bridge beyond.

“Ah!” murmured the old man, shaking his head, “it is good to be young.” And there was the ghost of admiration in his watery eyes as he looked at her tall straight figure.

“Yes,” she answered sadly, looking away down the road where she saw Bella’s white dress fluttering, “it is good to be young.”

The lovers passed without noticing them, absorbed in each other. Presently the old man hobbled away. “It will come to that too,” she muttered looking after him. The husks of life!

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 thnikers.) 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.

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