Mother Earth

The Genius of Revolution

By John F. Valter

Revolution am I,
Red, grim, and grisly.
Aroused from my sleep
In the Cave of the Ages,
I come!

Dream haunted I come!
With the cries of the wretched—
The Strong, the Decrepit—
The greed-poisoned infant
That writhed out its life.

Unnoticed I stalk
Through the maze of the frenzied,
Urging them on in their hellish carouse—
There, midst the scenes of bloodshed and terror,
August, magnificent—
I rule ALONE.

When Ambition is stripped of its pomp,
And Folly is wholly rebuked;
When man is man—
Nor more, nor less—
I return to my sleep and my dreams.

Observations and Comments

Legalize a thing and it loses its originality; it withers. Place an imperative—a demand—side by side with a free emotion, and it becomes forced and compulsory. Marital law kills love. Many parents impose pedagogic rules and regulations with so much vehemence that they deaden their children’s desire to learn.

Everybody prates of duty; no one seems to realize that to insist on duty is to inevitably kill that which is the life-essence of fine characters—originality and spontaneity in mutual relations and affection.

Ancient Rome used to celebrate the feast of Saturnalia: the slaves played masters; the latter waited on their slaves—a spectacle to make one shed tears of indignation over the humiliated sensibilities of the oppressed and the sneering frivolity of the oppressors. Labor Day is our twentieth century Saturnalia.

The big heart of the government is bleeding. It made a profitable bargain by liberating the Filipinos and the Cubans who have since given ample cause for mourning. The liberated have proven themselves utterly unfit for the sort of freedom designed in Washington.

What does the liberty of our colonies consist of, anyway? 'Tis merely removing the obstacles in the way of the American capitalists who are eager to press profits from the conquered people.

Those who entertain a higher conception of liberty are Anarchists, and should be put in the care of the Secretary of the Navy, Bonaparte, who is about to transplant the knout to American soil.

Liberty that stands for profits, for law and order, can be defined as collective stupidity that will suffer politicians and speculators to draw the wool over the eyes of the people.

The Filipinos seem to have lacked proper appreciation for such order; therefore they had to be annexed. The Cubans were allowed more elbow space; they were guaranteed self-government—on paper. But according to the reports from Washington, they have made poor use of it; now they, too, will have to be annexed. What a terrible disappointment to the liberty-loving zeal of our government. Its intense desire is to carry the torch of liberty to all the nations of the globe; but as they are not so civilized as we Americans, it is our duty to make them so, even with Biblical and other cannons.

In the steppes, in the mines of Siberia, where the chains of the condemned clatter, in the underground dungeons of the Schlüsselburg and the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, the ghosts of the martyred heroes of Free Russia have arisen. Black hosts surround the throne—the T’sar’s prison cage—and force the trembling, bloodstained Trepoffs to flee in terror. The echo of their voices resounds in pistol shots and bomb explosions. Revolution stalks in iron sandals throughout the land, each step threatening to tear tyranny asunder.

The oppressed and disinherited the world over rejoice that a Nemesis still exists, whose work of constructive destruction no power on earth can delay.

The monotony and heaviness of the dog-days were somewhat relieved by the recent discussion as to whether the Anarchists should be first killed and then flogged, or whether the flogging should precede the killing. It was no less an authority than our Secretary Bonaparte who suggested the eminently civilized method of exterminating Anarchism by flogging. Fortunately, the Anarchists have too much humor to take this buffoon seriously. In a decent society his name will be catalogued among the instruments of torture in the medieval and modern inquisitions.

An Open Letter

By Voltairine de Cleyre

PHILADELPHIA, Pa., Aug., 1906.

MAXIM GORKY, New York City.

My right to address you is that I have felt the best that your soul has felt, and loved you for your voice that cried out of the deeps; and that not less have I felt the shame and degradation of your conduct as a weak and shambling creeper, since you have been in America.

Hedged about like the Russian Czar by those that have used you and fooled you; seeker for the gifts of those who have spit in your face; insulter of those to whom you once belonged; hedger and trimmer to the rotten bourgeoisie of America, for the dollars you hoped to get from them for the Russian revolution, you have not known even how to hedge and trim; and some one should tell you so.

Are you he who wrote the apotheosis of the tramp, you who in this city sat in the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel surrounded by the vulgar gaud of modern riches, paid for—by whom? By those who are down in the depths where you once were! In the closed circle which has kept away the honest light of truth from you, and reflected your image in the magnifying glass of hero-worship, you have not heard or seen the truth about yourself. To tell you that truth, that is why I write.

In what character did you come here? Did you come here as a man, or as a representative of the Russian revolution? You have acted as neither one nor the other. If you came here as a man, perfectly free and responsible to no one, then when Puritanic hypocrisy grew morally indignant at your personal relations, why did you not once and for all say, “I despise your marriage law, your marriage prostitution, your lying morality. Myself and my beloved are above you.” But you tried to creep behind a pretense of legality, you hung on to the skirts of the respectability, which flouted you and her. After an attack like that you should have stayed in the open like a man; but you went and hid like a coward. Again, if you were of the people, truly and in the depths of you, and free to act as you pleased, why did you please to go to the richest hotels and sit with the bourgeois? Why, when the poverty-stricken Russian Jews, who, and who alone, have given nine-tenths of the money contributed to the Russian revolution from America, when they wrote and told you your prices were too high for them to hear your lecture, did you answer, “I am here to collect money, not to be stared at”? You would have had twice the money at half the price. Have you then learned so soon the art of playing the lion at two-dollar banquets, and scorning the staircase whereby you climbed?

It is said by your apologists, among them some of those who sat at the banquet with you, that your anomalous position was due, not to yourself, but to your having fallen into the hands of committees of lickspittles. In the name of Manhood, are you nothing at all yourself? Do you not know when you are in surroundings incompatible with the character of one devoted to the cause of human—not Russian only—liberty? Are you such a helpless baby that you cannot assert yourself and tread a self-respecting path? Can you sit at the board with those who eat the flesh and drink the blood of the workers, and not know what you are doing? You did that, here in Philadelphia. And you left Mme. Andreieva in New York, or they would not have let you into that same Bellevue-Stratford! Shame on you!

But perhaps you came here not as a man, but as a delegate. Then why, in the name of common sense, did you not learn the nature of the people with whom you had to deal, and act with some sort of diplomacy. If you wanted the money of the American bourgeoisie, why did you not study them first? Why did you act like a blunderbuss, and begin by outraging the first article in their creed, viz.: “Let a man keep his illicit relations secret.” Why did you not master the psychology of the American journalist, before you walked near his traps? Why did you play your cards so stupidly as to fall foul of metropolitan newspaper jealousy, before you had a single thousand of all that money you wanted to get for Russia? If you undertook the errand of a diplomat, why did you not learn the business of a diplomat?

Finally, whether as a man or as a representative, what lying spirit put it in your mouth to call the Russian Czar an Anarchist? To decry people who, whether right or wrong in their beliefs, have fought and are fighting tyranny in every land, whether Russia or America; people who have felt the lash and iron, who have gone to the scaffold, the guillotine, and the garotte, for proclaiming the freedom of all, the tyranny of none. You cannot be so ignorant as not to know who Peter Kropotkin is and what he teaches, and you know it has as much in common with Czarism as light has with darkness. Is this, then, again a piece of your “diplomacy”? Do you throw mud where all the world throws mud, in order to get dollars again? Do you want to help the Russian revolution at the expense of truth, of justice to those to whom it is popular to be unjust? We, the Anarchists of America, have been ever the first to welcome every dawn-bearer over the darkness of Russian tyranny. For years we have given our work and our money—what little we had—to push the cause of freedom, there as here, and everywhere. We will continue to do so, no matter what you say of us. But if you choose to blacken us, to misrepresent us, expect from us the contempt of honest men for liars.

I have written with the bitterness of one who has had—I will not say an idol shattered, but something akin to it. I thought you were a fearless man, a true child of the people; and you are weak and characterless, as a daughter of silk and velvet.

At the end of the bitterness comes an all-surgent wish, “Oh, that he might yet shake them all off, strike out a line, clean as an arrow-path, and walk in it among his own people,—the poor, the outcasts, the tramps. We would forget it all,—these shameful days, this disgusting truckling, this vane-veering, this eating of the bread of the rich: he would be ours again!”

And I remember “The Lost Leader”—

“Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat!”

You wanted to be true to the Russian revolution, and you have been untrue to the great revolution, which is to the other as the ocean to the wave!

I have told you the truth.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE, 517 N. Randolph street, Philadelphia, Pa.

Modern Science and Anarchism

By Peter Kropotkin

(Continued.)

To predict what direction science will take in its further development is, evidently, impossible. As long as men of science depend upon the rich and the governments, so long will they of necessity remain subject to influence from this quarter; and this, of course, can again arrest for a time the development of science. But one thing is certain: in the form that science is now assuming there is no longer any need of the hypothesis which Laplace considered useless, or of the metaphysical “words” which Goethe ridiculed. The book of nature, the book of organic life, and that of human development, can already be read without resorting to the power of a creator, a mystical “vital force,” an immortal soul, Hegel’s trilogy, or the endowment of abstract symbols with real life. Mechanical phenomena, in their ever-increasing complexity, suffice for the explanation of nature and the whole of organic and social life.

There is much, very much, in the world that is still unknown to us—much that is dark and incomprehensible; and of such unexplained gaps new ones will always be disclosed as soon as the old ones have been filled up. But we do not know of, and do not see the possibility of discovering, any domain in which the phenomena observed in the fall of a stone, or in the impact of two billiard balls, or in a chemical reaction—that is, mechanical phenomena—should prove inadequate to the necessary explanations.

II.

It was natural that, as soon as science had attained such generalizations, the need of a synthetic philosophy should be felt; a philosophy which, no longer discussing “the essence of things,” “first causes,” the “aim of life,” and similar symbolic expressions, and repudiating all sorts of anthropomorphism (the endowment of natural phenomena with human characteristics), should be a digest and unification of all our knowledge; a philosophy which, proceeding from the simple to the complex, would furnish a key to the understanding of all nature, in its entirety, and, through that, indicate to us the lines of further research and the means of discovering new, yet unknown, correlations (so-called laws), while at the same time it would inspire us with confidence in the correctness of our conclusions, however much they may differ from current superstitions.

Such attempts at a constructive synthetic philosophy were made several times during the nineteenth century, the chief of them being those of Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer. On these two we shall have to dwell.

The need of such a philosophy as this was admitted already in the eighteenth century—by the philosopher and economist Turgot and, subsequently, even more clearly by Saint-Simon. As has been stated above, the encyclopedists, and likewise Voltaire in his “Philosophical Dictionary,” had already begun to construct it. In a more rigorous, scientific form which would satisfy the requirements of the exact sciences, it was now undertaken by Auguste Comte.

It is well known that Comte acquitted himself very ably of his task so far as the exact sciences were concerned. He was quite right in including the science of organic life (Biology) and that of human societies (Sociology) in the circle of sciences compassed by his positive philosophy; and his philosophy has had a great influence upon all scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century.

But why was it that this great philosopher proved so weak the moment he took up, in his “Positive Politics,” the study of social institutions, especially those of modern times? This is the question which most admirers of Comte have asked themselves. How could such a broad and strong mind come to the religion which Comte preached in the closing years of his life? Littré and Mill, it is well known, refused even to recognize Comte’s “Politics” as part of his philosophy; they considered it the product of a weakened mind; while others utterly failed in their endeavors to discover a unity of method in the two works.*

And yet the contradiction between the two parts of Comte’s philosophy is in the highest degree characteristic and throws a bright light upon the problems of our own time.

When Comte had finished his “Course of Positive Philosophy,” he undoubtedly must have perceived that he had not yet touched upon the most important point—namely, the origin in man of the moral principle and the influence of this principle upon human life. He was bound to account for the origin of this principle, to explain it by the same phenomena by which he had explained life in general, and to show why man feels the necessity of obeying his moral sense, or, at least, of reckoning with it. But for this he was lacking in knowledge (at the time he wrote this was quite natural) as well as in boldness. So, in lieu of the God of all religions, whom man must worship and to whom he must appeal in order to be virtuous, he placed Humanity, writ large. To this new idol he ordered us to pray, that we might develop in ourselves the moral concept. But once this step had been taken—once it was found necessary to pay homage to something standing outside of and higher than the individual in order to retain man on the moral path—all the rest followed naturally. Even the ritualism of Comte’s religion moulded itself very naturally upon the model of all the preceding positive religions.

Once Comte would not admit that everything that is moral in man grew out of observation of nature and from the very conditions of men living in societies,—this step was necessary. He did not see that the moral sentiment in man is as deeply rooted as all the rest of his physical constitution inherited by him from his slow evolution; that the moral concept in man had made its first appearance in the animal societies which existed long before man had appeared upon earth; and that, consequently, whatever may be the inclinations of separate individuals, this concept must persist in mankind as long as the human species does not begin to deteriorate,—the anti-moral activity of separate men inevitably calling forth a counter-activity on the part of those who surround them, just as action causes reaction in the physical world. Comte did not understand this, and therefore he was compelled to invent a new idol—Humanity—in order that it should constantly recall man to the moral path.

Like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and almost all his other contemporaries, Comte thus paid his tribute to the Christian education he had received. Without a struggle of the evil principles with the good—in which the two should be equally matched—and without man’s application in prayer to the good principle and its apostles on earth for maintaining him in the virtuous path, Christianity cannot be conceived. And Comte, dominated from childhood by this Christian idea, reverted to it as soon as he found himself face to face with the question of morality and the means of fortifying it in the heart of man.

IV.

But it must not be forgotten that Comte wrote his Positivist Philosophy long before the years 1856–1862, which, as stated above, suddenly widened the horizon of science and the world-concept of every educated man.

The works which appeared in these five or six years have wrought so complete a change in the views on nature, on life in general, and on the life of human societies, that it has no parallel in the whole history of science for the past two thousand years. That which had been but vaguely understood—sometimes only guessed at by the encyclopedists, and that which the best minds in the first half of the nineteenth century had so much difficulty in explaining, appeared now in the full armor of science; and it presented itself so thoroughly investigated through the inductive-deductive method that every other method was at once adjudged imperfect, false and—unnecessary.

Let us, then, dwell a little longer upon the results obtained in these years, that we may better appreciate the next attempt at a synthetic philosophy, which was made by Herbert Spencer.

Grove, Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, and a whole group of physicists and astronomers,—as also Kirchhoff, who discovered the spectroscopic analysis and gave us the means of determining the composition of the most distant stars,—these, in rapid succession at the end of the fifties, proved the unity of nature throughout the inorganic world. To talk of certain mysterious, imponderable fluids—calorific, magnetic, electric—became impossible. It was shown that the mechanical motion of molecules which takes place in the waves of the sea or in the vibrations of a bell or a tuning fork, was adequate to the explanation of all the phenomena of heat, light, electricity and magnetism; that we can measure them and weigh their energy. More than this: that in the heavenly bodies most remote from us the same vibration of molecules takes place, with the same effects. Nay, the mass movements of the heavenly bodies themselves, which run through space according to the laws of universal gravitation, represent, in all likelihood, nothing else than the resultants of these vibrations of light and electricity, transmitted for billions and trillions of miles through interstellar space.

The same calorific and electrical vibrations of molecules of matter proved also adequate to explain all chemical phenomena. And then, the very life of plants and animals, in its infinitely varied manifestations, has been found to be nothing else than a continually going on exchange of molecules in that wide range of very complex, and hence unstable and easily decomposed, chemical compounds from which are built the tissues of every living being.

Then, already during those years it was understood—and for the past ten years it has been still more firmly established—that the life of the cells of the nervous system and their property of transmitting vibrations from one to the other, afforded a mechanical explanation of the nervous life of animals. Owing to these investigations, we can now understand, without leaving the domain of purely physiological observations, how impressions and images are produced and retained in the brain, how their mutual effects result in the association of ideas (every new impression awakening impressions previously stored up), and hence also—in thought.

Of course, very much still remains to be done and to be discovered in this vast domain; science, scarcely freed yet from the metaphysics which so long hampered it, is only now beginning to explore the wide field of physical psychology. But the start has already been made, and a solid foundation is laid for further labors. The old-fashioned classification of phenomena into two sets, which the German philosopher Kant endeavored to establish,—one concerned with investigations “in time and space” (the world of physical phenomena) and the other “in time only” (the world of spiritual phenomena),—now falls of itself. And to the question once asked by the Russian physiologist, Setchenov: “By whom and how should psychology be studied?” science has already given the answer: “By physiologists, and by the physiological method.” And, indeed, the recent labors of the physiologists have already succeeded in shedding incomparably more light than all the intricate discussions of the metaphysicists, upon the mechanism of thought; the awakening of impressions, their retention and transmission.

In this, its chief stronghold, metaphysics was thus worsted. The field in which it considered itself invincible has now been taken possession of by natural science and materialist philosophy, and these two are promoting the growth of knowledge in this direction faster than centuries of metaphysical speculation have done.

In these same years another important step was made. Darwin’s book on “The Origin of Species” appeared and eclipsed all the rest.

Already in the last century Buffon (apparently even Linneus), and on the threshold of the nineteenth century Lamarck, had ventured to maintain that the existing species of plants and animals are not fixed forms; that they are variable and vary continually even now. The very fact of family likeness which exists between groups of forms—Lamarck pointed out—is a proof of their common descent from a common ancestry. Thus, for example, the various forms of meadow buttercups, water buttercups, and all other buttercups which we see on our meadows and swamps, must have been produced by the action of environment upon descendants from one common type of ancestors. Likewise, the present species of wolves, dogs, jackals and foxes did not exist in a remote past, but there was in their stead one kind of animals out of which, under various conditions, the wolves, the dogs, the jackals and the foxes have gradually evolved.

But in the eighteenth century such heresies as these had to be uttered with great circumspection. The Church was still very powerful then, and for such heretical views the naturalist had to reckon with prison, torture, or the lunatic asylum. The “heretics” consequently were cautious in their expressions. Now, however, Darwin and A. R. Wallace could boldly maintain so great a heresy. Darwin even ventured to declare that man, too, had originated, in the same way of slow physiological evolution, from some lower forms of ape-like animals; that his “immortal spirit” and his “moral soul” are as much a product of evolution as the mind and the moral habits of the ant or the chimpanzee.

We know what storms then broke out upon Darwin and, especially, upon his bold and gifted disciple, Huxley, who sharply emphasized just those conclusions from Darwin’s work which were most dreaded by the clergy. It was a fierce battle, but, owing to the support of the masses of the public, the victory was won, nevertheless, by the Darwinians; and the result was that an entirely new and extremely important science—Biology, the science of life in all its manifestations—has grown up under our very eyes during the last forty years.

At the same time Darwin’s work furnished a new key to the understanding of all sorts of phenomena—physical, vital, and social. It opened up a new road for their investigation. The idea of a continuous development (evolution) and a continual adaptation to changing environment, found a much wider application than the origin of species. It was applied to the study of all nature, as well as to men and their social institutions, and it disclosed in these branches entirely unknown horizons, giving explanations of facts which hitherto had seemed quite inexplicable.

Owing to the impulse given by Darwin’s work to all natural sciences, Biology was created, which, in Herbert Spencer’s hands, soon explained to us how the countless forms of living beings inhabiting the earth may have developed, and enabled Haeckel to make the first attempt at formulating a genealogy of all animals, man included. In the same way a solid foundation for the history of the development of man’s customs, manners, beliefs and institutions was laid down—a history the want of which was strongly felt by the eighteenth century philosophers and by Auguste Comte. At the present time this history can be written without resorting to either the formulæ of Hegelian metaphysics or to “innate ideas” and “inspiration from without”—without any of those dead formulæ behind which, concealed by words as by clouds, was always hidden the same ancient ignorance and the same superstition. Owing, on the one hand, to the labors of the naturalists, and, on the other, to those of Henry Maine and his followers, who applied the same inductive method to the study of primitive customs and laws that have grown out of them, it became possible in recent years to place the history of the origin and development of human institutions upon as firm a basis as that of the development of any form of plants or animals.

It would, of course, be extremely unfair to forget the enormous work that was done earlier—already in the thirties—towards the working out of the history of institutions by the school of Augustin Thierry in France, by that of Maurer and the “Germanists” in Germany, and in Russia, somewhat later, by Kostomarov, Belyaev and others. In fact, the principle of evolution had been applied to the study of manners and institutions, and also to languages, from the time of the encyclopedists. But to obtain correct, scientific deductions from all this mass of work became possible only when the scientists could look upon the established facts in the same way as the naturalist regards the continuous development of the organs of a plant or of a new species.

The metaphysical formulæ have helped, in their time, to make certain approximate generalizations. Especially did they stimulate the slumbering thought, disturbing it by their vague hints as to the unity of life in nature. At a time when the inductive generalizations of the encyclopedists and their English predecessors were almost forgotten (in the first half of the nineteenth century), and when it required some civic courage to speak of the unity of physical and spiritual nature—the obscure metaphysics still upheld the tendency toward generalization. But those generalizations were established either by means of the dialectic method or by means of a semi-conscious induction, and, therefore, were always characterized by a hopeless indefiniteness. The former kind of generalizations was deduced by means of really fallacious syllogisms—similar to those by which in ancient times certain Greeks used to prove that the planets must move in circles “because the circle is the most perfect curve”; and the meagerness of the premises would then be concealed by misty words, and, worse still, by an obscure and clumsy exposition. As to the semi-conscious inductions which were made here and there, they were based upon a very limited circle of observations—similar to the broad but unwarranted generalization of Weismann, which have recently created some sensation. Then, as the induction was unconscious, the generalizations were put forth in the shape of hard and fast laws, while in reality they were but simple suppositions—hypotheses, or beginnings only of generalizations, which, far from being “laws,” required yet the very first verification by observation. Finally, all these broad deductions, expressed as they were in most abstract forms—as, for instance, the Hegelian “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,”—left full play for the individual to come to the most varied and often opposite practical conclusions, so that they could give birth, for instance, to Bakunin’s revolutionary enthusiasm and to the Dresden Revolution, to the revolutionary Jacobinism of Marx and to the recognition of the “reasonableness of what exists,” which reconciled so many Germans to the reaction then existing—to say nothing of the recent vagaries of the so-called Russian Marxists.

Since Anthropology—the history of man’s physiological development and of his religious, political ideals, and economic institutions—came to be studied exactly as all other natural sciences are studied, it was found possible, not only to shed a new light upon this history, but to divest it for ever of the metaphysics which had hindered this study in exactly the same way as the Biblical teachings had hindered the study of Geology.

It would seem, therefore, that when the construction of a synthetic philosophy was undertaken by Herbert Spencer, he should have been able, armed as he was with all the latest conquests of science, to build it without falling into the errors made by Comte in his “Positive Politics.” And yet Spencer’s synthetic philosophy, though it undoubtedly represents an enormous step in advance (complete as it is without religion and religious rites), still contains in its sociological part mistakes as gross as are found in the former work.

The fact is that, having reached in his analysis the psychology of societies, Spencer did not remain true to his rigorously scientific method, and failed to accept all the conclusions to which it had led him. Thus, for example, Spencer admits that the land ought not to become the property of individuals, who, in consequence of their right to raise rents, would hinder others from extracting from the soil all that could be extracted from it under improved methods of cultivation; or would even simply keep it out of use in the expectation that its market price will be raised by the labor of others. An arrangement such as this he considers inexpedient and full of dangers for society. But, while admitting this in the case of the land, he did not venture to extend this conclusion to all other forms of accumulated wealth—for example, to mines, harbors, and factories.

Or, again, while protesting against the interference of government in the life of society, and giving to one of his books a title which is equivalent to a revolutionary programme, “The Individual vs. The State,” he, little by little, under the pretext of the defensive activity of the State, ended by reconstructing the State in its entirety,—such as it is to-day, only slightly limiting its attributes. These and other inconsistencies are probably accounted for by the fact that the sociological part of Spencer’s philosophy was formulated in his mind (under the influence of the English radical movement) much earlier than its natural-scientific part—namely, before 1851, when the anthropological investigation of human institutions was in its rudimentary stage. In consequence of this, Spencer, like Comte, did not take up the investigation of these institutions by themselves, without preconceived conclusions. Moreover, as soon as he came in his work to social philosophy—to Sociology—he began to make use of a new method, a most unreliable one—the method of analogies—which he, of course, never resorted to in the study of physical phenomena. This new method permitted him to justify a whole series of preconceived theories. Consequently, we do not possess as yet a philosophy constructed in both its parts—natural sciences and sociology—with the aid of the same scientific method.

Then, Spencer, it must also be added, is the man least suited for the study of primitive institutions. In this respect he is distinguished even among the English, who generally do not enter readily into foreign modes of life and thought. “We are a people of Roman law, and the Irish are common-law people: therefore we do not understand each other,” a very intelligent Englishman once remarked to me. The history of the Englishmen’s relations with the “lower races” is full of like misunderstandings. And we see them in Spencer’s writings at every step. He is quite incapable of understanding the customs and ways of thinking of the savage, the “blood revenge” of the Icelandic saga, or the stormy life, filled with struggles, of the medieval cities. The moral ideas of these stages of civilization are absolutely strange to him; and he sees in them only “savagery,” “despotism,” and “cruelty.”

Finally—what is still more important—Spencer, like Huxley and many others, utterly misunderstood the meaning of “the struggle for existence.” He saw in it, not only a struggle between different species of animals (wolves devouring rabbits, birds feeding on insects, etc.), but also a desperate struggle for food, for living-room, among the different members within every species—a struggle which, in reality, does not assume anything like the proportions he imagined.

How far Darwin himself was to blame for this misunderstanding of the real meaning of the struggle for existence, we cannot discuss here. But certain it is that when, twelve years after “The Origin of Species,” Darwin published his “Descent of Man,” he already understood struggle for life in a different sense. “Those communities,” he wrote in the latter work, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.” The chapter devoted by Darwin to this subject could have formed the basis of an entirely different and most wholesome view of nature and of the development of human societies (the significance of which Goethe had already foreseen). But it passed unnoticed. Only in 1879 do we find, in a lecture by the Russian zoologist Kessler, a clear understanding of mutual aid and the struggle for life. “For the progressive development of a species,” Kessler pointed out, citing several examples, “the law of mutual aid is of far greater importance than the law of mutual struggle.” Soon after this Louis Büchner published his book “Love,” in which he showed the importance of sympathy among animals for the development of moral concepts; but, in introducing the idea of love and sympathy instead of simple sociability, he needlessly limited the sphere of his investigations. To prove and further to develop Kessler’s excellent idea, extending it to man, was an easy step. If we turn our minds to a close observation of nature and to an unprejudiced history of human institutions, we soon discover that Mutual Aid really appears, not only as the most powerful weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of nature and all other enemies, but also as the chief factor of progressive evolution. To the weakest animals it assures longevity (and hence an accumulation of mental experience), the possibility of rearing its progeny, and intellectual progress. And those animal species among which Mutual Aid is practiced most, not only succeed best in getting their livelihood, but also stand at the head of their respective class (of insects, birds, mammals) as regards the superiority of their physical and mental development. This fundamental fact of nature Spencer did not perceive. The struggle for existence within every species, the “free fight” for every morsel of food, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine”—he accepted as a fact requiring no proof, as an axiom. Only in recent years did he begin in some degree to understand the meaning of mutual aid in the animal world, and to collect notes and make experiments in this direction. But even then he still thought of primitive man as of a beast who lived only by snatching, with tooth and claw, the last morsel of food from the mouth of his fellowmen.

Of course, having based the sociological part of his philosophy on so false a premise, Spencer was no longer able to build up the sociological part of his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series of errors.

(To be Continued.)

* None that know the author’s fairness of mind will be likely to accuse him of partiality in the scathing criticism he here makes of the Apostle of Positivism. Lest any reader be inclined to do so, however, it may not be amiss to cite on this point the opinion of a critic unquestionably conservative and, presumably, impartial—an opinion I came upon by mere chance while engaged on this translation. Scattered through pages 560 to 563 of Falckenberg’s “History of Modern Philosophy” (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1893), I find the following estimate of Comte and his uneven work: “The extraordinary character of which [Comte’s philosophy] has given occasion to his critics to make a complete division between the second, ‘subjective or sentimental,’ period of his thinking, in which the philosopher is said to be transformed into the high priest of a new religion, and the first, the positivistic period. . . . Beneath the surface of the most sober inquiry mystical and dictatorial tendencies pulsate in Comte from the beginning. . . . The historical influence exercised by Comte through his later writings is extremely small in comparison with that of his chief work. . . . Comte’s school divided into two groups—the apostates, who reject the subjective phase and hold fast to the earlier doctrine, and the faithful.”—Translator.

Commercialism

Commercialism, at its best, is an uncongenial subject—at bottom it spells exploitation; but as long as we live under such a system, any project that promises more freedom and a higher standard of material prosperity for the wealth producer must have our sympathy. One of the chief factors in the enormous increase in the cost of wheat, coal, iron, lumber, and other raw material during the past few years is the high freight rates, so much so that a tempest in a tea-pot has taken place during the last twelve months in this country, resulting in that abortion known as the Roosevelt Rate Regulation Bill. That the latter is a farce a great many people are just beginning to realize, and therefore the article of Richard Lloyd Jones in “Collier’s” for August 18th on “The Resuscitation of a River” is timely and interesting. The article deals with a project to deepen the Mississippi River from St. Paul to Cairo, and so make it possible for cargo loaded, say, at Chicago or Duluth, to sail undisturbed to Hamburg, Havre or Liverpool. Inasmuch as coal mined in Pennsylvania and West Virginia could be hauled from Pittsburg to Minneapolis, New Orleans or Omaha at a cost not exceeding seventy-five cents per ton, lumber from the mills of Minnesota and the Northwest forests floated to Southern and Eastern river ports for less than one-tenth of the rail traffic, and other commodities at a corresponding cost; it is easy to see what a development this means for the Mississippi Valley States and the opportunities it offers for millions of immigrants. This project, fraught with so much significance to millions of people, can be accomplished, Mr. Jones says, by the judicious expenditure of the cost of three battleships. This, he declares, would wing-dam a channel adequate to accommodate heavy freighting from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the very dams that make this unlocked channel possible arrest sufficient water to give milling power to a hundred manufacturing cities on the way, each of upward of a hundred thousand people. Mr. Jones has the following to say as to how “we” spend our money:

"Our statesmen are schooled in the thoughts of war. It is quite as essential that we prepare for peace. With a population only twenty times as great as during our Revolutionary War, when our independence was seriously endangered, we are now spending two hundred times as much on national defense, with no possible danger of war except as we may invite it through conquest.

"Canada, with no army or navy, is spending her energies in building up a great agricultural empire and alluring Americans by the hundred thousands to her hospitable fields, while we build battleships and buy gold braid for shoulder decorations, neglecting the while the improvement of those things which might make every Canadian immigrant delighted to stay at home.

“For the money we have spent on the Philippines we could have built for the farmers a splendid system of good roads—we could have completed two ship canals across Panama, or we could have channeled the Mississippi River so deep that every city on its banks, from St. Paul to New Orleans, could be a seaport town.”

He makes the common mistake of supposing that the duty of a statesman is to love peace instead of war, and consider the interest of the people as superior to his own, which is interesting, if not surprising.

Politicians and Aristotle

By H. Kelly

POOR, old Aristotle! What searchings of heart you would have were you alive and able to read those beautiful ethical teachings of yours. To strive for humanity is the highest and noblest aim of man, and as the “politician” is engaged in that glorious occupation, he is surely the “best” man in the community. Using “good” in a purely relative sense, it is true that he who devotes the talents which nature has endowed him with for the benefit of all men represents a higher type than he who limits his activities and impulses to those only who are near and dear to him. Unfortunately for us, the definition of politician is quite different in our day from what it was in Aristotle’s time, and the great Greek philosopher would be the first to recognize how inappropriate his definition is as applied to our Tim Sullivans, “big and little”; Platts, Odells, and others far too numerous to mention. Human nature is so contradictory, and we have drifted so far from first principles, that we are highly amused at the innocence of the man who expects the political leader, for whom he votes, to be honest and the politician to live up to his pre-election promises.

To expect honesty and intelligence, coupled with some sort of civic pride, from those elected to public office, is to write oneself down an ass—yet we calmly vote grafters into office and encourage them in their plundering with all the seriousness of which we are capable.

Those venerable “City Fathers” of ours, whose intelligence and piety prevent this great city from falling into Anarchy and decay, have just given us as fine an example of intelligent and disinterested patriotism as one could wish. Having recently come to the conclusion, after long and serious consideration, that the duties of their office were so very onerous and exacting, and that they were sacrificing themselves upon the altar of the commonweal for less than they were worth, “The Fathers” calmly increased their salaries from one thousand to two thousand dollars a year and adjourned for their vacation. Having a little difference of opinion with these gentlemen, Acting Mayor McGowan, in pursuance of the authority of his office, issued a call for a special meeting of the aforesaid “City Fathers,” to vote on the assessment of taxes for the ensuing year. Voting franchises to Belmont, looking after the hygienic conditions of the East Side with an intelligent but discriminating eye, and attending to political fences is enough to give bigger men the brain fag. Therefore, the majority of our statesmen had retired to Europe, the Adirondacks, and other uninteresting places to recuperate. When the meeting was called to order on Aug. 10th, they were twelve short of a quorum. It was considered a good joke by quite a few of those present, until some inquisitive alderman began digging into the laws governing the Council, and found, to his horror, that all members of that body were subject to forfeiture of office and $500 fine for neglect of duty in failing to authorize the assessments of taxes for the ensuing year, as provided for in the laws governing the Council. Grief mingled with rage and activity spread quickly throughout the chamber as the dread spectre—loss of office and $500 fine—became more and more apparent. To their credit be it said that the “Fathers” worked as statesmen never worked before: a temporary adjournment was taken, all the telephones in sight were commandeered, and a number of sergeants-at-arms were pressed into service and sent forth to scour the city for the truant fathers. It was an anxious and trying time, but, as with all clouds, it had its silver lining, and cheer after cheer rent the air as the last man was brought into the council chamber by a heroic sergeant-at-arms. The country (some good jobs and $500 fines) was saved. The session lasted three minutes; the assessments were voted and the meeting adjourned; the members fled for refreshments after a nerve-destroying and strenuous exhibition of statecraft.

The above incident represents the lighter side of our political ethics; there is another and more serious side. The N. Y. “Sun” of Aug. 11th gravely informs its readers that Wm. Travers Jerome is considering the advisability of running this fall as an independent candidate for Governor, and, with all the assurance of an Oracle, it adds: “If Mr. Jerome decides to run, Mr. Jerome will be elected.” During his spectacular campaign of last fall, this gentleman told his hearers, again and again, “I stand on my record.” We wonder if he will have the audacity to repeat the same slogan again. It is an open and notorious fact that since this popular idol was elected district attorney of this city, he has unblushingly ranged himself on the side of the corporations he was supposed to prosecute. He has made a virtue of brazen-faced partiality—he so much despises the people who elected him as to expect praise for his ostentatious sale of their interests. He has constituted himself judge and jury on questions pertaining to the prosecution of violators of the law—and his defence of Geo. W. Perkins, Vice-President of the N. Y. Life Insurance Co. (who filched $50,000 of the policy-holders’ money to uphold the policy of the Republican party, to which many of those policy-holders are violently opposed), has become a classic for impudence coupled with dishonesty. It is not stealing to take money which has been placed in your hands for safeguarding, and apply it (without the knowledge or consent of the owner) to perpetuate a political system violently opposed by the owner of the money. And this man Jerome has the audacity to talk of running for Governor. It is an insult to the intelligence of every decent man and woman in the State.

James K. Jones, ex-senator of Arkansas, Chairman of the National Democratic Committee during the Bryan campaigns of 1896 and 1900, trust destroyer, free silverite, and friend of the “common” people, visited Mr. Roosevelt a few days ago as attorney for the Standard Oil Co., to induce the President to override the decision of the Secretary of the Interior concerning the acquisition of oil and timber lands in Indian Territory. Gov. Higgins, of New York, recently wrote to the President to the same effect. Should Secretary Hitchcock’s decision be overruled, the Standard Oil Co. will acquire by it one million five hundred thousand acres of land.

“These considerations will harmonize also with what we said at the commencement, for we assumed the End of Politics to be most excellent. Its principal care is to develop in the members of the community a certain character; that is to say, good and honorable traits.” . . . “And by Human Excellence we mean not that of man’s body, but that of his soul; for we call Happiness an exercise of the soul.”

“And if this be true, it follows that some knowledge of the soul is necessary for the politician, just as a knowledge of the body is indispensable for the physician; the more so in proportion as politics is more precious and important than the art of healing.” (Aristotle’s Ethics.)

What a pity it is that Aristotle died without meeting “Pat” McCarren, the “Grocer of Newburg,” Abe Slupsky, Winky Dink Kenna, and Bath-House Johnny Coughlin.

He would have had a chance to revise those beautiful studies of his. Our range of perspective is not great enough to appreciate the genius of our saviors—it is possible we underestimate the benefits they bestow on society.

To the Readers

By Alexander Berkman

It is an undisputed fact that the majority of people know little of the great questions of our time; much less do they know of those unfortunates whom Poverty and Law have condemned to a life of degradation and despair—the prisoners. In tribute to the latter, and because it is my desire to shed light on the terrible influence of prisons on those within and without the gloomy walls, I have decided to tour the country.

I am ready to deliver a series of lectures on Prisons and their physical and psychic effects.

Groups, Societies, and Unions that wish me to lecture before them will please communicate with me at once.

ALEXANDER BERKMAN, Box 217, Madison Square Station, New York.

A Toiler’s Plaint

By David Diamondstein

You may sing of sunshine and flowers,
Of the beauty and joy of spring;
But for me the day’s long hours
Naught but weariness brung.

I weep when the sun is a-shining,
For I know not how this may be,
That I, a man, am slaving,
While beasts in the woods are free.

The birds that live in the forests
Are happily soaring about;
They sing to the glory of nature
As they fill their loved one’s mouth.

The bees that hum in the meadow
Give praise to the glorious sun;
They embrace and kiss the flowers
'Till the livelong day is done.

While I, who am made in “God’s image,”
Am sweating my life away;
And I long for the night’s fair bosom,
While I hate and I curse the day.

I curse the day with its noises,
Its hurry, and worry, and wrath.
For the best of my life has it taken
And leaves me a prey unto Death.

Anthony B. Comstock’s Adventures

Not long ago Comstock was thrown into great excitement by the shocking news that a child was born in his neighborhood—perfectly naked.

To prevent scandalous possibilities he hurried to the scene of the motherly crime, armed with a pair of old trousers. There he found a most outrageous state of affairs—an infant born absolutely naked. But as it had not been delivered through the mails, it could not be confiscated. Since that awful event Anthony B. is preparing a bill that will not permit babies to be born unless they come decently clothed.

Through the kindness of a detective Comstock heard of Zola’s novel “At the Fireplace.” Immediately securing a copy, he sent an agent to locate the indecent author, determined to prosecute him for circulating immoral literature. However, the culprit could nowhere be found. For two weeks a staff of well-trained spies searched every nook and corner of the land, in quest of a man by the name of Zola. In one town a cheese monger by that name was discovered, but he had never written any novels, much less “At the Fireplace.” In another town a Zola was seized, but had to be discharged—he was engaged in the legitimate sale of clay figures. Finally, through the wisdom of a newspaper, Comstock discovered that Zola had never lived in the United States and that, moreover, he has been dead for several years. Anthony’s patriotic bosom expanded. “Is it not elevating to know,” he remarked to one of his agents, “that our country has never produced such an author?”

When Comstock first visited an Art Museum he was prostrated by the terrible display of nudity, the indecency of which made him quite ill. He realized that he must seek the safety of the retreat bearing the legend “For men only.” There he meditated and prayed God to visit his vengeance upon these horrors. He was still young; his guardianship of public morals was in the dim future, but he keenly felt that something had to be done at once.

He sent in his card to the Director of the museum and requested an interview.

After a prolonged and serious consultation, Comstock framed a poster for the museum walls: “In the name of Decency all visitors are requested to examine the ladies and gentlemen of Greek mythology on the posterior side only.”

The Director, however, must have been an immoralist in disguise. The posters were never placed on the walls.

Like all moralists, Comstock is subject to nightmares. One night he had a very severe attack. He felt as though a whole army of wild-looking creatures surrounded him, making indecent grimaces. He heard shrill laughter and felt himself a football in the hands of the hellish chorus.

Suddenly Venus stepped forward and pointing at Comstock she said, “Leave this man to me.” The malicious wantonness of the lady exasperated Anthony. He wished a policeman were on hand to arrest her for disorderly conduct.

Soon the chorus withdrew. Venus approached Comstock. Her velvety, warm touch thrilled the saintly Anthony. Though fully conscious of his importance as the protector of his country’s morals, he persuaded himself that he must make allowances for Venus—had she not for centuries past aroused the love ecstasies of young and old alike? . . . Besides, there were no witnesses. . . .

He was about to embrace her, when he suddenly recollected that he was in his nightshirt. Blushingly he assured the divine seducer that he was a gentleman. He begged to be excused for a moment and soon returned in full dress.

Alas, the room was deserted. In the distance he heard the boisterous laughter of ridicule of the retreating Venus.

On one occasion Comstock surprised his wife in her bath. She greeted him with a smile. He frowned. “Scandalous! Had I ever suspected such depth of shamelessness, I should have never honored you as my wife.”

“But Anthony, dear, have you not assured me last night that you loved my body as well as my soul, above everything under heaven?”

“To be sure, I did. We were in the dark, but it is broad daylight now.”

Sincerity in Literature

By G. H. Lewis

(From Principles of Success in Literature.)

It is not only the grocers who sand their sugar before prayers. Writers who know well enough that the triumph of falsehood is an unholy triumph, are not deterred from falsehood by that knowledge. They know, perhaps, that even if undetected it will press on their consciences; but the knowledge avails them little. The immediate pressure of the temptation is yielded to, and Sincerity remains the text to be preached to others. To gain applause they will misstate facts, to gain victory in argument they will misrepresent the opinions they oppose; and they suppress the rising misgivings by the dangerous sophism that to discredit error is good work, and by the hope that no one will detect the means by which the work is effected. The saddest aspect of this procedure is that in Literature, as in Life, a temporary success often does reward dishonesty. It would be insincere to conceal it. To gain a reputation as discoverers men will invent or suppress facts. To appear learned, they will array their writings in the ostentation of borrowed citations. To solicit the “sweet voices” of the crowd, they will feign sentiments they do not feel, and utter what they think the crowd will wish to hear, keeping back whatever the crowd will hear with disapproval. And, as I said, such men often succeed for a time; the fact is so, and we must not pretend that it is otherwise. But it no more disturbs the fundamental truth of the Principles of Sincerity than the perturbations in the orbit of Mars disturb the truth of Kepler’s law.

James’s Vindication of Anarchism. An Appeal

AN APPEAL.

Comrades and Friends:—

It has been the earnest desire of many of the former readers of Free Society to see the work entitled, “Vindication of Anarchism,” by C. L. James, issued in book form. The comrades of Philadelphia, whose original suggestion was in a measure the occasion which called forth the work, have steadily kept this purpose in view ever since its serial appearance in Free Society, regarding it as one of the serious contributions to a fundamental literature of Anarchism. The creation of such a literature is, in our opinion, the most definite task we can assign ourselves under present material and intellectual conditions in America.

We, therefore, appeal to all who agree with us in this matter to help raise the funds necessary for the publication,—between $450 and $500. We suggest that wherever picnics, socials, or similar affairs are held, a proportion of the receipts be set aside for this purpose; and we feel assured that the undertaking can be accomplished in a comparatively short time, if all will concentrate their efforts to that end.

Send all contributions to N. Notkin, 2630 E. Lehigh street, Philadelphia. Acknowledgment will be made through the Demonstrator, Freiheit, and Mother Earth; and as soon as the commencement of the work is justified, report will be given.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. NATASHA NOTKIN. GEO. BROWN.

Philadelphia, Aug. 14, 1906.

To the Readers.

On the 27th of last month I lost a letter containing a $5 money order. I failed to note the name of the sender. Will the kind remitter communicate with me at once?

EMMA GOLDMAN.

The Procurer’s Assistant

By A. T. Heist

WITH the progress of intellectual evolution in the individual, there comes a time which marks the budding perception of those wider human relations—which perception we inaccurately call the “social consciousness.” By this ever broadening view of interdependence in human existence we come to look upon the courtesan as a victim of most cruel circumstances, and her business we regard as a direct attack upon womanhood and manhood. It follows almost naturally that the procurer who induces the final step, which is often but an escape from “virtuous” martyrdom to open shame, is regarded by us as the worst enemy of the social organism. In the feverish excitement of hysteria-inducing methods of reform agitation we often totally lose all our sense of perspective, and under the influence of the professional reformer’s ranting we denounce the procurer as though he were the only reprehensible factor in the final wrong against society. We act as though, given a woman, all that is necessary to make a harlot is the addition of a procurer. When the proposition is thus stated, we all recognize its absurdity and the necessary existence of other conditions before the evil result is producible. The professional reformers are always ready to devise means, political or otherwise, by which they will earn a good living (more than $5.00 per week) through their, usually futile, efforts at restoring to “virtuous” living the “fallen” woman: but what methods more sane than hollow exhortation have they devised for destroying the producing cause of that hopeless state of mind which in most women is a condition precedent to their being listed among those who are about to “fall”?

We all read with absorbing interest the newspaper accounts of how a woman can be decent, dress well, pay car fare and live on five dollars a week. We may be entirely convinced that it is not only possible, but that many thousands actually accomplish that most difficult task, but the exacting conditions of such a life will sooner or later induce these unfortunate women to secretly ask themselves whether virtue under such circumstances is worth the price of its maintenance. As these women learn more of themselves, their environment, the human animal that lives in that environment, the ever-present pressure of the hard conditions of her virtuous existence—all combine to invite a more frequent recurrence of the query, “Is it worth while?” Soon she entertains as a tolerable thought the hope of a life of respectable, legalized prostitution, such as marriage, solely for the sake of support, to a man in whom she has not the least genuine affectional or other interest. This form of prostitution, under a legal contract for life service, in its final essence is not different from that in which the time period of service and price are fixed by the day or month, and the step from the first to the second is not a very long one. The mental condition is now ready for the seeds of sin.

That person who, in New York City, would ask a mature woman with intelligence enough to sell dry goods, or trim millinery, to dress herself fittingly for such vocations, pay car fare to and from her work, and comfortably house and feed herself on five dollars a week, is preparing the way for the procurer and usually deserves at least as much censure as does the latter. That person who, while not acting in self-defense against actual pains of poverty, would yet avail him or herself of the cheap goods, made cheap only by cutting down the wages of mature women to five dollars per week, such bargain-counter habitué also contributes a vicious mite toward inducing a frame of mind, where shame may become more acceptable than the hardship necessary to remain conventionally virtuous.

To those good and influential women who from time to time meet to discuss ways and means of decreasing the cities’ sexual vice, the foregoing comment may suggest one most efficient means of removing the social and economic conditions which conduce toward an increase in the number of the victims.

To those engaged in the anti-vice crusade, whose motives are superior to those of the mere politician, whose ambition for purity finds a lodgement in a more philosophical mental attitude than hysteria can produce, and whose courage will permit of their opposition to the ordinary money-getting conventionalities—to such persons, if there be enough of them to make an audible protest in the din of professional shouters, I suggest the following remedies:

First—Inaugurate, and through an appeal to the enlightened “social conscience” execute, a boycott against every business establishment which, by underpaying its women employees, compels a state of mind that makes the thought of sin for gain tolerable to those whose minds it would otherwise never enter.

Second—Boycott merchants who sell wares manufactured by sweat-shop methods and by women who receive only virtue-tempting wages.

Third—Let the influential and wealthy institute a social and religious lockout against those who, by their financial interest in mercantile and manufacturing establishments, profit by that same under-pay of women-help, which makes those employers the procurer’s most effectual assistants.

But these employers may be the husbands of our Fifth avenue feminine reformers. Very well; then let these fashionable women begin their reform at home, thus making it the most likely to produce good results if attempted in real earnest. Incidentally, it might be interesting to inquire how many of these “superior” women with such very virtuous exteriors overflowing with pharisaical cant, are themselves employing women at wages which tempt to more profitable vice.

If demands for reform are not mere unreasoned products of hysteria, nor office-getting shams, we must do at least as much to remove distressing economic conditions of the woman who is about to “fall,” as for the “fallen” one.

If prostitution is so great an evil as is popularly believed, then there is a real duty to fix the responsibility where it belongs. Prostitution is not due to “original sin,” nor to “total depravity,” but is the result of the “system.” It follows then that all those, and only those, should be held up to execration for “the social evil,” who are the “respectable” beneficiaries of the “system” by which prostitutes are made, and who are doing nothing to lessen or remove the economic wrongs which are the inducing cause.

Reviews

By Voltairine de Cleyre

REVIEWS.—THE CURSE OF RACE PREJUDICE.

LIKE all the writings of Jas. F. Morton, his “Curse of Race Prejudice” is conceived in a spirit of fairness—fair even to laboriousness at times. One might occasionally wish for a little more ginger to spice it! For if ever warmth was justified, it surely is when one is characterizing the unspeakable acts of Negrophobiacs and Jew torturers. Nevertheless the average reader will undoubtedly in the end be more deeply impressed by Morton’s quiet and even speech than by the gall that bites and the vinegar that eats.

The substance of his arguments is summed up under the following ten heads:

1. All social, economic, religious or political discrimination based solely on color or race is wrong in principle and demoralizing in practice.

2. To treat a race as inferior is the surest way to make and keep it so.

3. It is a disgrace to any association of any sort to draw a color line.

4. A mere difference in color should debar no person from holding any office or position which is fit to be held at all.

5. Immigration into this or any other country should be open to all races on precisely equal terms.

6. The question of racial amalgamation is not involved in the demand for equal justice, and may be safely left to nature, without any present attempt to decide on its merits or possible evils.

7. The present status of a race in no way proves its permanent or even long-continued superiority or inferiority as compared with any other race.

8. The inherent possibilities of a race are to be measured by the highest individual it has produced.

9. It is unutterably mean, as well as heartlessly cruel, to refuse to extend the hand of fellowship to an individual who is our equal in intelligence, refinement and character, simply because his family or race as a whole is on a much lower level.

10. An individual who has succeeded in rising superior to his racial environment deserves not only full social recognition at the hands of his equals in culture and intelligence, but exceptional regard on account of his splendid achievement in surmounting the obstacles of birth and early environment.

If I were opposing Friend Morton, I would say in criticism that he would have done better to have cited more facts in support of these points and presented his opinion less. For example, it is more convincing to say: Forty years ago the negroes were an illiterate race, debarred from schools; to-day 55 per cent. can read and write; in the North 85 per cent. owned no property in 1860, in 1900 they had learned the white man’s game sufficiently to have acquired $600,000,000 worth of property in things. They operate 746,717 farms, containing 38,233,933 acres, equal to the area of New England. There were among them 82 bankers and brokers, 52 architects and designers, 236 artists, 212 dentists, 185 electricians, 120 civil engineers and surveyors, 210 journalists, 719 government officials, 728 lawyers, 1,734 physicians and surgeons, 395 stenographers, 475 bookkeepers, 15,530 clergymen, 21,268 teachers, 156,370 farm owners, 1,311 stock raisers, 1,186 manufacturers and officials in manufacturing establishments, 149 wholesale merchants—U. S. Census Report, 1900—all this is more convincing than: “The old yarn that the Negro is inherently lazy and shiftless is pretty well exploded. The highest form of industrial activity were hardly to be expected of a race designedly kept for generations in dense ignorance, and just emerging from a state of absolute bondage. No matter what the inherent qualities of a race, common sense and justice would demand that its capacity for industry be allowed at least two or three generations of independence to manifest itself, before the formation of any general conclusion on the subject. In only forty years, however, the industrial development of the Negro has already attained such immense proportions that his supposed incapacity for steady work must be relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. There is not the slightest shadow of reason to conclude that the Anglo-Saxon or any other race, under precisely similar conditions, would have been able to show any better results. Statistics easily verifiable show that the improvement from year to year is constant and strongly marked.”

However, being on the same side of the question, it appears to me that not even the proofs given are necessary, the abomination of race prejudice being self-evident. I only suggest that an opponent might so consider the argument. The pamphlet concludes with an address delivered in New York during the Jewish massacres, wherein occurs a statement which was made by nearly every other protester at the time, but which is not strictly true, viz.: “What was the crime of the wretched victims of deeds too awful to relate? They were Jews, that was all.” The truth is, be it said to the honor of the Jews, that besides being Jews they were, more than any other separable social quantity, movers in the social revolution. Other revolutionists were massacred also, and with equal ferocity. No doubt the element of race hatred played an enormous part: but the government of Russia hates the Jews not so much as Jews, but as mortal antagonists; and the massacres were of governmental origin.

Altogether, the pamphlet is a welcome contribution to a much-needed literature,—sane, reasonable, ever keeping in view the great ideal of a universal humanity. As an Anarchist, however, one cannot but wonder how the author reconciles himself to the following sentence: “All evils of ignorant Negro rule, and the manifest injustice of robbing the Negro of his constitutional rights may be alike avoided by establishing strict educational qualifications for the exercise of suffrage, made in good faith, applicable to both races alike.”

Has Comrade Morton become a convert to the efficacy of suffrage, or to the possibility of “purifying” the ballot-box?

Marriage and Race Death

MARRIAGE AND RACE DEATH.

There is no deficiency of vinegar in the writing of Morrison Swift,—in fact it is all vinegar except a residue of wormwood. In his “Marriage and Race Death” he starts out with some very bracing declarations: one feels that a strong sea wind has blown in his face and waked him up when he gets an opening statement like this: “The doctrine that Evolution is slowness is flatly false. Society may put itself through a sudden and vast transformation with the greatest ease, leaping over vast chasms of misery which accompany slow evolution without touching them.” This is good news: there is hope in it. We like the word and eagerly look for the way. And lo! we look for it through 270 pages and do not find it. What we do find is unrivaled riches of invective. The author declares: “If 4,000 men possess themselves of a country of eighty or ninety million people and conduct it like a cotton plantation, the writer of a true social science will have to say that these men are thieves and slaveholders. His saying so is bare truth, chaste of emotion, and calm as chemistry. It is science.” This is promising and refreshing,—on page 7; but when one gets to 270 one feels one has had a surfeit; the science becomes nauseating; a small fraction of the quantity of “cussing” would have been a relish, but as it is the author has not salted the potatoes, but potatoed the salt. One can scarcely find the argument for the words. Skeletonized it seems to be this: Marriage and the family have gone to pieces because of the industrialization of women; this industrialization is the result of capitalism; capitalism exists only because the ordinary brain is so defective as not to be able to see that the rich are criminals who are to be done away with, peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary. How the ordinary brain is to pull itself out of this slough of despond by its own bootstraps is not successfully demonstrated, though Mr. Swift attempts it in the chapter, “How to Restore the Race.” He says: “Many men have the capacity to expand their own brains.” But as he has just been showing us, lengthily, that every condition within and without is bearing in the direction of further deterioration, it is difficult to imagine any factor suddenly developing within the brain to alter the situation. He has put us in the dilemma that we have a general deteriorating brain, because we allow rich people to exist, and we allow rich people to exist because of a general deteriorating brain. Out of this dilemma he does not get, but proceeds: “I must therefore ask how the our aristocracy may be immediately abolished, if the people become mentally alive.”

He then recommends complete organization of the awakened brains, and a quiet but solid demand for the transference of all property titles to the whole people, and the universal strike.

The Moods of Life

Of marriage he tells us only that in another volume he will deal with the future relations of the sexes proper to the continuance and development of race life. The subject is extremely interesting, and if Mr. Swift can be convinced that the argument will be more effective if not overloaded with diatribe, permitting himself to use about one in ten of the bad words used in this volume, there is no doubt that his fearlessness will be able to present a startling exposition of the change and the desirable dénouement of the great sex-drama.

THE MOODS OF LIFE.

Every radical who has felt dearth of poetic thought and feeling as one of the defects of our especial literature, I mean the literature of Anarchism, should read “The Moods of Life,” by Wm. Francis Barnard. They are a redemption of the desert. Full of exquisite tones and colors, melodious, delicate, one listens and is glad to know that the old spring is welling yet, and that here in the dust and strife, in the chokingly prosaic, in the maddeningly commonplace, the singing voice is heard again, the Grecian flute is playing still: glad that the new thought, the thought which is to consume the old life in remorseless flame, the thought which alone can redeem mankind from the chains of their own forging, which must go down, therefore, into the smut of the mine and the grind of the mill and be one with the utterest prose of existence in order that it may be understood, can yet reclothe itself in the glory and the music of dream,—answer to man’s more intangible aspirations, fill him, lift him.

I will not say it is a Master Voice; some note of strength, some fire, somewhat, just escapes the verses. One feels the author will never be one to seize the language and forge word-iron of it, make it clang and crash with vibrant power. But they are bluebird notes, high and clear and sweet, presaging the coming chorus,—wild melodies of dawn.

Henrik Ibsen

By Georg Brandes

A WRITER born in a country whose language is not one of the principal languages of the world is generally at a great disadvantage. A talent of the third order that finds expression in one of the tongues that may be called universal achieves glory much more easily than a genius with whom the great nations cannot enjoy direct familiarity.

And yet it is impossible for another to produce anything whatever that is really artistic in any other than his native tongue. First of all, his fellow-countrymen must recognize in his work the exact savor of the soil. There is nothing for him, then, but to bow to this alternative: either the savor in question will evaporate through translation, or else, by some master-stroke at the command of very few interpreters, it will persist; but in the latter case the work will preserve peculiar characteristics of a nature to render its diffusion slow and difficult.

If Henrik Ibsen has become known and admired in all countries in a minimum number of years, this is due, in the first place, to the fact that he wrote in prose. Everybody knows that prose is infinitely more easy to translate than poetry. Furthermore, he has no style, in the rhetorical sense of the word. He uses short, simple, clear phrases, whose shades lie in the content and not in the form.

On the other hand, his production has evolved steadily in the direction of the generalization, the universalization, of theses. After having written plays in which only the Scandinavian soul was faithfully reflected, he worked more and more for the world public. A detail here and there indicates this tendency in a remarkable fashion. Thus in a play written in the middle of his career he places in Norway a chateau (Rosmersholm) of a type very common in Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere, but utterly unknown in Scandinavia.

Finally, and especially, he has revolutionized the art form in which he expressed himself.

Efforts have been made to trace his work to the initiative of certain German dramatists,—Friedrich Hebbel, for instance,—but it has been impossible to deny that these were no more than precursors.

The French dramatists who dominated the European theatre during Ibsen’s youth belong to a category absolutely different from his own. We find in their works a special characteristic called intrigue, which Ibsen utilized only in the plays of his youth,—which are not real Ibsen. Another peculiarity emphasizing the contrast between the French manner, classic or romantic, and Ibsen’s manner is the development of the characters. In the French pieces the character is established almost from its first appearance, either by acts or by other external indications. But at an Ibsen play the spectator who would decipher an individuality is forced to the same efforts as in life. No more than in life, for instance, can he count on the aid of such childish expedients as the monologue and the aside.

The most happily conceived characters of modern French dramas are almost all one-sided, or in some other way incomplete. Emile Augier’s Giboyer, which seems so life-like, is lacking in complexity nevertheless, not only in comparison with kindred characters familiar to us in actual life, but in comparison with Rameau’s nephew. In spite of everything, it is a symbol, and inspires within us no vibrant response.

How different with Solness! This character, too, is a symbol, but in his nature there are a number of individual peculiarities which create between him and ourselves close, firm, palpable ties,—painful too, and thereby moving our passions.

And Ibsen has carried to such perfection this scenic realization of character and this thorough utilization of individual mental intrigue that it has become impossible to achieve theatrical success with plays of the sort that was triumphant in France and elsewhere twenty years ago.

Some of the most eminent savants of Scandinavia—Tycho-Brahé, Linnæus, Berzélius, Abel—and one sculptor, only one, Thorwaldsen, have won fame with some promptness beyond the confines of their own land. The number of writers who have had the same good fortune is limited. The novels of Tagner are esteemed in Germany and England; the fantastic tales of Andersen are popular in Germany, Poland and France; Jacobsen has exercised a certain influence in Germany and Austria. This is all, or almost all; and the Danes, for instance, will never become resigned to the thought that the foreigner is unaware even of the existence of so profound and original a mind as Sœren Kiarkegaard.

This injustice, of which the rest of Europe is guilty toward most of the Scandinavian authors, and toward Kiarkegaard in particular, has been of much service to Henrik Ibsen. He was the first Scandinavian to write for the universal public, and he worked a revolution in one branch of literature; it was commonly agreed that he was the greatest of all the writers ever born in the three countries of the North, and that, besides, he had no intellectual ancestry in his own race any more than in central, or western, or southern Europe.

One distinction must be noted. If the three Scandinavian literatures be considered from the absolute point of view; if account be taken only of the personal genius of the authors and of their national genius,—that is, of their individual value and of the relations between this value and their environments, race, etc.,—then several Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish writers are indisputably worthy to be ranked with Ibsen. But it is certain, on the other hand, that, if the first consideration is to be the influence exercised over universal intellectuality, Ibsen must be proclaimed the most powerful mind of Scandinavia up to the present time.

Henrik Ibsen began by producing plays whose subjects are borrowed from history or from legend. Then he gave to the stage works which fairly may be considered as purely polemical: “The Comedy of Love,” “Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” “The League of Youth.” But his glory rests on his twelve modern plays on which he worked during his maturity.

Of these twelve dramas six are devoted to social theses; these are: “The Pillars of Society,” “A Doll’s House,” “Ghosts,” “An Enemy of the People,” “The Wild Duck,” and “Rosmersholm.” The six others are purely psychological developments, bearing principally upon the intellectual and sentimental relations between woman and man. It is possible, however, to view these also as pieces devoted to a thesis, for they seem written especially to establish the superiority of the feminine character. This cycle includes: “The Lady of the Sea,” “Hedda Gabler,” “The Master-Builder,” “Little Eyolf,” “John Gabriel Borkman,” and “When We, Dead, Awaken.” This is a cycle of domestic and familiar plays,—intimate, in short.

It is with these twelve plays that Ibsen has conquered one of the most eminent situations among the rare minds that guide the course of universal culture. And, to form an exact and precise idea of the importance and the nature of his influence, it is fitting to compare him with other directors of the contemporary conscience. Taine, Tolstoi, and Ibsen were born in the same year. Naturally, these three men possess several traits in common.

Taine, like Ibsen, began by being a rebellious mind: before the age of forty, he did his utmost to bring about a revolution of French intellectuality. And then, as the years passed, Taine, still like Ibsen, came to hate democracy more and more, looking upon it as a blind leveller. Both have taught that majorities always and everywhere group around the worst guides and the worst solutions.

Taine, however, is the more conservative of the two. His ideal is the British régime. Ibsen is no more indulgent for that régime than any other that rests on an ensemble of established principles. In his eyes doctrines scarcely count. It is not by the aid of new dogmas that society is to be ameliorated, but the transformation of individuals.

Tolstoi, so great in his feelings, but so narrow in his ideas, has failed to understand either Taine or Ibsen, and it is painful to hear him declare Ibsen unintelligible. He belongs none the less to the same family as the Scandinavian dramatist, the family of the great modern iconoclasts, who are also prophets. He, too, is working for the destruction of all prejudices, and announces the advent of a new order of things, which is born and develops without the aid of the State and even against its opposition. Like Ibsen, he is full of tenderness for all forms of insurrection against contemporary society,—all, including Anarchism. Only he is impregnated with oriental fatalism, and of equality he has the most basely demagogical conception, the conception of a tramp,—and of a Russian tramp at that! Whereas Ibsen is a furious aristocrat, who would tolerate only one form of levelling—a form whose plan should be indicated by the proudest of all souls. Tolstoi recommends the individual to dilute himself in evangelical love; Ibsen counsels him to disengage and fortify his autonomy.

We find in Ibsen certain of the fundamental ideas of Renan, who was his elder, and with whose works he seems to have been unfamiliar. When he writes: “I propound questions, knowing well that they will not be answered,” do we not come in contact with a mentality substantially identical with that of Renan? The only difference to be seen sometimes between the two is that one attracts you by his charm, while the other lays hold of you in a manner that terrifies.

Count Prozor, moreover, has shown clearly the relationship existing between the conceptions set forth in a work of Ibsen’s youth, “Brand,” and those developed by Renan in one of his early works, “The Future of Science.”

When Brand proclaims that the church should have no walls or any sort of limits, because the vault of heaven is the only roof befitting it, we recognize the same idea that Renan affirmed in declaring that the old church is to be succeeded by another vaster and more beautiful.

Among the great guides of conscience there is another whom we cannot help comparing with Ibsen. I mean Nietzsche, of whom, however, he had never read a line. Ibsen, Renan, Nietzsche, all three have claimed for truly noble individualities the right of escape from all social discipline. This is the favorite idea of Rosmer, and also that of Dr. Stockmann. Long before predicting the “overman” through the lips of Zarathustra, Nietzsche declared the formation of superior beings to be the essential aspiration of the race. The individualism of the three thinkers is of an ultra-aristocratic tendency.

Ibsen and Nietzsche meet also in the psychological domain. The latter loves life so passionately that truth seems to him precious only so far as it tends to the preservation of life. Falsehood, in his eyes, is reprehensible only because in general it exercises a pernicious influence upon life; when its influence becomes useful, then it is commendable.

In vain does Ibsen profess the worship of truth; he sometimes concludes exactly like Nietzsche, in favor of the contingent legitimacy of falsehood. In “The Wild Duck” Dr. Relling pleads the necessity of certain simulations. In “Ghosts” the very thesis is the harm that truth may do. Madame Alving cannot and will not tell Oswald what his father really was. She refuses to destroy his ideal. For here Ibsen goes so far as to place the ideal in opposition with truth.

Madame Borkman lives on an illusion. She says to herself that Erhart will become capable of accomplishing great things and will make his family famous. “That is only a dream,” another character tells her, “and you cling to it simply to avoid falling into despair.” Borkman, for his part, dreams that a deputation is coming to offer him the management of a great bank. “If I were not certain that they will come,” he cries, “that they must come, I would long ago have blown my brains out.”

Says the sculptor Rubec: “When I created this masterpiece—for the ‘Day of Resurrection’ is surely a masterpiece, or was at the beginning . . . no, it is still a masterpiece; it must, it absolutely must remain a masterpiece.”

Ibsen and Nietzsche lived lives of grim solitude. It is difficult to solve the problem posited by Count Prozor,—the question which of the two has best and most betrayed in his works the influence of this isolation. It would be still more difficult to decide which of the two makes the deeper impression on the reader, and which of the two will be the longer famous.

In Scandinavia, at any rate, Ibsen has founded no school. He seems really to have rendered the three kingdoms but one service,—that of greatly contributing to draw the attention of the rest of the world to their literature.

In Germany, Ibsen was highly appreciated twenty years ago as a great naturalist, like Zola and Tolstoi. Nobody would hear a word of the idealism of Schiller, and it was thoroughly agreed that Ibsen was no idealist. Various groups began to be fond of him for diametrically opposite reasons. On account of the revolutionary current that runs, so to speak, through the depths of his works, and which is especially apparent in “The Pillars of Society,” the conservatives catalogued him among the Socialists. On account of his championship of the individual and his curses on majorities, the Socialists placed him, now in the category of reactionaries, now in that of Anarchists.

The contemporary German theatre, especially that of Hauptmann,—and Hauptmann is the greatest living German dramatist,—reflects the influence of Ibsen even more than that of Tolstoi.

In France Ibsen was adored as the god of symbolism in the days when symbolism was the fashion. He won hearts by the Shakespearean character of his mystical discoveries,—the white horses in “Rosmersholm,” the stranger in “The Lady of the Sea.” And they consecrated him Anarchist during the years when it was good form to pose in favor of Anarchism. The bomb-throwers, in their speeches in court, named him among their inspirers. On the other hand, his technique has made a school,—witness, for example, François de Curel.

In England Ibsen has had scarcely any influence except on Bernard Shaw; and, in spite of the efforts of critics like Edmund Gosse and William Archer, his works are known to a very limited public. It is to be remarked that, in general, the English see in him the perfect materialist, but an admirable psychologist.

When everybody feels sure that he sees in the works of a genius a faithful reflection of the most diverse and contradictory mentalities, that genius must be very broad and very deep. The Norwegians have declared Ibsen a radical after having proclaimed him a conservative; elsewhere he has been dubbed by turns Socialist and Anarchist, idealist and materialist, and so on. He is all that, and he is nothing of all that; he is himself,—that is, something as immense and manifold as humanity itself.

The Revolutionary Spirit in French Literature

By Alvan V. Sanborn

(Continuation.)

His most complete abhorrence is the politician. The employer is white beside him. “The employer is a man, like you. You have him before you. You speak to him, you move him, you threaten him, you kill him! At least, he has a visage,—a chest in which to sink a knife. But go move this being without a visage called politician! Go kill this thing called politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased, everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice, love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution!”

Aided and inspirited by a working girl, Madeleine, this Jean Roule, who would kill as much from excess of love as from hate, leads the workmen in a revolt against their employers. But the latter are sustained by government troops, and the play ends with a massacre and a procession of coffins.

L’Épidémie (1898) is an extravagant one-act comedy,—almost a farce,—caricaturing the culpable indifference of the bourgeois politician to the welfare of the humble and his extreme solicitude for the welfare of the rich. Typhoid fever has made several victims in the military barracks of a provincial city. The municipal council assembles for the purpose of taking measures to arrest it. When the council learns, however, that the disease has attacked no one outside the barracks, and within the barracks only the private soldiers, whose duty, whose glory it is to give their lives for their country, it decides to do nothing, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic cries of ‘Vive la France!’ The decision has scarcely been made when a messenger arrives with the news that a bourgeois has died of the plague. Thereupon the council reconsiders its former action, votes to erect a statue to the dead bourgeois, to name a street in his honor, to demolish the city’s unsanitary quarters, to open up boulevards, and to introduce a water system, and makes an appropriation of 100,000,000 francs therefor. Finally, each councillor rises in turn, and pronounces a panegyric of the bourgeois victim.

L’Acquitté, another one-act comedy, presents the adventure of a vagabond, Jean Guenille, who, having carried to the police station (in an excess of honesty) a purse of 10,000 francs which he found in the street, is browbeaten and put under lock and key by the commissaire because he has no legal domicile. M. Mirbeau’s other plays, Vieux Ménages (1900), Le Portefeuille and Scrupules (1902), and Les Affaires sont les Affaires (1903),—the last-named an exposition of the power of money to destroy natural sentiments,—are only a shade less subversive in tone.

Lucien Descaves has to his credit a one-act anarchistic play, entitled La Cage. The Havenne family, threatened with eviction and unable to pay their rent or find work, are in black despair. The father and mother, in the temporary absence of Albert and Madeleine, drink a vial of laudanum and light a brazier of charcoal. The children return, find their parents dead, and, desiring to die likewise, submit themselves to the poisonous fumes of the brazier, which is still burning. They bethink themselves in time, however, decide that it is less cowardly to steal than to die, and set out together for a career of outlawry and revolutionary apostleship. “Are we quite sure, Madeleine, that there is nothing better to do than to kill ourselves?” queries Albert. And then he quotes the famous letter of Frederick of Prussia to D’Alembert: “If there should be found a family destitute of all resources and in the frightful condition you depict, I should not hesitate to decide theft legitimate. . . . The ties of society are based upon reciprocal services; but, if this society is composed of pitiless souls, all engagements are broken.”

La Cage was suppressed by the censorship very early in its career. Descaves foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. “Let me try,” he said, “to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and embarrassing liaisons, the distress of a bourgeois family at the end of its resources, its illusions, and its courage,—the parents reduced to suicide and the children precipitated into revolt. Ah! you’ll hear a fine clatter!”

The severity of the censorship towards La Cage called out numerous protests, notably this from Alexander Hepp, little suspected of doctrinal sympathy with Descaves:

A translation of this play has been successfully produced in America (1904) under the title “Business is Business.”

“As soon as we show to the gallery the reality of the miseries, the despairs, the injustices of society, a fragment of real life, of the true cross people carry, our delicate sensibilities are shocked; and it is always before that which is truest that we cry out improbability. The innovating tendencies, the harsh accent of retribution, the virile sincerity of Descaves, who puts on the boards a family driven to suicide, have disturbed the digestions of the orchestra.”

The critic Henri Bauer, commenting on Les Mauvais Bergers and La Cage, wrote: “An anti-social dramatic literature is born in France. . . . It requires authors of the power and eloquence of Mirbeau, of the devouring passion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, society is a lie, social progress a lure, the social pact is broken: nothing is left but the individual,—his temperament, his law, his conscience, and his will.”

Descaves’ Tiers État is an eloquent plea for the faithful mistress who is debarred from marriage by legal technicalities. He is also joint author with Georges Darien of Les Chapons, and with Maurice Donnay of La Clairière and Oiseaux de Passage. La Clairière, which was one of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898–99, pictures the life of an anarchist phalanstère, which succeeds admirably until the members send for their compagnes, when it is demoralized and disintegrated by petty intrigues and jealousies.

The moral? Not the obvious and absurd one that men alone will constitute the society of the future; but this, that women have not been enfranchised long enough to have developed the maturity of character necessary to the practice of anarchist precepts. Oiseaux de Passage deals with the experiences of anarchists in exile. “I am proud,” says M. Descaves, apropos of the piece, “to have been able to transfer to the stage the theories of a Bakounine, and to introduce them to the public thus.”

Maurice Donnay is a railing nihilist, subtle, graceful, and gracious, somewhat after the Anatole France pattern,—a smiling révolté, a refined recalcitrant, whose recipe for a play is said to be “a little love, much adultery, an enormous amount of esprit, a pinch of politics, and a stamme of sociology,” and whose psychology is “a sparkling, effervescing affair, the analyses of which explode merrily with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks.”

In Amants, La Douloureuse, La Bascule, Le Retour de Jérusalem, and Georgette Lemonnier, Donnay is prodigal of bons mots and malicious pleasantries, by which he gives the most piquant conceivable flavor to the social and political infamies of the time. Le Torrent, his most ambitious work, has this much of the serious, that death is its dénouement; but its general method and attitude do not differ essentially from the method and attitude of his other plays.

To those who expressed surprise that the flippant Donnay should collaborate with the truculent Descaves, Donnay himself said: “A young man, I produced at the Chat Noir my piece Pension de Famille, which won me the honor of being called ‘joyous anarchist’ by Jules Lemaitre. I remained an anarchist in La Douloureuse. And, without doubt, I have always been an anarchist; more, it is true, for sentimental than for sociological reasons, but also from a point of view exclusively philosophical. He who analyses, he who, without ceasing, unravels the meshes of this complicated network of ideas which constitutes the social order, is more or less of an anarchist necessarily, is he not?”

Other works of unequivocal revolt produced within the last fifteen years are:

Mais Quelqu’un Troubla la Fête, a one-act piece by Louis Marsolleau. A financier, a politician, a bishop, a general, a judge, a duchess, and a courtesan partake hilariously of a sumptuous banquet. Their revels are interrupted by the apparition first of a peasant, then of a city laborer, and are finally put an end to by a mysterious and terrible unknown, who causes a general explosion.

Sur la Foi des Étoiles, by Gabriel Trarieux,—an esoteric symbolistic effort, a groping towards the society of the future: “I say to myself: The stars up yonder, with their fixed, impassive air, the stars which have mounted guard for centuries, are living worlds. . . . They die and are born. I compare them to the truths which guide us. . . . For there are several truths—. . . some very ancient, almost extinguished, to which we submit by force of habit, and some—oh! just emerging—which will not be true before to-morrow.”

Le Cuivre, by Paul Adam and André Picard, which exposes and explains the tyranny exercised by money over persons and governments; and L’Automne, by Paul Adam and Gabriel Mourey (forbidden by the censorship).

Le Domaine, by Lucien Besnard, which recounts the progress of socialism in the rural districts, and defines the antagonism between the decadent nobility and the rising fourth estate.

La Pâque Socialiste, by Emil Veyrin, which describes a practical experiment in Christian socialism.

La Sape, by Georges Leneven, the hero of which is an anarchist dreamer of a highly intellectual type, Le Détour by Henry Bernstein, and Le Masque by Henri Bataille.

Le Voile du Bonheur, by Georges Clemenceau, which employs Chinese personages and a Chinese setting to explain the manner in which Frenchmen are fooled and ruled by their “mandarins”; and Les Petits Pieds by Henry de Saussine, which employs a similar device to ridicule French education.

Le Ressort: Étude de Révolution, mystic and ominous, by Urbain Gohier; Barbapoux, savagely anti-clerical, by Charles Malato; En Détresse, with a conclusion akin to that of Descaves’ Cage, by Henri Févre; L’Ami de l’Ordre, by Georges Darien; La Grève, by Jean Hugues; Conte de Noël and Des Cloches du Cain, by Auguste Libert; Le Chemineau, by Richepin; Jean Ajalbert’s adaptation of De Goncourt’s La Fille Elisa; and the pieces of Hérold, Pierre Valdagne, and Georges Lecomte.

These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prostitute for the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need of her assistance.

Alfred Capus, the principal rival of Maurice Donnay, in his peculiar genre, holds in completest but most amiable detestation whatever has to do with regular living. Less sardonic than M. Donnay, lighter, brighter and more spirituel, if that is possible, he is equally nihilistic, though not, so far as I am aware, by personal avowal.

Reformers being notoriously deficient in the sense of humor, it is a curious and piquant circumstance that not only a majority of the brilliant school of stage humorists, currently known as the “Auteurs Gais,” but the four most admired of the group,—Georges Courteline, Pierre Veber, Jules Renard, and Tristan Bernard,—are frankly revolutionary, either in their personal opinions or in their writings, or in both.

Pierre Veber and Tristan Bernard were charter members of the revolutionary band L’Endehors, and have been affiliated latterly with that of L’Idée Nouvelle. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.

Courteline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that he is called, without too gross exaggeration, “le petit-fils de Molière”; Courteline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of many, long after every contemporary French dramatist has been forgotten; Courteline, who makes you laugh till you weep over what you ought to weep over without laughing, who promotes reflection and rouses the conscience while dispelling melancholy,—this prodigious Courteline, truth-loving joker and humane mountebank as he is, has probably done more than any single individual in any sphere to bring into disrepute the brutality of the army, and to expose the perpetual contradiction between essential justice and the texts of the law.

Eugène Brieux is the most prolific producer of the “pièce à thèse sociale” and the most indefatigable corrector of abuses connected with the Paris stage. He has attacked the race course and the police station in Le Résultat des Courses, public and private charity in Les Bienfaiteurs, physicians in Blanchette, popular ignorance of and prejudice against venereal diseases in Les Avariés, the law and the administration of the law in La Robe Rouge, and the Chamber of Deputies in L’Engrenage; and he has defended the rights of children against parents in Le Berceau, the rights of the artistic temperament in Ménages d’Artistes, the rights of the poor against the rich in Les Remplaçantes, and the rights of the fille-mère in Maternité.

M. Brieux is not easy to locate doctrinally or otherwise. He is not an “auteur gai,” far from it, and is not, in the strict sense of the term, perhaps, a revolutionist.

But his mania for the correction of abuses has surely beguiled him more than once into an attitude towards society that is, to all intents and purposes, revolutionary.

The rugged, poetic, weird, and philosophical François de Curel is as difficult to locate doctrinally as M. Brieux. There are times when he seems to be as irreverent a nihilist as Mr. France, M. Donnay, or M. Richepin, and times when he seems to be as reverently ecclesiastical and reactionary as M. Paul Bourget or M. le Comte de Mun. All his plays—Les Fossiles, in which he pictures the pathetic impotence of the exhausted nobility; La Nouvelle Idole, in which he alternately exalts and belittles science; La Fille Sauvage, in which he studies the demoralizing effect of civilization upon the mind of the savage; and Le Repas du Lion, in which he confronts orthodox economy with the socialist’s dream—admit of different and absolutely contradictory interpretations.

But Le Repas du Lion is claimed, with at least a show of reason, by the socialists, because of its dénouement. One of its wealthy characters elucidates the conflict between labor and capital by means of a parable, “The Lion and the Jackal.” The lion hunts for himself. The jackal, too feeble to hunt for himself, follows the lion. The lion gorges himself with his prey. The jackal eats what the lion leaves. If there were no lion to hunt for him, the jackal would starve. Ergo, the lion is the benefactor of the jackal.

A laborer objects: “In that case, Monsieur, there is a lion; and we are the jackals. Since you choose to have the business settled between wild beasts, we will follow you on to your own ground. When the jackal finds that the remnants left by the lion do not garnish their paunches sufficiently, they get together in great numbers, surprise the king, and devour him alive.”

The laborer’s objection is given force by the shooting of the capitalist of the piece. “The reply of the jackal to the lion,” comments one of the minor characters.

Jean Jullien considers himself, if rumor speaks true, in no sense a revolutionist. All the same, his robust drama La Poigne, which depicts vividly the moral ravages wrought by authority in and about a humanitarian soul, was received enthusiastically by both the socialistic and the anarchistic press. “Socialists will take notice,” remarked a socialist organ, “that it behooves them to lavish their money and their bravos on this attempt at ‘L’Art Social.’” And the theatrical critic of Le Libertaire said: “The piece of Jean Jullien pleased by its frankness and its human interest. Rarely has an author so stirred our minds and hearts. It is only just to say that the personages exemplify the sentiments and the ideas which are familiar to the anarchists, and that we find in La Poigne an echo of our passions.”

The same author’s L’Écolière, which denounces the hypocrisy of petty provincial functionaries and narrates the conflict of a high-minded, warm-hearted woman with the bourgeois system of morals, was accorded a similar welcome in similar quarters. So also was his Oasis, which preached that Humanity should create for itself, remote from egoisms, prejudices, mutually hostile religions, and the disgraceful tumults of injustice and war, the basis of peace, of association, and of love.

Revolutionary and semi-revolutionary plays were for a considerable period well-nigh a monopoly of the Théâtre Libre, where unconditional literary form and unconventional acting were the handmaids of unconventional ideas. Latterly they have invaded every legitimate stage of Paris, not excepting the august and supposedly inhospitable Comédie Française; and they may be said to be the specialty of four houses: the Théâtre Antoine, the Grand Guignol, the nearest existing counterpart to the Théâtre Libre; and the Gymnase and the Renaissance, which are now copying the general policy of the Antoine. Maurice Maeterlinck and his company have latterly made their headquarters in Paris. Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna was applauded by the revolutionary organs.

The various free stages, or théâtres à côté, which give private performances at irregular intervals, also reserve a modicum of space in their répertoires for pieces of social revolt.

The revues of the variety theatres and concert halls, in which the events of the year are criticised and caricatured with a freedom that often calls down the wrath of the censorship, particularly at Montmartre, are also far from a negligible influence in the direction of revolution.

In 1883 the socialist Clovis Hugues wrote, in an introduction to a volume by the refractory Léon Cladel: “The petrification of the republic in the bourgeois spirit does not prevent literature from being socialistic. It is unconsciously so, perhaps; but it is so. And this is the essential thing for the future. . . . Open a romance, no matter what one, attend a theatrical representation, no matter what one, and, so that you have the slightest aptitude for combining details, for surprising the idea in the fact, for following a philosophical train through an intrigue, you will be amazed at the quantity of socialism which emerges from this romance and that play. Has the author felt himself responsible towards the Revolution in writing his work? Not the least in the world. He has yielded to the mighty pressure of events, he has submitted to the historic fatalities of his time, the permanent influence of humanity in travail. . . . What signifies this transformation? It signifies that the philosophies soak down into literature; it signifies that the hour is at hand, since the idea incarnates itself involuntarily in the form; it signifies that the fourth estate is mounting, that justice is near.”

Still later (1899) a declared opponent of anarchism, M. Fierens-Gevaert, wrote in his admirable social study, La Tristesse Contemporaine: “Every philosopher, novelist, poet, dramatist, and artist is to-day a latent anarchist; and very often he boasts of it.”

(THE END.)

The Little Wayside Station

By Sadakichi Hartmann

THE midnight train had left the whole company, manager, actors and actresses, and a heap of trunks at a little wayside station, somewhere on the coast of Alabama. The term station was really far too presumptuous for the little wooden shanty, that could not even boast of two separate apartments, one for white and the other for colored people, as it is customary in the South.

It was really one of the most forlorn and forsaken places that these weary nomads, traveling from place to place to amuse people, had ever come across. Not a road house was in sight; the crossing led straight from the station into the hilly country and lost itself in darkness. Only in the far distance rose some geometrical shapes that indicated a barn, and farm houses, whose lights were long extinguished.

The company had to wait two hours for the connecting train and had the whole station at its disposal. Even the ticket seller and baggage master had gone home for a rest. It was a sultry night, the air seemed to lay heavily on every object, and the poor Thespians, perspiring and fatigued, lounged on the benches inside, smoked discolored pipes, or sat on their trunks and discussed their parts and the success of their tour, while the leading man strutted up and down the platform like the hero of some Roman play. The manager and the villain sallied forth to reconnoitre, but soon returned, finding the ground too muddy; and one of the walking ladies shrieked because she had stepped into a pool of water.

The soubrette, an undersized bit of femininity, rather prim-looking for her vocation, stepped out on the platform to a secluded spot and looked about. Everything above and around her seemed colorless, a dark, dull mottled gray, yet far on the horizon, miles away, she was surprised to see a glimpse of the sea. The station was situated on a hill, and wild tracts of underbrush and forest land, forms which her eyes could not distinguish, swept down to the water’s edge.

Lost in the contemplation of this weird, nocturnal scene she suddenly became conscious of a faint aroma that was lingering in the air. There is nothing that arouses one’s senses as much as the sudden appreciation of some scent, so vague in character that its origin cannot be defined. It is like recollecting a life that we might have led before our present one.

Automatically she arose and ventured forth in the dark, as if in quest of that mysterious something which had captivated her senses. Carefully lifting her skirts, she made her way towards the dark and wave-like mass of vegetation, but soon found that a fence barred her way. Through the rails she dimly discerned large high-stalked flowers, the colors of which she could not differentiate. Overjoyed that her quest had not been futile, she reached through the rails, plucked a whole armful of flowers, and, shivering with the touch of the dew, returned to the platform.

Her colleagues surrounded her and asked for a part of her booty. She handed a few to the first-comers, but when the requests became too numerous, she turned away and snippishly advised them to get some for themselves. She sat down on a trunk, her arms full of these unknown flowers, the aroma of which caressed her senses, and gazed out towards the sea.

There were no moon nor stars. All forms faded into each other. Everything seemed motionless, only the breeze toyed with her hair as might the fingers of a lover. It came from far over the sea, and had wandered over dale and dell, over palm tree thickets, and perhaps orange groves, to continue its journey inland, just like the homeless folks who wandered about the earth for the delectation of others. A sail became discernible in the distance. She sat motionless as in a trance.

Of what was she thinking? Was it of her childhood and dreary youth in a little provincial New England town: of her headstrong contrary nature that rendered life intolerable to her at home; of her desire to live her own life; of her running away with a barnstorming company that had strayed into her path; of all the disappointments, privations and humiliations which are the share of every debutante; and of her settling down to routine work, not yet knowing if her talent would ever suffice to secure her a somewhat respectable position in that everything but respectable profession!

Perhaps the scenes of her life had thus passed in rapid review. But more likely she had thought of nothing in particular. The visions of life of a young girl, who has not yet enacted the drama of the heart, are apt to be just like such a midnight scene. She only feels the breath of life in the passing breeze. She only sees phantom boats pass by in the distance. Yet she sees no outlines and does not know what strange forms are contained in all this darkness.

She had never been in so close a contact with nature before. It was as if her soul were lifted out of her body and sporting over the vales. How different this was to her ordinary existence! Every day in another city, but always in the same insignificant part; to repeat with the same modulation the same words, the same smiles, the same silly gestures, and to make exits and entrances, and the next day again in another place. No home and no association which would develop the nobler sentiments of human companionship. The days spent in dingy and cheerless hotel rooms, the evenings among the dusty wings of the theatre, and the nights on trains or at some humble wayside station.

How curious life must be out there in the darkness! So different to the atmosphere in which the actor lives, the stifling atmosphere which he has created for himself and which clings to him even in his everyday life. Every day was discolored with the glare of the footlights, everything was false and exaggerated, even her complexion—she still felt the grease paint on parts of her face. Not a word she spoke on the stage was spoken as in real life. How absurd it would sound if she would recite the lines of her part in the solitude which surrounded her. (All the stage heroes and heroines require a certain routine to simulate emotions; and in old age nothing is left to them but to imitate themselves.)

She suddenly realized that all this out-of-door life was absolutely unknown to her, that she, who was only used to the dim light of rehearsals, was a perfect stranger to nature, and that in a profession which should “hold up the mirror to nature.” Her sky had been clouds painted on canvas, and her stars the dull glare of lamps.

Inside, the leading lady sang a popular song in a hoarse voice and with exaggerated pathos, and the man who was supposed to be her husband accompanied her upon the banjo. And the poor little soubrette, still sitting on the trunk with the flowers in her arms, wept pitifully, her tears dropping on leaves and petals and mingling with the dew.

Then suddenly—perhaps with the passing breeze or the heavy perfume of the flowers—an inspiration came over her. Yes, she would try at least to bring some truth of nature upon the stage, real emotions that were born out of the experiences of her own heart and in harmony with the elements of nature. She needs must enter upon the big stage of life, revel in the warmth and joyousness of nature, struggle, suffer, experience everything, and then transform it into art.

Her chest expanded. She quivered with emotion. A great joy filled her little soul to overflowing. And at this little wayside station this inspiration had come to her, she would never forget it. Perhaps she would never see it again. She did not even know its name. But at some distant day, when she had become famous, she would hunt it up again. She no longer looked dejected, but sat erect with the flowers pressed to her breast, as if at this very moment she had accomplished all that she aspired to do.

We all have had such moments in our life, moments when we dreamt of great things we would accomplish, but most of them have faded like the nameless flowers in which the little soubrette had buried her tear-stained face.

We all act our parts badly, we all are stilted at times, and the glare of selfish desire throws an unnatural light over all of us. Yet these dreams of unrealized hopes are so beautiful that we should cherish them in our memory. They alone make life worth living, no matter whether we realize them or not.

A distant rumbling was heard. It was the signal to resume the duties of her profession. With a sigh, she rose as the train came to a halt. She was surrounded again by frowsy caricatures of women and vulgar men with greasy faces, to which the railroad coaches furnished a prosaic background, shutting out the beauty of the scenery.

She sat down far away from all others, in a corner of the last car, and as the train began to move she beckoned a last farewell to the little wayside station.

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