Mother Earth

Observations and Comments

The readers of Mother Earth are already aware of the fact that the New York police interpret the Constitution by forcibly dispersing meetings, clubbing and arresting men, women and immature girls.

Where is the Sword of Justice, where the judges who have sworn allegiance to the Republic and whose duty it is to watch over the constitutional rights of the people? Where are the men to call to account those that trample under foot the right of free speech and assembly? Were the Sword of Justice not rusting in its sheath, the police—to whom suppression of free speech is mere sport—would be imprisoned as the arch-conspirators against the fundamental principles of the Republic.

Poor Editor of Mother Earth! Are you so stupid as to take the Republic seriously? Why, you prate the nonsense of the law-abiding citizen, you sermonize like Teddy, you act like a political Rip Van Winkle who still dreams of Thomas Jefferson as the President of the United States. Don’t moralize! State the bare facts. Do you wish to incite? By the beards of our Revolutionary fathers, you need no stronger language than these facts.

After the police had dispersed the meetings and arrested twelve persons, they suddenly discovered that there was not a particle of evidence against the prisoners. But why trouble about evidence! There are enough judges on the bench, too “intelligent” to distinguish an anarchist from a criminal. Judge Cornell, for instance, instead of reprimanding the police for their arbitrary high-handedness, held the prisoners in one thousand dollars bail, each. Meanwhile, they are busy at headquarters searching for evidence—the asinine detectives are all ears; they scent conspiracies in every nook and corner. The 11th of November meeting—never before interfered with during the last nineteen years—was prohibited, and even our ordinary business meetings are not exempt from the precious presence of the uniformed busybodies.

But even detectives are human; they are not immune against the temptations of the fair sex—no wonder they could not withstand Mother Earth; they took possession, as the Romans did with the Sabine women, and as true possessors they forbade all others to enjoy her charms.

Ye journalists of America! Cease your criticism of Russian censorship; there, at least, it is in the hands of professionals who are able, though their object be unworthy; here, however, every bluecoat constitutes himself censor of writers who will not prostitute their intellect.

Mother Earth had invited her children to the Masquerade Ball; we had a considerable response from—headquarters. The temptation to kick the fellows out was very great, for their coarse and annoying presence made everyone feel the Tzar’s atmosphere. At one o’clock the American Cossacks avenged their failure to discover an anarchistic conspiracy by closing the bar. What poor diplomats we anarchists are! Had we treated the police to free drinks and free lunch, the zeal of the law and “order” guardians would have certainly been tempered by imbibing tolerance, and Mother Earth’s exchequer would not now be in such deplorable condition.

The extravagance of the sovereign American people! If they must have detectives and spies to save society from conspirators, why not at least employ men whose knowledge of English is not limited to street slang? Were they at least to understand an intelligent conversation, their reports to headquarters would perhaps not teem with so much lying stupidity. We were discussing, for instance, the habits and physiological peculiarities of the skunk. One of the detectives, overhearing the conversation, straightway concluded that we referred to him and his species. His mistake, of course, was pardonable. Considering himself, however, an important pillar of society, he feels the latter insulted and threatened in his person, and straightway he arrests us for high treason, confident that Judge Cornell can always be relied upon to hold the “criminals” for the Grand Jury.

Up to the moment of this writing the cases have not yet been considered by the Grand Jury. Evidently, the police are still looking for evidence—District Attorney Jerome is busy gathering laurels for his raids upon “illegal” gambling resorts. Wall Street is not on his list.

In the meantime, friends, our sinews of war must not be allowed to become exhausted.

Christmas is the chief holiday of Christianity. It is also a day of innermost devotion and gratitude to the Christian God. The latter conceived the remarkable idea of saving mankind from perdition by sending his peculiarly begotten Son upon the earth, and then suffered him to be crucified by the scribes and pharisees.

How do the Christians celebrate this event? A few weeks previous to the great holiday they plunge into the whirl of bargaining, huckstering and fraud. In vain one seeks for the reflection of the pretended joy over the birth of the Savior—their faces are intense with cold, calculating shrewdness. At Christmas-time the Christian dealers dispose of miserable goods at the highest prices. The book market is flooded with the most superficial literature. Indeed, it would seem as if the Christians hail Christmas mainly because of the exceptional opportunities it offers for swindling, bargaining and profit making.

Preachers, moralists, sociologists and economists of America will soon be out of a job. Our Chief Magistrate has cheerfully undertaken to do their work. He has given his message to the world—nothing is left to say. Hear him on “International Morality”:

"Not only must we treat all nations fairly, but we must treat with justice and good-will all immigrants who come here under the law. Whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, whether they come from England or Germany, Russia, Japan, or Italy, matters nothing.

“All we have a right to question is the man’s conduct. If he is honest and upright in his dealings with his neighbor and with the State, then he is entitled to respect and good treatment. Especially do we need to remember our duty to the stranger within our gates. It is the sure mark of a low civilization, a low morality, to abuse or discriminate against, or in any way humiliate, such stranger who has come here lawfully and who is conducting himself properly.”

Poor, pitiable John Turner! Why did you not come to this country in a “lawful and proper” manner? If you were but as honest as an American Senator, Congressman, or lawyer; as incorruptible as a politician; as unbribable as a Police Captain! How joyfully you would have been received by the Immigration authorities!

The President is lying awake nights racking his poor head how to make free men of the Filipinos:

“In these Islands we are steadily introducing both liberty and order to a greater degree than their people have ever before known. We have secured justice. We have provided an efficient police force. We are constantly increasing the measure of liberty accorded the Islanders, and next spring, if conditions warrant, we shall take a great stride forward in testing their capacity for self-government by summoning the first Filipino legislative assembly.”

A Legislature and police as high-minded and pure as ours! Indeed, if then the Islanders do not feel themselves free, they will have proved themselves quite unfit for freedom—of dear Teddy’s stripe.

Now, listen to the inexorable moralist, on “Marriage and Divorce”:

“When home ties are loosened; when men and women cease to regard a worthy family life, with all its duties fully performed, and all its responsibilities lived up to, as the life best worth living; then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand. There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate. Surely it should need no demonstration to show that wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the Nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.”

Is this enthusiastic appeal for the manufacture of future subject and factory hands meant to include the dwellers of tenements? Has our quack moralist considered whether the wretched lodgings of the masses and the undermined physiques of tenement mothers permit their bearing still more children? In the White House, of course, there is no lack of air, light and space—'tis a pity Alice did not live up to her father’s ideal of motherhood even before her marriage.

Quite interesting are the views of our Chief Magistrate on government by injunction—that despicable invention of the judicial servants of Mammon for the purpose of the greater enslavement of the working people.

“It is at least doubtful whether a law abolishing altogether the use of injunctions would stand the test of the courts; in which case, of course, the legislation would be ineffective. Moreover, I believe it would be wrong altogether to prohibit the use of injunctions. It is criminal to permit sympathy for criminals to weaken our hands in upholding the law, and if men seek to destroy life or property by mob violence there should be no impairment of the power of the courts to deal with them in the most summary and effective way possible.”

The White House Kaiser can be best characterized by the words of Henry D. Thoreau, addressed to the then Governor of Massachusetts:

“What I am concerned to know is, that that man’s influence and authority were on the side of the slaveholder, and not of the slave—of the guilty, and not of the innocent,—of injustice, and not of justice.”

THE ONES INTERESTED.

The question, “Is marriage a failure?” can be discussed only by single people, who have not tried it.

If a married man says it is a failure, his wife will make it so; if he says marriage is a success his auditors will say he is henpecked.

But why can’t married women discuss the subject?

Because they are all of one mind—that marriage is a huge success—but that each of them failed to pick out just the right man.

BOLTON HALL.

Gaudeamus Igitur

By William Mountain

Then fill the goblet to the brim,
The brave will drink it to the lees;
To-morrow merry eyes will dim
And loving hearts in silence freeze.
The past is burning through our veins,
And lives a moment in our cry;
'Tis ours to joy in spite of pain,
To live a happy hour and die.

For all has been that we might live
And quaff this hour divine in bliss;
Whate’er the past of life can give
Is ours—a coffin or a kiss.
Is ours, ah! let the wine run red,
And let us drink while drink we may;
The weary? they are well abed,
And we? alas! must soon away.

The best we know is not to fear,
To live each moment as the last,
Be bravest when the foe is near,
And weak, if e’er, when danger’s past;
If beaten, not to weep or sigh,
Or feebly curse a hapless fate;
To feel we do not vainly die
If life is lived in love’s estate.

With cosmic disregard of care,
Our glory is we will not try
To placate fate with craven prayer
And ease our conscience with a lie;
Nor hide with words a common fear,
Nor seek some cheap unworthy aid,
But wait for death in honest cheer,
Or go to meet him unafraid.

To My Readers

By Emma Goldman

The birth of “Mother Earth” was an eventful day for me. For years I longed to create a medium through which I might express myself in words more durable than oral language. The necessity was not merely subjective; conditions, too, called for the clarification of much-befogged ideas,—not merely from the narrow party standpoint, but on the broad basis of a better and nobler life.

The outlook for such a magazine seemed very favorable. An artist friend promised a theatrical performance, the proceeds of which were to establish a solid financial foundation for the undertaking. Alas, the conspiracy of circumstances! Owing to many unforeseen obstacles and difficulties, the performance was only a partial success, and the greater part of the proceeds was swallowed up by the necessity of changing the original name, “Open Road,” to that of “Mother Earth.”

Immediately on its appearance, however, the magazine enlisted the interest of a large circle of sympathizers and friends. All prospects pointed to success.

Then came the Summer, with its hot and sultry weather. Somebody has said that a Revolution would be impossible in July—“Mother Earth,” too, suffered from the same cause, the revenue of the magazine largely depending on the sales at the various radical and liberal meetings, which are quite inactive during the Summer months.

Thanks to the active interest of a few friends, however, I was enabled to fertilize the soil, hoping that with cooler weather would come the harvest.

My expectations were amply justified. August, September and October brought a host of new subscribers and a great demand for single copies.

Then the Police Department got busy. What on earth is there for them to do, but to hound Anarchists?! Thus it happened that they raided two meetings, clubbed the audiences, arrested twelve persons and confiscated a considerable part of the October issue of “Mother Earth.”

Not satisfied with this arbitrary and highhanded proceeding, the police have since kept up their brutal persecution, closing radical meetings, terrorizing hallkeepers and audiences, and threatening them with arrest.

“Mother Earth” depends largely upon the sale of single copies, averaging monthly about eighty dollars; the action of the authorities has resulted in almost extinguishing that source of revenue. Some of our liberals, ever courageous in fighting dead gods, have been so frightened by the sight of a detective that they have entirely withdrawn “Mother Earth” from sale at their meetings. And yet the postal authorities continue to pass the magazine through the mails!

Through all this unwonted activity of the police can be plainly seen the determination to suppress the spreading of Anarchism, and particularly of “Mother Earth.” Even our masquerade ball, a simple social affair, was invaded by the presence of uniformed Comstocks who left nothing undone to create a disturbance. Fortunately, nothing happened; but the depressing effect made enjoyment impossible, resulting in financial loss.

All this, however, shall not influence in the least my determination to continue the magazine. Neither shall police persecution nor personal danger deter me from voicing my ideas. Are the readers and friends of “Mother Earth” willing to assist me?

A Sustaining Fund for the magazine has been suggested, and a number of friends have already contributed towards it. I should ask all those desirous to aid to come forward soon, that I may know what to expect.

At this writing I am unable to say what the charge against me will result in. In case of my conviction and imprisonment, “Mother Earth” will continue. Comrades Alexander Berkman and John R. Coryell, aided by Voltairine De Cleyre, Max Baginski and other able contributors have consented to publish the magazine.

But whatever the future may bring, a Sustaining Fund is an immediate necessity.

EMMA GOLDMAN.

“MOTHER EARTH” SUSTAINING FUND

Carpenter Union No. 309 — $5.00
Dr. Joseph Pitkin — $2.50
Miss Anna Riedel — $2.00
Emma Lee — $2.00
M. Rubinstein, Chicago — $5.00
B. Capes — $2.00
J. M. Livshis — $3.00
Jul. Bloomfield — $3.00
Jos. Goldman — $2.00

Announcement

ANNOUNCEMENT.

Sunday, December 16th, at 3 P. M., EMMA GOLDMAN will lecture at the Brooklyn Philosophical Association, Long Island Business College, 143 S. 8th Street.

Subject: “False and True Conceptions of Anarchism.”

The “Criminal Anarchy” Law

Sec. 468-a. Criminal Anarchy Defined:

Criminal Anarchy is the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force or violence, or by assassination of the executive head or of any of the executive officials of government, or by any unlawful means. The advocacy of such doctrine either by word of mouth or writing is a felony.

Sec. 468-b. Advocacy of Criminal Anarchy:

(1) By word of mouth or writing advocates, advises or teaches the duty, necessity or propriety of overthrowing or overturning organized government by force or violence, or by assassination of the executive head or of any of the executive officials of government, or by any unlawful means; or

(2) Prints, publishes, edits, issues or knowingly circulates, sells, distributes or publicly displays any book, paper, document or written or printed matter in any form, containing or advocating, advising or teaching the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force, violence or any unlawful means; or

(3) Openly, wilfully and deliberately justifies by word of mouth or writing the assassination or unlawful killing or assaulting of any executive or other officer of the United States or any state or of any civilized nation having an organized government because of his official character, or any other crime, with intent to teach, spread or advocate the propriety of the doctrines of criminal anarchy; or

(4) Organizes or helps to organize or becomes a member of or voluntarily assembles with any society, group or assembly of persons formed to teach or advocate such doctrine: is guilty of a felony and punishable by imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or by a fine of not more than $5,000, or both.

Sec. 468-c. Liability of Editors and Others:

Every editor or proprietor of a book, newspaper or serial, and every manager of a partnership or incorporated association by which a book, newspaper or serial is issued, is chargeable with the publication of any matter contained in such book, newspaper or serial. But in every prosecution therefor the defendant may show in his defense that the matter complained of was published without his knowledge or fault and against his wishes by another who had no authority from him to make the publication and whose act was disavowed by him as soon as known.

Sec. 468-d. Assemblages of Anarchists:

Whenever two or more persons assemble for the purpose of advocating or teaching the doctrines of criminal anarchy, as defined in section 468 of this title, such an assembly is unlawful, and every person voluntarily participating therein by his presence, aid or instigation is guilty of a felony and punishable by imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or by a fine of not more than $5,000, or both.

Sec. 468-e. Permitting premises to be used for assemblages of anarchists:

The owner, agent, superintendent, janitor, caretaker or occupant of any place, building or room, who wilfully and knowingly permits therein any assemblage of persons prohibited by section 468 of this title, or who, after notification that the premises are so used permits such use to be continued, is guilty of a misdemeanor and punishable by imprisonment for not more than 2 years, or by a fine of not more than $2,000 or both.

Sec. 469. Witness’ Privilege:

No person shall be excused from giving evidence upon an investigation or prosecution for any of the offenses specified in this title, upon the ground that the evidence might tend to convict him of a crime. But such evidence shall not be received against him upon any criminal proceeding.

RESPECTABILITY’S CONFESSION.

A new kind of graft has been discovered—“honest graft.”

Its superior efficiency shows that the criminal kind was only sham graft.

Similarly it is profitable to be a captain of industry; but it is far more lucrative to be a captain obstructing industry.

B. H.

Our Vanishing Liberty of the Press

By Theodore Schroeder

(By special permission, re-published from The Arena for December, 1906.)

FOR over a century it has been believed that we had abolished rule by divine right, and the accompanying infallibility of officialism, and that we have maintained inviolate the liberty of conscience, of speech and of press. However, this belief of ours is fast becoming a matter of illusion. Though a love for such liberty is still verbally avowed, yet in every conflict raising an issue over it, it is denied in practice. There is not a State in the Union to-day in which the liberty of the press is not abridged upon several legitimate subjects of debate. Here will be discussed but one of these, and that perhaps the most unpopular.

By gradual encroachments and unconscious piling of precedent upon precedent, we are rapidly approaching the stage in which we will enjoy any liberties only by permission, not as a matter of right. In this progressive denial of the freedom of conscience, speech and press, all three branches of government have transgressed, without seriously disturbing the serene, sweet, century-long slumber, into which we were lulled, by the songs of liberty, whose echoes still resound in our ears, but whose meaning we have long since forgotten.

A century ago we thought that we had settled all these problems of liberty. In all our constitutions we placed a verbal guarantee of liberty of speech and press, and then stupidly went to sleep, assuming that the Constitution had some mysterious and adequate potency for self-enforcement. This is the usual mistake, always so fatal to all liberties, and the multitude is too superficial and too much engrossed with a low order of selfish pursuits to discover that constitutions need the support of a public opinion which demands that every doubtful construction shall be resolved against the State and in favor of individual liberty.

In the absence of such construction, constitutions soon become the chains which enslave, rather than the safeguards of liberty. Thus it has come that under the guise of “judicial construction,” all constitutions have been judicially amended, until those who, by a dependence upon the Constitution, endeavor to defend themselves in the exercise of a proper liberty, only make themselves ridiculous. Persons finding satisfaction or profit in repudiating constitutional guarantees, and combining therewith sufficient political power to ignore them with impunity, unconsciously develop in themselves a contempt for the fundamental equalities which most founders of republics sought to maintain. This contempt is soon shared by those who find themselves the helpless victims of misplaced confidence in constitutions, and through them is transfused to the general public, until that which we should consider the sacred guarantee of our liberties becomes a joke, and those who rely upon it are looked upon as near to imbecility.

Some years ago a United States Senator (Mr. Cullom) was reported as saying that “in the United States there is no constitution but public opinion.” We should also remember the unconscious humor which made Congressman Timothy Campbell famous. He was urging President Cleveland to sign a bill which had passed Congress and the latter objected because he believed the bill to be violative of the organic law. Our ingenious statesman broke in with the earnest plea: “What’s the Constitution as between friends?” General Trumbull once said: “The Constitution has hardly any existence in this country except as rhetoric. . . . By virtue of its sublime promise to establish justice, we have seen injustice done for nearly a hundred years. It answers very well for Fourth-of-July purposes, but as a charter of liberty, it has very little force.” In Idaho, at the time of the official kidnapping of Moyer and others in Colorado, the attorney of these men tried to show the court the unconstitutionality of the procedure, when the baffled rage of the Judge prompted him to exclaim: “I am tired of these appeals to the Constitution. The Federal Constitution is a defective, out-of-date instrument, anyhow, and it is useless to fetch that document into court. But Constitution or no Constitution, we have got the men we went after; they are here; they are going to stay here until we have had our final say, and I would like to know what is going to be done about it?” No wonder that the wise Herbert Spencer wrote: “Paper constitutions raise smiles on the faces of those who have observed their results.”

All this is true because the great mass are indifferent to the constitutionally-guaranteed liberties of others, and so allow sordid self-interest and bigotry to add one limitation after another, until all freedom will be destroyed by judicial amendments to our charters of liberty. Furthermore, to most persons, the word liberty is only an empty sound, the meaning of which they know not, because they have never learned the reasons underlying it. Thus they are too stupid to be able to differentiate between their disapproval of an opinion and their opponent’s right to disagree with them. They love their own power to suppress intellectual differences more than another’s liberty of expressing them, and more than the progressive clarification of human conception of Truth, which can only come through freedom of discussion. Such persons specially owe to themselves, and to those against whom they are encouraging injustice, that they should read the defenses of liberty as made by the master-minds of the past.

That the State is a separate entity is a mere fiction of the law, which is useful within the very narrow limit of the necessities which called it into existence. This is judiciously recognized by our courts and by thoughtful laymen. By getting behind the fiction, to view the naked fact, we discover that the State has no existence except as a few fallible office-holders, theoretically representing the public sentiment, expressing its power, sometimes doing good and often thriving on the ignorance and indifference of the masses. When we abolished the infallibility of rulers by divine right, we at the same time abolished the political duty of believing either in God or what was theretofore supposed to be His political creation, the State.

Henceforth government was to be viewed only as a human expedient, to accomplish purely secular human ends, and subject to be transformed or abolished at the will and discretion of those by whose will and discretion it was created and is maintained. The exclusively secular ends of government were to protect each equally in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So the fathers of our country in their Declaration of Independence wrote that: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Similar declarations were made by the separate colonies. Thus the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights contains these words: “The community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasable right to reform, alter or abolish, government, in such manner as shall be by that community judged most conducive to the public weal.” In harmony with these declarations we made laws, such that political offenders, though they had been in open revolt to a tyrannous foreign government, or had slain the minions of the tyrant, they might here find a safe retreat from extradition.

All this has passed away. Formerly it was our truthful boast that we were the freest people on earth. To-day it is our silent shame that among all the tyrannical governments on the face of the earth ours is probably the only one which makes the right of admission depend upon the abstract political opinions of the applicant. Our people denounce the unspeakable tyranny of a bloody Czar, and pass laws here to protect him in the exercise of his brutalities in Russia. Instead of being “the land of the free and the home of the brave” we exclude from our shores those who are brave and seek freedom here, and punish men for expressing unpopular opinions if they already live here. In vain do the afflicted ones appeal to a “liberty loving” populace for help in maintaining liberty.

In this short essay I can discuss specifically only the denial of liberty of conscience, speech, and press, as it affects one class of citizens, and I choose to defend the most despised.

Under our immigration laws no anarchist, that is, “no person who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized governments” is allowed to enter the United States, even though such person be a non-resistant Quaker. In other words, the person who believes with the signers of the Declaration of Independence that those who create and maintain governments have a right to abolish them, and who also desire to persuade the majority of their fellow-men to exercise this privilege are denied the admission to our national domain.

Of course that and kindred legislation was the outgrowth of the most crass ignorance and hysteria over the word “anarchist.” I say most crass ignorance deliberately, because to me it is unthinkable that any sane man with an intelligent conception of what is believed by such non-resistant anarchists as Count Tolstoi, could possibly desire to exclude him from the United States. It almost seems as though most people were still so unenlightened as not to know the difference between socialism, anarchism, and regicide, and so wanting in imagination that they cannot possibly conceive of a case in which the violent resistance or resentment of tyranny might become excusable. Thus it is that the vast multitude whose education is limited to a newspaper intelligence, stupidly assume that no one but an anarchist could commit a political homicide, and that every anarchist of necessity condones every such taking of human life. Nothing of course could be farther from the fact, but out of this ignorance it comes that every attempt at violence upon officials is charged against anarchists even before it is known who the perpetrator was, and without knowing or caring whether he was an anarchist, a socialist, an ordinary democrat, a man with a personal grudge, or a lunatic. From such foundation of ignorance comes the result that we punish those who disagree with the English tyrant of a couple of centuries ago, who said that the worst government imaginable was better than no government at all.

For the benefit of those whose indolence precludes them from going to a dictionary to find out what “anarchism” stands for I will take the space necessary to quote Professor Huxley on the subject. He says:

“Doubtless, it is possible to imagine a true ‘Civitas Dei,’ in which every man’s moral faculty shall be such as leads him to control all those desires which run counter to the good of mankind, and to cherish only those which conduce to the welfare of society; and in which every man’s native intellect shall be sufficiently strong and his culture sufficiently extensive to enable him to know what he ought to do and to seek after. And in that blessed State, police will be as much a superfluity as every other kind of government. . . . Anarchy, as a term of political philosophy, must be taken only in its proper sense, which has nothing to do with disorder or with crimes; but denotes a state of society, in which the rule of each individual by himself is the only government the legitimacy of which is recognized. Anarchy, as thus far defined, is the logical outcome of the form of political theory which, for the last half-century and more, has been known under the name of individualism.”

And men who merely believe this beautiful ideal attainable are unfit for residence in a land that boasts of freedom of conscience and press!

If the distinguished and scholarly author of the “Life of Jesus,” M. Ernest Renan, should be Commissioner of Immigration, he would, under present laws, be compelled to exclude from the United States the founder of Christianity, should He seek admission. In his “Life of Jesus,” Renan expresses this conclusion: “In one view Jesus was an anarchist for he had no notion of civil government, which seemed to him an abuse, pure and simple. . . . Every magistrate seemed to him a natural enemy of the people of God. . . . His aim is to annihilate wealth and power, not to grasp them.”

If the Rev. Heber Newton were Commissioner of Immigration, he, too, would have to exclude Jesus from our land as an anarchist. Dr. Newton says: “Anarchism is in reality the ideal of political and social science, and also the ideal of religion. It is the ideal to which Jesus Christ looked forward. Christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority, but he did seek to write on the hearts of men God’s law and make them self-legislating.”

Surely people who only ask the liberty of trying to persuade their fellow-men to abolish government, through passive resistance, cannot possibly be a menace to any institution worth maintaining, yet such men we deny admission into the United States. If they chance to be Russians, we send them back, perhaps to end their days as Siberian exiles, and all because they have expressed a mere abstract “disbelief in government,” though accompanied only by a desire for passive resistance.

Julian Hawthorne wrote this: “Did you ever notice that all the interesting people you meet are Anarchists?”

According to his judgment, “all the interesting people” would, under present laws, be excluded from the United States. An industrious commissioner, zealous to enforce the law to the very letter, could easily take the writings of the world’s best and greatest men, and if foreigners, on their own admissions, could exclude them because they had advocated the anarchist ideal of a “disbelief in government.” Among such might be named the following: Count Leo Tolstoi, Prince Peter Kropotkin, Michel Montaigne, Thomas Paine, Henry Thoreau, Lord Macaulay, William Lloyd Garrison, Hall Caine, Turgot, Simeon of Durham, Bishop of St. Andrews, Max Stirner, Elisée Reclus, Frederick Nietzsche, Thomas Carlyle, Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman, Elbert Hubbard, Samuel M. Jones, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Charles O’Conor, and probably also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and—but what’s the use? They can’t all be named.

These are the type of men who hold an ideal, only a dream, perhaps, of liberty without the invasion even of government, and therefore we make a law to exclude them from the United States. But that is not all we do in this “free” country. If a resident of this “land of the free” should “connive or conspire” to induce any of these non-resistants, who “disbelieve in governments,” to come to the United States, by sending one of them a printed or written, private or public, invitation to visit here, such “conspirer” would be liable to a fine of five thousand dollars, or three years’ imprisonment, or both. And yet we boast of our freedom of conscience, of speech and of press! It is hard for me to believe that there is any sane adult, worthy to be an American, who knows something of our own revolutionary history, who does not believe revolution by force to be morally justifiable under some circumstances, as perhaps in Russia, and who would not defend the revolutionists in the slaughter of the official tyrants of Russia, if no other means for the abolition of their tyranny were available, or who would not be a revolutionist if compelled to live in Russia and denied the right to even agitate for peaceable reform. And yet “free” America, by a congressional enactment, denies admission to the United States of any Russian patriot who agrees with us in this opinion, even though he has no sympathy whatever with anarchist ideals. It is enough that he justifies (even though in open battle for freedom) the “unlawful” killing of any tyrant “officer” of “any civilized nation having an organized government.” Here, then, is the final legislative announcement that no tyranny, however heartless or bloody, “of any civilized nation having an organized government” can possibly justify violent resistance. It was a violation of this law to admit Maxim Gorky into this country, though he is not an anarchist.

In the State of New York, although satisfied with American conditions and officials, and although you believe in democratic government, if you should orally, or in print, advocate the cause of forcible revolution against Russia, or against “any civilized nation having an organized government,” you would be liable, under a State Statute, to a fine of $5,000 and ten years’ imprisonment besides. Have we, then, freedom of conscience, speech and press? Do we love liberty or know its meaning?

Yes, it may be that a dispassionate and enlightened judge must declare such laws unconstitutional, but such judges are as scarce as the seekers after martyrdom who are willing to make a test case. Hence we all submit to this tyranny. Furthermore, the same hysteria which could make legislators believe they had the power to pass such a law, in all probability would also induce courts to confirm such power. A Western jurist, a member of the highest court of the State, once said to me that it must be a very stupid lawyer who could not write a plausible opinion on either side of any case that ever came to an appellate court. Given the mental predisposition induced by popular panic, together with intense emotions, and it is easy, very easy, to formulate verbal “interpretations” by which the constitutional guarantees are explained away, or exceptions interpolated,—a common process for the judicial amendment of laws and constitutions.

If, then, we truly believe in the liberty of conscience, speech and press, we must place ourselves again squarely upon the declaration of rights made by our forefathers, and defend the right of others to disagree with us, even about the beneficence of government.

Free Speech Defense Fund

As when your neighbor’s house is on fire your own is in danger, so the protection of your liberty should begin when it is menaced by a precedent which attacks your opponent’s equality of opportunity to express his disagreement with you. Let us then unite for the repeal of these iniquitous laws, born of hysteria and popular panic, and maintained in thoughtless disregard of others’ intellectual freedom.

FREE SPEECH DEFENSE FUND.

Group Freie Arbeiter-Stimme — $50.00
Group Germinal — $31.50
Progressive Library — $25.00
Carpenter Union No. 309 — $25.00
Singing Society “Freiheit” — $12.50
Through “Freiheit” — $15.00
Brewer Union, Newark, N. J. — $5.00
Through N. Notkin, Philadelphia — $35.00
Chicago, through J. M. Livshis — $95.35
Milwaukee, November meeting — $12.75
Italian Anarchists, Alabama — $3.40
Through L. Camanita — $3.00
Several contributions — $4.00

The expenditures, so far, total $215. An itemized account will appear in the next issue of “Mother Earth.”

THE EDITOR.

As to “Crammers of Furnaces”

(A Reply to E. C. Walker’s Article in No. 46 “Truth Seeker.”)

It requires a very brave mind to be just to one’s opponent. We are apt, only too often, to misstate facts in order to gain victory in an argument or discussion. But the really honest man, the truly broadminded, scorns such tactics; to him the triumph based on falsehood is bitter fruit.

This was the thought that persisted and kept obtruding itself at our perusal of Mr. E. C. Walker’s article “Crammers of Furnaces and Sitters on Safety Valves.” Perhaps the article might have never been written had Mr. Walker realized that sincerity in literature and honesty towards opponents are as desirable as good weight and full measure in the matter of groceries. Or may be that, the opportunity being given, the temptation to lecture Anarchists on Anarchism was very, very strong and—Mr. Walker weak? Has he again succumbed to the passion for reiterating the claim—as ancient as it is stupid—that the Anarchist-Communists have no right to be called Anarchists.

Mr. Walker waxed eloquent over the “crime” of holding Czolgosz memorial meetings. As a matter of fact, no such memorial meetings took place and none were contemplated. The meeting in question was called for the purpose of discussing whether Czolgosz was an Anarchist or not. We claim the right of discussing—even under the present iniquitous law—whatever subject interests us. If free speech and free press mean anything, they mean freedom of discussion. We, therefore, claim the right to discuss how it is and why it is that a native born American, in this—politically the most advanced—country, the “land of opportunity,” enjoying universal adult suffrage, should wish to kill the President of the United States, elected as that official is by a majority of the voting population, in accordance with our political institutions. The Czolgosz act was an entirely new phenomenon on the horizon of our country,—neither sectional feeling nor personal interest played any part in the act. A social phenomenon of this character should, in our estimation, receive our most earnest attention; it should be intelligently discussed in order to help us arrive at a better understanding of causes, and at a solution, if possible, of effects.

An unpopular subject? Granted. Shall freedom of speech, then, mean the discussion of only such subjects as are popular? And is the sex question a popular subject? And yet Mr. Walker has been discussing that question for more years than some of us can boast of since our birth. And we venture to say that the sex question is more obnoxious to the great American public than the McKinley episode.

“When a minority drops the pen of reason,” says Mr. Walker, “and draws the sword of physical force, does it expect still to be opposed by reason and waved back by olive branches?” Not at all, Mr. Walker. It is true Czolgosz drew the sword; he paid the penalty without a murmur. We, however, are using the pen of reason. On what grounds, then, should we be persecuted any more than the so-called philosophical Anarchists? And does not Mr. Walker know that eight out of the twelve arrested and held for criminal court were mere spectators, and that one of the chief speakers at the alleged “memorial” Czolgosz meeting—Mr. Moscow—is a comrade of Mr. E. C. Walker, an Individualist Anarchist absolutely opposed to violence.

We are open and avowed Revolutionists; but we defy any one to produce a single line from any English Anarchist paper or magazine published in this country within the last twenty-five years where assassination is advocated or even implied. And if this be true, can a just and honest man maintain that the followers of the Communist-Anarchist school of thought should be treated as criminals?

Yes, literary honesty is a rare jewel, Mr. Walker. If you read in an article in “Mother Earth” that “Czolgosz was a soul in pain,” you immediately declare the writer to be an apologist for Czolgosz. Is sympathy for an unfortunate man identical with justification of or apology for the man’s act? As real Anarchists we neither condemn nor justify; our business is to try to understand, understand, understand, Mr. Walker. In view of this, is it not foolish to say, “Yes, the police have acted foolishly, badly; almost or quite as foolishly and badly as the Communist Czolgosz apologists?”

“To return to our examination of the policy of those who stand forth as apologists or quasi-apologists for political assassination in the United States: In the first place, as heretofore intimated”—thus spake Mr. Walker—“they are not Anarchists, for if Anarchism means one thing more than another, it means opposition to the government of man by man. To take a man’s life without his consent is the last supreme step in governing him.”

Let us see, Mr. Walker. Government is an invasive organization; it taxes people without their consent; it butchers Philippino men, women and children; establishes bull pens at Idaho and sends colored troops to inflame race prejudice, by allowing those troops to obtain liquor and then illtreat the people. Government kidnaps men like Moyer and Haywood; it violates its own laws and then delegates the secretary of war to give his official indorsement to the illegal acts. In short, government and its representatives assassinate liberty at every step. At last a man arises who embodies in himself all the revolt of the people—he strikes down one of the invaders. According to Mr. Walker’s logic he invades the invader. Is it not farcical to maintain that two persons can invade each other at the same time? Is this the celebrated “philosophic” logic?

We neither advocate nor advise acts of violence. But those who have come to realize that government is invasive of the liberty of the individual, can object to the assassination of tyrants on only two grounds—sentiment and expediency. Mr. Walker, who summons everything, except his own pet theories, to the bar of reason, would eliminate sentiment. Expediency is a matter of opinion and judgment.

As to that old, hoary chestnut about our not being Anarchists, do not permit it to worry you, Mr. Walker. We shall continue our Communist-Anarchist education of the people, and for the rest, let posterity judge.

EMMA GOLDMAN, ALEXANDER BERKMAN, H. KELLY.

Nov. 20, 1906.

(The “Truth Seeker” declined to print the above article on the ground that the “editor thought it best not to open up another discussion.” Since it was Mr. Walker’s article in the “Truth Seeker” that really opened up the discussion, we think it strange that a liberal paper should decline hearing the other side.—THE EDITOR.)

The Psychology of “Crime”

Criminology has of late years become a science of much importance, and although there has been a good deal of nonsense written on the subject by those who cling to old prejudices, a deal of much-needed light has been thrown on this dark subject. In Health (New York) two instances are given of surgical operations performed on boys “who had exhibited unmistakable vicious tendencies.” In each case injuries to the head had been sustained and trephining was resorted to, “with the result that in one case a piece of bone an inch long was removed from the brain, and in the other a depressed bone was raised, both operations being followed by marked mental and moral improvement.” Had it not been for our stupid and, let us add, barbarous habit of leaving to the law, with its petrified judges and brutalized police, the treatment of our criminals, public opinion would have recognized long ago that these unfortunates—the viciously inclined—from some cause or other are mentally crippled. As investigations proceed it will doubtless be made clear that the “law” has been hanging and imprisoning wretched human creatures whose brains have been injured or diseased, and who, living in a state of society that favors insanity, have been driven to commit crime. The paternal State doesn’t spare the rod, but it “spoils” its children all the same.

The Stream of Life

By John Francis Valter

Pile upon pile of granite hives
Where money-bees toil and thrive.

Block after block where poor men dwell
'Midst surroundings vile as hell.

Row next to row of mansions hold
Pleasure beyond the price of gold.

Gaudy shops entice each sense
To indulge itself at slight expense.

Miles of streets, some grave, some gay,
Interlacing thread their way.
Through all pours the Stream of Life;

Singing sweet songs of felicity;
Babbling soft words of simplicity;
Skirling wild screeds of audacity;
Roaring wild roars of ferocity;

Rushing and roaring and sobbing and tearing
With a swish and a swirl,
With a twist and a twirl,

It gobbles and vomits,
Poor toiling humanity.

APHORISMS.

By J. M. Gottesman

Beware of giving advice. The problem is too difficult and the responsibility too great. You give advice after your own nature. But this very rarely is after the nature of the one who asks it. This way you understand. The other way he does. Advising prudence you produce weakness, and where strength is needed, violence is applied. A foreign element has been introduced into the other’s soul, and he has lost the measure.

Modern Science and Anarchism

By Peter Kropotkin

(Concluded.)

Then, we assert and endeavor to prove that it devolves upon every new economic form of social life to develop its own new form of political relations. It has been so in the past, and so it undoubtedly will be in the future. New forms are already germinating all round.

Feudal right and autocracy, or, at least, the almost unlimited power of a Tsar or a king, have moved hand in hand in history. They depended on each other in this development. Exactly in the same way the rule of the capitalists has evolved its own characteristic political order—representative government—both in strictly centralized monarchies and in republics.

Socialism, whatever may be the form in which it will appear, and in whatever degree it may approach to its unavoidable goal—Communism—will also have to choose its own form of political structure. Of the old form it cannot make use, no more than it could avail itself of the hierarchy of the Church or of autocracy. The State bureaucracy and centralization are as irreconcilable with Socialism as was autocracy with capitalist rule. One way or another, Socialism must become more popular, more communalistic, and less dependent upon indirect government through elected representatives. It must become more self-governing. Besides, when we closely observe the modern life of France, Spain, England, and the United States, we notice in these countries the evident tendency to form into groups of entirely independent communes, towns and villages, which would combine by means of free federation, in order to satisfy innumerable needs and attain certain immediate ends. Of course, neither the Russian Minister Witte nor the German William II, nor even the Jacobinists who to-day rule Switzerland, are making for this goal. All these work upon the old model for capitalist and governmental centralization in the hands of the State; but the above-mentioned dismemberment of the State, both territorial and functional, is undoubtedly aimed at by the progressive part of West European society and of the American people. In actual life this tendency manifests itself in thousands of attempts at organization outside the State, fully independent of it; as well as in attempts to take hold of various functions which had been previously usurped by the State and which, of course, it has never properly performed. And then, as a great social phenomenon of universal import, this tendency found expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in a whole series of similar uprisings in France and Spain; while in the domain of thought—of ideas spreading through society—this view has already acquired the force of an extremely important factor of future history. The future revolutions in France and in Spain will be communalist—not centralist.

On the strength of all this, we are convinced that to work in favor of a centralized State-capitalism and to see in it a desideratum, means to work against the tendency of progress already manifest. We see in such work as this a gross misunderstanding of the historic mission of Socialism itself—a great historical mistake, and we make war upon it. To assure the laborers that they will be able to establish Socialism, or even to take the first steps on the road to Socialism, by retaining the entire government machinery, and changing only the persons who manage it; not to promote, but even to retard the day on which the working people’s minds shall be bent upon discovering their own, new forms of political life,—this is in our eyes a colossal historical blunder which borders upon crime.

Finally, since we represent a revolutionary party, we try to study the history of the origin and development of past revolutions. We endeavor, first of all, to free the histories of revolutions written up till now from the partisan, and for the most part false, governmental coloring that has been given them. In the histories hitherto written we do not yet see the people; nor do we see how revolutions began. The stereotyped phrases about the desperate condition of people previous to revolutions, fail to explain whence, amid this desperation, came the hope of something better—whence came the revolutionary spirit. And therefore, after reading these histories, we put them aside, and, going back to first sources, try to learn from them what caused the people to rise and what was its part in revolutions.

Thus, we understand the Great French Revolution not at all as it is pictured by Louis Blanc, who presents it chiefly as a great political movement directed by the Jacobin Club. We see in it, first of all, a chaotic popular movement, chiefly of the peasant folk (“Every village had its Robespierre,” as the Abbé Grégoire, who knew the people’s revolt, remarked to the historian Schlosser). This movement aimed chiefly at the destruction of every vestige of feudal rights and of the redemptions that had been imposed for the abolition of some of them, as well as at the recovery of the lands which had been seized from the village communes by vultures of various kinds. And in so far the peasant movement was successful. Then, upon this foundation of revolutionary tumult, of increased pulsation of life, and of disorganization of all the powers of the State, we find, on the one hand, developing amongst the town laborers a tendency towards a vaguely understood socialist equality; and, on the other hand, the middle classes working hard, and successfully, in order to establish their own authority upon the ruins of that of royalty and nobility. To this end the middle classes fought stubbornly and desperately that they might create a powerful, all-inclusive, centralized government, which would preserve and assure to them their right of property (gained partly by plunder before and during the revolution) and afford them the full opportunity of exploiting the poor without any legal restrictions. This power, this right to exploit, the middle classes really obtained; and in the State centralization which was created by the revolutionary Jacobinists, Napoleon found an excellent soil for establishing his empire. From this centralized authority, which kills all local life, France is suffering even to this very day, and the first attempt to throw off its yoke—an attempt which opened a new era in history—was made by the proletariat of Paris only in 1871. Without entering here upon an analysis of other revolutionary movements, it is sufficient to say that we understand the coming social revolution, not at all as a Jacobinist dictatorship—not at all as a reform of the social institutions by means of laws issued by a convention or a Senate or a dictator. Such revolutions have never occurred, and a movement which should take this form would be doomed to inevitable death. We understand the revolution as a widespread popular movement, during which, in every town and village within the region of the revolt, the masses will have to take upon themselves the task of rebuilding society—will have to take upon themselves the work of construction upon communistic bases, without awaiting any orders and directions from above; that is, first of all, they will have to organize, one way or another, the means of supplying food to everyone and of providing dwellings for all, and then produce whatever will be found necessary for feeding, clothing, and sheltering everybody.

As to the representative government, whether self-appointed or elected—be it “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as they said in the forties in France and are still saying in Germany, or an elected “temporary government,” or, again, a Jacobinist “convention,”—we place in it no hopes whatever. Not because we personally do not like it, but because nowhere and never in history do we find that people, carried into government by the revolutionary wave, have proved equal to the occasion; always and everywhere they have fallen below the revolutionary requirements of the moment; always and everywhere they became an obstacle to the revolution. We place no hope in this representation because, in the work of rebuilding society upon new communist principles, separate individuals, however wise and devoted to the cause, are and must be powerless. They can only find a legal expression for such a destruction as is already being accomplished—at most they can but widen and extend that destruction so as to suggest it to regions which have not yet begun it. But that is not all. The destruction must be wrought from below in every portion of the territory; otherwise it will not be done. To impose it by law is impossible, as indeed, the revolt of the Vendée has proved. As for any new bases of life which are only growing as yet,—no government can ever find an expression for them before they become defined by the constructive activity of the masses themselves, at thousands of points at once.

Looking upon the problems of the revolution in this light, Anarchism, obviously, cannot take a sympathetic attitude toward the programme which aims at “the conquest of power in present society”—la conquête des pouvoirs, as it is expressed in France. We know that by peaceful, parliamentary means, in the present State such a conquest as this is impossible. In proportion as the Socialists become a power in the present bourgeois society and State, their Socialism must die out; otherwise the middle classes, which are much more powerful both intellectually and numerically than is admitted in the Socialist press, will not recognize them as their rulers. And we know also that, were a revolution to give France or England or Germany a Socialist government, the respective government would be absolutely powerless without the activity of the people themselves, and that, necessarily, it would soon begin to act fatally as a bridle upon the revolution.

Finally, our studies of the preparatory stages of all revolutions bring us to the conclusion that not a single revolution has originated in parliaments or in any other representative assembly. All began with the people. And no revolution has appeared in full armor—born, like Minerva out of the head of Jupiter, in a day. They all had their periods of incubation, during which the masses were very slowly becoming imbued with the revolutionary spirit, grew bolder, commenced to hope, and step by step emerged from their former indifference and resignation. And the awakening of the revolutionary spirit always took place in such a manner that, at first, single individuals, deeply moved by the existing state of things, protested against it, one by one. Many perished—“uselessly,” the arm-chair critic would say; but the indifference of society was shaken by these progenitors. The dullest and most narrow-minded people were compelled to reflect,—Why should men, young, sincere, and full of strength, sacrifice their lives in this way? It was impossible to remain indifferent—it was necessary to take a stand, for or against; thought was awakening. Then, little by little, small groups came to be imbued with the same spirit of revolt; they also rebelled—sometimes in the hope of local success—in strikes or in small revolts against some official whom they disliked, or in order to get food for their hungry children, but frequently also without any hope of success; simply because the conditions grew unbearable. Not one, or two, or tens, but hundreds of similar revolts have preceded and must precede every revolution. Without these no revolution was ever wrought; not a single concession was ever made by the ruling classes. Even the famous “peaceful” abolition of serfdom in Russia, of which Tolstoy often speaks as of a peaceful conquest, was forced upon the government by a series of peasant uprisings, beginning with the early fifties (perhaps as an echo of the European revolution of 1848), spreading from year to year, and gaining in importance so as to attain proportions hitherto unknown, until 1857. Alexander Herzen’s words, “Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the abolition comes from below,”—repeated by Alexander II before the serf-owners of Moscow—were not mere phrases, but answered to the real state of affairs. This was all the more true as to the eve of every revolution. Hundreds of partial revolts preceded every one of them. And it may be stated as a general rule that the character of every revolution is determined by the character and the aim of the uprisings by which it is preceded.

To wait, therefore, for a social revolution to come as a birthday present, without a whole series of protests on the part of the individual conscience, and without hundreds of preliminary revolts, by which the very nature of the revolution is determined, is, to say the least, absurd. But to assure the working people that they will gain all the benefits of a socialist revolution by confining themselves to electoral agitation, and to attack vehemently every act of individual revolt and all minor preliminary mass-revolts—even when they appear among nations historically far more revolutionary than the Germans—means to become as great an obstacle to the development of the revolutionary spirit and to all progress as was and is the Christian Church.

Without entering into further discussion of the principles of Anarchism and the Anarchist programme of action, enough has been said, I think, to show the place of Anarchism among the modern sociological sciences.

Anarchism is an attempt to apply to the study of the human institutions the generalizations gained by means of the natural scientific inductive method; and an attempt to foresee the future steps of mankind on the road to liberty, equality, and fraternity, with a view of realizing the greatest sum of happiness for every unit of human society.

It is the inevitable result of that natural-scientific, intellectual movement which began at the close of the eighteenth century, was hampered for half a century by the reaction that set in throughout Europe after the French Revolution, and has been appearing again in full vigor ever since the end of the fifties. Its roots lie in the natural-scientific philosophy of the century mentioned. Its complete scientific basis, however, it could receive only after that awakening of naturalism which, about forty years ago, brought into being the natural-scientific study of human social institutions.

In Anarchism there is no room for those pseudo-scientific laws with which the German metaphysicians of the twenties and thirties had to content themselves. Anarchism does not recognize any method other than the natural-scientific. This method it applies to all the so-called humanitarian sciences, and, availing itself of this method as well as of all researches which have recently been called forth by it, Anarchism endeavors to reconstruct all the sciences dealing with man, and to revise every current idea of right, justice, etc., on the basis which have served for the revision of all natural sciences. Its object is to form a scientific concept of the universe embracing the whole of nature and including man.

This world-concept determines the position Anarchism has taken in a practical life. In the struggle between the Individual and the State, Anarchism, like its predecessors of the eighteenth century, takes the side of the Individual as against the State, of Society as against the Authority which oppresses it. And, availing itself of the historical data collected by modern science, it has shown that the State—whose sphere of authority there is now a tendency among its admirers to increase, and a tendency to limit in actual life—is, in reality, a superstructure,—as harmful as it is unnecessary, and, for us Europeans, of a comparatively recent origin; a superstructure in the interests of capitalism—agrarian, industrial, and financial—which in ancient history caused the decay (relatively speaking) of politically-free Rome and Greece, and which caused the death of all other despotic centers of civilization of the East and of Egypt. The power which was created for the purpose of welding together the interests of the landlord, the judge, the warrior, and the priest, and has been opposed throughout history to every attempt of mankind to create for themselves a more assured and freer mode of life,—this power cannot become an instrument for emancipation, any more than Caesarism (Imperialism) or the Church can become the instrument for a social revolution.

In the economic field, Anarchism has come to the conclusion that the root of modern evil lies, not in the fact that the capitalist appropriates the profits or the surplus-value, but in the very possibility of these profits, which accrue only because millions of people have literally nothing to subsist upon without selling their labor-power at a price which makes profits and the creation of “surplus values” possible. Anarchism understands, therefore, that in political economy attention must be directed first of all to so-called “consumption,” and that the first concern of the revolution must be to reorganize that so as to provide food, clothing and shelter for all. “Production,” on the other hand, must be so adapted as to satisfy this primary, fundamental need of society. Therefore, Anarchism cannot see in the next coming revolution a mere exchange of monetary symbols for labor-checks, or an exchange of present Capitalism for State-capitalism. It sees in it the first step on the road to No-government Communism.

Whether or not Anarchism is right in its conclusions, will be shown by a scientific criticism of its bases and by the practical life of the future. But in one thing it is absolutely right; in that it has included the study of social institutions in the sphere of natural-scientific investigations; has forever parted company with metaphysics; and makes use of the method by which modern natural science and modern material philosophy were developed. Owing to this, the very mistakes which Anarchism may have made in its researches can be detected the more readily. But its conclusions can be verified only by the same natural-scientific, inductive-deductive method by which every science and every scientific concept of the universe is created.

THE END.

Another Rockefeller Victory

ANOTHER ROCKEFELLER VICTORY.

Another Rockefeller victory falls to be celebrated. This time the bays rest on the brow of William Rockefeller, he of the vast estate in the Adirondacks. To round out this estate he wiped out a village. Within the law—always within the law—he instituted a campaign of petty persecution against the inhabitants of the little town of Brandon who refused to sell out to him. The late Postmaster-General Payne courteously took away the Brandon post office to oblige his friend Rockefeller, and substituted for it another, in the heart of the Rockefeller preserve. The Rockefeller keepers drove from the mountains the children who picked blueberries there, and the blueberries rotted on the bushes, thousands of bushels of them. Rockefeller barriers and Rockefeller trespass signs appeared across immemorial forest trails, highways in the truest sense of the word. And now, the highest court of the State of New York has decided for Rockefeller against old Oliver Lamora, the one man who defied him, and maintained his right to fish in a Rockefeller-hounded waterway which had been stocked with trout at the State’s expense. Three times Lamora has been haled to court on charge of trespass. His struggling fellow woodsmen have helped to pay his expenses; a local lawyer gave his services for nothing, but patience and persistence conquered. The last inhabitant of Brandon will soon go, and his house will be razed as the rest of the village has been razed. Rockefeller wins. Now let us all join in glad acclaim of the triumph, after which the class in Vested Rights will intone the lesson for the day, beginning, “What a strange, incredible, and wholly abominable thing is class hatred!”

—(Ridgway’s.)

Parasitism

By J. F. Phillips

(Or Concerning a Right to Existence)

I HAVE consumed much and produced little. I was cursed from my birth; I was born rich. My earliest recollection is of a room, in time, filled with two thousand dollars worth of toys. A nurse was always in attendance—she was hired to gratify my slightest wish. I was taught from my infancy to depend upon others for my daily wants of life.

Later on I was sent to school, where the object was to educate gentlemen; non-producing consumers—parasites. Every boy considered himself above manual labor, and he was encouraged in this belief by the “teachers.” So I became a gentleman.

When this process was completed, I demanded money to “see life” and I have seen “it.” I have indulged in conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. I have associated with men and women whose sole object was to bid for admiration without personal exertion: ladies and gentlemen.

I have lived at the best hotels that New York City has builded, and lived in idleness. I have patronized the finest restaurants “long old Broadway,” where I have paid twenty-five dollars for a dinner for two. I have seen ladies and gentlemen, magnificently gowned and dressed and jeweled, gaily drive up to brilliant cafés and ushered over soft, rich carpets to “reserved tables.” I have observed the glitter of diamonds on snow-white bosoms. I have heard the pop of champagne corks and felt the entrancing strains of exquisite music steal away my senses. I have lifted up my wine glass and drunk it to the maddening, dashing, voluptuary life of “dear old New York!” I have been through all this and more, but this will suffice—I have been a gentleman. To-day, at twenty-one years of age, my health is shattered. I have had something for nothing and I am paying the price. Some of my former companions are in sanatoriums, others committed suicide, and a few are still wooing debility. None, to my knowledge, are leading useful lives.

Now I realize that when I was reading Caesar, I ought to have been doing useful work. When I was living the life of a gentleman of leisure, unconsciously causing my own undoing, I should have protected myself from gentility. For I know to-day that the money which cursed me was stolen property; that the school I attended was a place of poisonous environments; that the scintillating surroundings in which I lived were supported by slavery, by theft, by murder. And competition is still the law. Since I broke the chains of conventionality I have seen another side of life. I have seen children without sufficient clothing to protect their shivering bodies from the severe attacks of winter—and I thought of my two thousand dollars worth of toys. I have seen men and women living in dens and caves where the sunlight never enters—and I thought of my sumptuous school days. I have seen the producers of the necessaries of life want for food and I thought of my wanton waste of champagne. Opportunity, Liberty, Justice: fine names which mean, at least, very little. How are we going to have Opportunity, while the producers do not own the instruments of production and have to beg leave to use them from the Capitalist?

How are we going to have Liberty, while men, women and children are forced to do distasteful work for ten hours a day or longer for the bare necessities of existence?

And how are we going to have justice, while a man can get a monopoly on property and bequeath it to his son, who becomes an idler, a parasite and is allowed to live on the labor of another? How?

The law of the survival of the fittest in the business world means this: The thief and fence will become wealthy and the honest man correspondingly poor.

For this law is irrefutable: As one man goes up in the financial world, another or others must go down. The Individualist doesn’t know this or else he is a thief and parasite at heart. Personally I have no desire to return to my life of waste.

I shudder to think of the lives that were sacrificed to procure the means of allowing me to create abnormal desires. I have commenced to really educate myself, which is proved by the realization of the fact that the only way to be happy is to make others so. And the only way to make others so, is to quit enslaving them.

When we evolve a little further and truths become more generally understood, men will know that co-operation is better than competition, and autonomous socialism or communal anarchism (the difference between which I am unable to see) will be brought about. In the meantime I have a duty to perform, namely, to earn my right to existence.

The claim I make to that right may not be sufficient; however, it is not pure parasitism nor robbery. I can and do make people think for themselves.

I help break down the barriers which retard evolution—not by creating like-mindedness, but by stimulating thought.

Apropos of Woman Suffrage

By H. Kelly

APROPOS OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

The equilibrium of the Anglo-Saxon world is rudely disturbed from time to time by incidents that in former times would have been settled by a parish council. There was a time when a Civil War, a Corn Law, or a Reform Bill was necessary to disturb the equanimity of the two hemispheres. The arrest of eleven women for raising a disturbance within the sacred precincts of the House of Commons is now sufficient to set the civilized world by the ears.

A great deal of attention has been paid, too, and some excellent articles written about the eleven women, who in defiance of law and “order” appeared at the House of Commons recently to petition the government on the question of granting suffrage to the women of Great Britain. There are some phases of this question which have, to our knowledge, not received attention and to these we intend to devote ourselves.

The women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain has for years past been as negligible a quantity as the Rational Dress League, and has attracted less attention than the Vegetarian Society; now, however, it threatens the peace and quietude of King Edward’s Ministers because the women suffragists have ceased to follow the beaten path, which invariably leads to sterility and ossification.

After the Balfour-Chamberlain government had gulled an unsuspecting and unthinking public into returning them to power, they proceeded to rob that public of some of their most cherished liberties, among which was the attempted destruction of the Board Schools, which were turned into the hands of the clergy. The Free Churches, Wesleyans, Baptists, etc., aroused at this, organized the so-called Passive Resistance movement, which was really passive enough to suit every one, except the most bigoted Churchman. They refused to pay the school tax, printed and distributed Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” and did a great deal of good in claiming freedom for the individual as against the state, especially in matters of conscience. It was during this agitation and inspired, no doubt, by the Passive Resisters that a woman and a Socialist (I think it was Miss Dora Montefiore) conceived the idea of refusing to pay her taxes on the ground that she was disfranchised and treated by the government as an outcast, unfit to vote or participate in the councils of the nation. An Opera Bouffe war took place, lasting several days. The lady barricaded herself in her house and refused to accept the summons thrown over her garden wall; food was hauled over the fence with a string, and the incident was really interesting while it lasted. Just as it happened with Thoreau when he refused to pay taxes—some friend paid them, and the case was closed. The incident described above, small and ridiculous as it seemed, had its effect, however; women in various parts of England took courage and emulated the example set before them; members of the government were heckled at public meetings in different cities and, of course, were pretty generally condemned; the ladies with true British tenacity persevered, and finally eleven of them stormed the House of Commons with a petition, raised a disturbance when it was refused and were finally arrested. They were all women of property and social standing, among them being Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, daughter of the famous Richard Cobden, and wife of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, one of England’s most distinguished artist-craftsmen. The Magistrate who tried the cases offered to release the prisoners, under bonds to keep the peace. To the credit of the ladies, however, be it said that they refused to compromise, whereupon they were sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. Their treatment in jail was outrageous. We quote Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s description of his wife’s experience:

“On entering the prison, my wife was stripped of all her things save her wedding ring, and re-dressed in the clothing of the prison; and, in place of her name, was numbered with a number which is now her name, deprived of all associations save those of the prison which is now her new and silent world. Her food—she is a vegetarian—consists of dry bread, tea or cocoa and potatoes. She is in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. For one hour, in silence, she is—with other prisoners, six feet apart—walked backwards and forwards in a yard in the prison enclosure. In her cell she has for occupation the making of postmen’s bags. For reading, the Bible—that book of Revolutions! What a mockery!—and a book called ‘A Healthy Home,’ which, she says, with a smile, is of no use to her there. She asked for a Shakespeare; there was but one volume in the prison and that was engaged. She asked for pen and paper, that she might write down her meditations. That was refused; it was against the prison regulations.”

The heinousness of a crime (?) depends largely upon the guise it is committed under, and in this connection some people remembered that Dr. Jameson, the present Prime Minister of Cape Colony, when still an independent freebooter in the employ of Cecil Rhodes, organized an expedition and invaded the Transvaal Republic for the purpose of overthrowing what was then a friendly State to the United Kingdom. Defeated, captured and sentenced to death, he was pardoned by President Kruger, and turned over to the British government for punishment. Jameson was sentenced to one year imprisonment (in the same institution to which the suffragists were sent) as a first-class misdemeanant; in other words, he was not forced to wear prison clothes or to eat prison food and was treated as a gentleman (?) should be. To invade a friendly state with arms is one thing; to invade the British House of Commons with a petition is another; so Mr. Herbert Gladstone, Home Secretary and with a keen recollection of his father’s treatment of Irish political prisoners, determined to make an example of these dangerous revolutionists. Unfortunately for Mr. Gladstone the imprisoned women were women of standing and property; moreover, there are still men in England like George Meredith and Bernard Shaw, who are not only true libertarians, but know how to write, and when they and others like them began to bombard the London Times with long letters on the subject, the public conscience was awakened and an outcry went up all over the country. The government, unable to withstand the agitation, released the women unconditionally (on November 24th) after they had served but one month of their time. No reasons were given.

It is too much to hope that the women suffragists in this country will be able to forget their respectable traditions so far as to violate the law here or see the logic of acting instead of talking. Propaganda by example is an unpopular subject with all classes of reformers. Why, if we resist we’ll be sent to prison, they say, and this cowardice paralyzes every reform proposed from Socialism to Woman’s Suffrage. Education must always precede any act of revolt, but pious expressions of opinion are of no use whatever unless backed up by definite action. We hear very often of the three million Socialistic voters in Germany, but we see that country groaning under the burdens of Militarism and men sent to prison for six, nine and twelve months for daring to point out violations of the law by Kaiser Wilhelm, and when we inquire the reason why the three million Socialists permit these things, we are informed they are still in a minority in the nation. Is there a man or woman so shortsighted as not to know that if one million of the three million voters were thoroughly imbued with the principles of Socialism and anti-Militarism and threw down their arms and tools, that the army could not exist, nor men be sent to prison for criticising their mountebank Emperor? The real reason why all these institutions can and do exist and woman’s suffrage is a joke in this country is because the people in their heart of hearts have not really emancipated themselves from the opinions of their next door neighbor, and as for going to prison for their opinions think it is not only impractical, but most unpardonable of all—it doesn’t pay. Perhaps it is because we have been so unsuccessful in our lives that we are such incorrigible optimists, but we have hopes that people may see that if revolt is a thing to be admired in other countries, it ought not be despised here, and if ideals are to become realities, some attempt at living those ideals is necessary, even though we may be forced to leave the beaten path, brave public opinion and, if necessary, go to jail as a protest against injustice, thereby inspiring those who follow us to do likewise.

International Notes

INTERNATIONAL NOTES.

RUSSIA.

About the end of October the Russian comrades resumed the publication of “Bread and Freedom,” printed at 163 Jubilee street, Mile End Road, London, E. The first number contains interesting statements of the progress of theoretical Anarchism in Russia, together with a consideration of tactics. The much-mooted question of criminal acts is reported to have been dealt with by the comrades as follows: Where such acts were done not really by anarchists, but by those pretending to be such, or by social-democrats seeking to throw odium on the anarchists, manifestos repudiating the charges were issued. Where anarchists themselves, pursuing the mistaken idea of individual expropriation were guilty of theft, such actions are condemned with the words: Expropriation does not mean the transference of wealth from the possession of one individual to another, but its restoration to the whole mass.

Interesting reports from Ekaterinoslav, Novgorod, Odessa, and Kiev, show that the people are both consciously and unconsciously working out self-reliance as opposed to dependence on authorities.

In Ekaterinoslav the movement seems to express itself most definitely among the organizations of industrial workers. They report a number of assassinations as justified by the particular heinousness of the conduct of the persons killed; acts of group expropriation; and several thousand leaflets and pamphlets printed and distributed in explanation of these acts. In Novgorod the movement does not seem to be definitely anarchistic, but rather negatively so. It is said that the chief agitators of social ideas have been the school teachers, who in the beginning were received with hostile expressions by the peasants, but later were greatly respected and sought after. They were subsequently dismissed from their employment and replaced by conservatives, who are despised by the now more enlightened peasants. The mistrust of the latter against political action is shown in a common attitude towards the Douma: “What’s the use? They won’t do anything anyway. We have to get it ourselves.” There is a general intention not to pay rent, so that the revenues of certain rent-collectors amount to nil, and in one case the peasants chased a disliked landlord out of the country. Also the recruits by “making themselves scarce” forced the recruiting office to ameliorate its rules. These are significant tendencies. In Odessa and Kiev executions of comrades have taken place—in the latter place the first execution since that of Brandier and Ossinsky in 1879. All died like men, prophesying the free future.

The reporter concludes that from all over Russia he receives letters showing the awakening, and that an inter-Russian conference to discuss disputed points, tactics and united action is proposed at an early date.

An instance of “Administrative Intelligence.” The French edition of Moribund Society and Anarchy has been interdicted by the Russian postal censorship. On the other hand, the Russian translation is openly sold.

FRANCE.

“Le Libertaire” of Oct. 14th contains a copy of the third letter written by F. de Pressensé, President of the League of the Right of Man, to Clemenceau, Minister of the Interior, in behalf of Louis Grandidier, still in prison in Riom. The Defense Committee is actively pushing its agitation, but apparently realizes that appeals to authorities are hopeless unless a strong public outcry is made. To this end they are holding public meetings and forcing attention to the case in meetings held by others. Two other comrades, Habert and Bouchard, are likewise suffering imprisonment for their antimilitarist agitation. The same issue contains an earnest plea by Jean Marestan in behalf of Cirillo, a poor shoemaker imprisoned in Marseilles during the southern trip of President Fallières. A great hue and cry had been raised about “an anarchist conspiracy” in Marseilles. And subsequently the police discovered explosives in the dwelling of Cirillo. The latter claims that he knows nothing of them; and it is a question whether he speaks falsely, or the police, as they have aforetime, put them there to find them later. It appears that Cirillo is unknown to the comrades as an anarchist, and the only evidence, that he is one, is, that the police say so. At any rate the man is accused, is in prison, is without defense; and Marestan concludes his appeal with these words: “Let the name of Cirillo be added to those for whom our defense association is organized. It depends a little upon us whether he recovers his liberty or not; and if he is not now one of us, perhaps, touched by gratitude, he may some day be found among those who will have defended him.”

How sympathetic and noble is this appeal compared with the utterances of the Pharisees of the American movement who are hastily clearing their skirts from contact with the boys and girls arrested in New York not for having explosives in their possession, but for attending a meeting!

“La bonne Louise,” so named in honor of “the good Louise Michel,” is a nursery recently founded by Mme. Séville-Mérat, with the object of receiving children of working women, especially unmarried mothers, and raising them from birth till thirteen years of age. The whole ambition of the founders is to make of them healthy physical and moral beings, in order to fit them for “the final struggle.” “La bonne Louise,” like “L’Avenir Social,” is another evidence of the growth of recognition of the importance of cultivating child-life with reference to “the final struggle.”

L. Etienne offers some well-thought-out propositions for the foundation of a communistic village near Lyon. Suitable ground has been obtained, comprising some 24½ acres of alluvial soil, along the banks of the Rhone. Means of transportation and communication at hand.

The Anarchist Publishing Group seems to be going merrily. For the securing of further necessaries in the operation of the farm four means have been adopted: First, subscriptions to a loan, payable in publications; second, a raffle, for which 6,000 tickets have been issued; third, the organization of a series of meetings, which shall each give the Publishing Group 25 francs; fourth, a request that implements, animals, grains, plants, etc., be donated.

Active promoters and speakers are Comrades Girault, Lorulot, and Godsky. Evidently they are bestirring themselves in this excellent enterprise “like the devil in a holy-water font.”

GERMANY.

The police have made several raids on the houses of the Anarchists in various cities. In Cologne four were arrested, taken to the station-house, photographed, inscribed in the protocol, and one, being German, was let go. The others, not being natives, were taken to the frontier and told to get out.

Comrades Breuer and Ross have been sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for distributing a leaflet. The Berlin author and publisher of the leaflet were simply fined, while the Cologne and Dusseldorf distributors go to prison!

In Delitzsch, Comrade Hilbig was sentenced to pay a fine of 96 marks for having distributed “Der Freie Arbeiter” in a railroad depot. At Heilbronn, the police captured some forty copies of a song-book in the house of Rietmeier. In Berlin the appeal of Fritz Miller and Paul Fraubése against the sentence of the 26th of March has been denied.

On the 5th of November, after eight months’ imprisonment, Comrade Junker was released.

On the 8th of October a conference was held in Berlin for the purpose of completing a union between all groups and the German Anarchist Federation. A commission from the three newspaper groups was appointed to do the necessary preparatory work to bring about the union.

Meetings in Berlin and Bremerhaven are reported very successful, but the movement drags in Hamburg.

BELGIUM.

With the month of October reappeared “L’Humanité Nouvelle,” an International Scientific and Literary Review of the highest class. Up till its suspension in 1903 it was edited by A. Hamon, the famous author of “The Psychology of the Professional Military Man.” M. Hamon remains one of the “Comité Conseil,” but the present Director of the journal is M. Heyman. The October issue contains an extremely interesting article entitled “Two Czars,” by Marie Stromberg. It is a conscientious study of the preludes and interludes of Russian Evolution and Revolution, and its present condition, written with much sympathy and power. There is also a striking article on “The Morality of Betrothals,” by Robert Michels, a frank attack upon the vulgarity of public engagements and marriages. It might do Comstock good to read it.

We have not yet received, but we read the announcement of the appearance of The International Libertarian Bulletin, a propagandist organ for the creation of an international anarchist association. It is issued at 97 rue Laixheau, Herstal-Liège, Belgium.

SPAIN.

The trial of Comrade Ferrer and the republican journalist Nackens, for having been acquainted with Morral the bomb-thrower, will probably take place in January. The prosecution demands sixteen years’ imprisonment for Ferrer and nine for Nackens. According to the opinion of a certain Barcelona lawyer, the forfeiture of Ferrer’s fortune which constitutes the fund for his Modern School, cannot be permanent, but Ferrer will be sentenced not only to prison, but to indemnify the families of the victims of Morral’s act, which will exhaust his fortune. A pardon will probably follow after a few months’ imprisonment, but by that time the schools will have been forced to suspend for want of means.

The first number of “Tierra y Libertad” to appear after its three months’ suspension has been seized by the public prosecutor, three articles having been denounced: the greater portion of the issue fell into the officers’ hands.

The “Voz del Cantero” is also prosecuted for having printed the protest of the International Free Thought Federation in favor of Ferrer.

PORTUGAL.

Emilio Costa writes in “Les Temps Nouveaux” that the Anarchist movement is in a very demoralized condition, owing to division among the comrades as to their attitude towards the republicans, some holding they should assist the latter in their struggle with monarchy, others that the politicians should fight their own battles. Owing to the dissonance of voices, it is not possible to maintain a paper. Those who are anxious for an understanding have proposed a general conference.

ITALY.

A new anarchist paper published by the young comrades has appeared in Rome, under the name: “Gioventù Libertaria,” Casella postale 229, Rome.

SWITZERLAND.

According to the energetic protest of Marcel Lacquement in a recent article entitled “The Mouse-trap,” this country is becoming, instead of an asylum for political refugees, a trap to catch them. The protest is provoked by the recent extradition of a number of Russian revolutionaries, the federal tribunal having by a little legal miracle-working transformed a purely revolutionary act into an act of common felony.

Propositions are now under consideration by the legislative powers of several cantons to limit the freedom to strike. The fact that the petition for such a law in the canton of Zurich received 25,000 signatures suggests that not only the bourgeois, but a good percentage of workers are in favor of this new limitation of liberty.

AUSTRIA.

A new Anarchist paper in the Italian language is published at Trieste. The first number contains only one-third of the matter intended, thanks to the Austrian censor.

HUNGARY.

The workers have been using the general strike as an effective weapon. In one city the firemen of a certain Navigation Company having struck for an increase of wages, they were joined first by the sailors and later by all the workers about the harbor. The next day the factory hands, mill and refinery workers went out. The employers telegraphed for military aid and got it; but the workers so far from giving way became still bolder. They marched through the city calling out all other workers, in spite of the threats of police and soldiers. Before so much solidarity the employers yielded and granted all demands.

These events were practically repeated in other cities. In one instance, the leaders of the original strike having been thrown in prison, all the workers of the city went out and forced the release of the prisoners as the only means of “restoring order.”

Hungary already has a “Slave law,” similar to that now demanded by the Swiss bourgeois. It is called the Strike Law, and provides that not only shall agitators be arrested, but that every peasant who dares to abandon his work shall be seized and brought back by force to the plough and made to labor under the vigilant eye of the gendarmes. Notwithstanding which they have general strikes!

ROUMANIA.

During the month of September the young socialists held their first Congress. It was remarkable for the absence of all allusion to political action. The General Strike was the principal topic.

URUGUAY.

A new weekly anarchist organ, “La Giustizia,” founded by Roberto d’Angio, is published in Montevideo.

Gustave Flaubert

By Charles Mierzwa

SIDNEY LANIER dwelt long and fondly upon the epic of those unknown heroes and martyrs to whom fame denies a pedestal. First broached by Carlyle, this epic has now attained proportions that threaten to overshadow the massive idol of a hitherto privileged hero-worship. In the works of George Eliot Lanier found such types faithfully and powerfully portrayed. The most exorbitant praise, the minutest researches of revering Boswells or the prattle of gossiping Pepyses could never hope to render their subjects more real or reverent than does this modern gospel. A kind of higher evocation for which few are profound enough, although thousands dabble, this gospel is the modern novel. Speaking of Dostoievsky, Nietzsche calls attention to the fact that this art-form occupies to-day the pinnacle of what is contained in the conception literature. No one who had not spent at least ten years in preparatory study, or had observed and taken note of the most insignificant details, could ever attempt to grapple with this gospel. We speak of the novel of manners, in distinction to the novel of mere plot, of mere romance. The novel that teaches, the novel that pictures accurately what you can verify, what you can feel, what you can see. The novel that needs not the false calcium lights of the stage to make it glow, the novel that paints without betraying the gaudy material of brush and colors. The novel where life lives as we know life, where hearts throb even as our own throb, where words verily become flesh and dwell amongst us. Such is the novel of manners, and we marvel that it needs but the tripedal support of the Platonic Idea, Human Nature, and Observation. The hard, technical sway of science which opened up so many fields of industrial pursuits, threatening to seriously invade the esthete’s realm, has proven one of its most prominent factors. Instead of leaving its dry and specialized impress upon the flexible human model which it helps to dissect, science has rather instilled a fuller, more pulsing life into the frame whose bones often rattled ominously of a hollow nothingness.

Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821. As a boy he evinced that odd precocity which betrays imaginative temperaments. There is preserved a juvenile letter written to his chum, Ernest Chevalier, where amidst frightful grammar are plainly seen those pretentious flights innocently unconscious of their fetters. Among his companions were Louis Bouilhet, Alfred de Poitevin, Ernest de Marie and the above-mentioned correspondent, all romantic youths whose feverish natures fanned to a flame young Gustave’s ardent yearning. Of course this unique ensemble of wild and capricious spirits could not help but seriously encroach upon the orthodoxy of his conservative education. To all his ambitious attempts, Père Flaubert gave his warm support; the billiard table was given up to them to be used as their stage, where the young actors launched their rantings before the indulgent circle of the family and friends. During these years of incubation their embryonic genius was nourished chiefly on the forbidden in literature,—already Hilarion had grown strong enough to give promise of “La Tentation de St. Antoine.”

In 1839 Gustave left school and went to Paris to study law. His father had early designed him for the legal profession, Gustave indifferently conforming to his wishes. Yet ere long the intricacies of legal technics proved too insipid for the young phantasy, imbued with the keener interests of literary ambitions. He complained loudly of his despised studies, and while at times he would devote the entire night to his Code, his disgust grew. After an excursion to Corsica he considers the profession of a bandit more congenial than that of a lawyer. As was to be expected, he utterly failed on examination, despite the assistance and lenity of his professors.

About this time a dreadful malady attacked him; he became subject to epileptic fits. Perhaps the strain upon even his strong, robust constitution engendered serious wear of the nervous tissues. Du Camp tells us that his incredible diligence and application was a habit contracted while studying law. He would often copy reams of texts without bestowing a thought upon what he was writing. His purposeless labors thus molded that fastidiousness which later in life did not hesitate to sacrifice the most prodigious studies to attain the most trivial information concerning his subjects. With such insatiable thirst for knowledge, such violent yearnings to attain his lofty ideals, the conflicts of duty and indulgence easily left him restless. His caprices were no less exaggerated. Maxime du Camp gives us a very definite picture of this young Siegfried: “He would spout prose and verse, repeating to satiety expressions that thrilled him, fill the house with noise, scorn the women his beauty attracted, wake me up at 3 in the morning to admire a moonlight effect on the Seine.”

He is described as of splendid proportions, tall and handsome, his blond hair and beard giving him a distinct lionine appearance, “with the eye,” says Turgenieff, “of a master.” He falls in love, soul stirring confessions flash out from his coleopterous heart. Nothing comes of it save two large volumes under the mystic title “L’Éducation Sentimentale.” He makes a compact with du Camp in which they agree to study ten years and reserve the next ten years to the fruits of their studies. “I shall then be 40,” he says, “little can be expected from a man after he passes that age.”

In 1852 appeared his first work, “Madame Bovary.” At once the saintly régime of Napoléon III. pounced upon it as a mark for their promised guardianship of public morals. A law suit followed, Flaubert was accused of flagrantly polluting the immaculate virgins and chaste youths of France. After the axe had been sufficiently sharpened to impress with awe the unsophisticated bourgeoisie, he was exculpated, yet with a mild censure from the saints not to do it again. As we glance back from our higher elevation attained during these 50 years, we cannot suppress the smile that involuntarily creeps over our sober features as we review this comedy.

Naturally this litigation drew more attention to the already recognized “sensationalism” of the book. Paris smacked its lips in excitable approval. Here was a subject attractively delicatesse, handled in a masterly manner, undoubtedly written and garnished with sauce risqué merely for the epicurean appetites of the ineffable languor of a neurasthenic public. Certainly. And the author? Was he not keenly delighted in having this bourgeoisie applaud and devour his efforts to shock them? He once wrote: “There are few people who like what I like, or have an idea of what I care for.” Here is a contradiction; how can it be resolved? The work was a pronounced success.

It has been said that the stupid attracted Flaubert immensely. He could not resist the desire to revel in describing its ludicrous adventures. Its tragi-comic aspect gave truer pictures of a world ever wrestling with itself than the portraitures of noble grandeur or the reflections of virtuous Enchiridions. In Charles Bovary we find such an ideal of stupidity. Let us not forget that we know him even from his schooldays; we must make no mistake; each page impresses us with his obtuse qualities. The book might be another “Dunciad,” were it not infinitely more. Charles, notwithstanding his stupidity, becomes a doctor—nothing very remarkable. His first wife dies, whether of ennui or of smallpox, I forgot. Concomitant with stupidity he has inherited an allowance, and Emma’s solicitous relatives search him out as a desirable husband. Emma—young, pretty, imaginative, dreaming of Prince Charming, blandly accepts this man of a profession in preference to the lowly proletaires with whom only she had hitherto come in contact. The convent that educated her repressed, but could not obliterate, her yearning desires. Bovary, M. D., loves his wife with a kind of blasé affection, redolent of the ruminating cow as it turns to its fodder. His kindness, concern, and care are unimpeachable. His wife is to him the paragon at the show to which he had paid the price of admission. He gapes and stares and admires and serves, and thinks his duty done. He speaks eloquently of his conversational charms by his inability to say a word. Detestably and unmistakably dull, incompetent and a bore, his sterling heart and flawless good-nature leave him not even the redemption to be hated, he is contemned and—the niveau of all—pitied.

And Emma? “She recited impassioned verses to him in the garden by moonlight, sang melancholy slow music; found herself afterwards as calm as before those experiments, and Charles no more amorous than usual: before long she began to ask herself why she had ever married.” She is taken to a ball, sees the splendor and flash of dress and diamonds and wit, is dazzled by the deep enchanting interest of bright conversation and variegated scenes. Like a rush of a bursting lake whose waters dance in the sunlight, she becomes flooded with this yearning for a broader life. She wishes to be well dressed like the great ladies she had seen; Charles kindly indulges her caprice. Yet his modest fortune will not permit such sacrifices to fashion; she secretly makes arrangements with a shrewd dealer in garbs and temptations, and obtains on credit what she cannot get by cash. A young lawyer’s clerk falls in love with her, a sort of Platonic affection content with the privilege to worship. Deep down in Emma’s breast the fire begins to flicker; for the first time in her life she loves. Yet these fair lips are securely locked, the starry windows of her soul are effectually barred to the word or glance that knock loudly within for utterance. With excruciating anguish stern duty crushes them back into their secret cavern, there to lie until the flames consume them. But the fire has smoldered too long to be extinguished by mere spectres; this wearisome life, like a prolonged dull toothache, at last grows unbearable. At the agricultural exposition she meets a knight bolder than Léon, and to him the chaste guards of lips and eyes capitulate the citadel. She wants to fly with her new lover, but Rodolphe is a man of the world to whom flying has lost its charms.

All the old attachments and reverence for forms that custom enthroned as hallowed are now forsaken. She had stepped across that demarcation of shadow that divides honor and disgrace. Still concealed, the sunlight of favor plays about her as usual; Charles, suspecting nothing, dotes upon her as ever. We cannot afford to pass lightly over these transgressions. I know of nothing more touchingly naive than her whole-souled concern in her husband’s attempt to cure a club-foot. How fervently she longs that he will prove himself, after all, something worth admiring. How earnestly she yearns for his success, how sincere in her burning desire to find something worthy to love! And Bovary fails. With the aid of the apothecary, Homais, he succeeds brilliantly in blundering his case. Dr. Larivière is called in; Emma experiences the double shame of contrasting a man of ability and listening to his outraged censure upon the blockhead who so vainly tortured and deformed his victim for life. All hope of redeeming stupidity has fled. The name of Charles Bovary becomes the synonym of whatever is despicable, disgusting, loathsome. Emma, without an idol to worship in this dull, monotonous land, where between pestering usurers and pestering bores the heart shrivels to threads, flies to Paris. Here she meets Léon and grasps the bliss for which she had been longing. Subterfuges permit her to continue her visits. Meanwhile the incorrigible usurer demands payment. It is discovered that the amount far exceeds her husband’s resources; the house is sold, the goods levied upon. Her shame disclosed, Emma despairs. She had sounded all the fancy gew-gaws of the world and found them hollow. To her was not given that gift of flinging herself into some absorbent task which enables us to avoid the abyss of the soul. The flowers that might have grown in her garden of usefulness too early felt the chill of the blast which withered them ere they could bloom. Love at last rose triumphant out of the carnage, but its kingdom was desolate. Dark gray realities and glittering illusions alike exhausted, she does what many others who have lifted veils have done before—takes arsenic and dies. Flaubert said he tasted the drug arsenic all the time he was writing this death-scene.

II.

For those who are dissatisfied with the realist’s results, we suggest the calm unimpassioned reflection of their soberer moments. Too long has darkness been looked upon as unworthy of the painter’s art; or, more truly, inadequate to repay his particular effort to portray it. Some have made it hideous, others have distorted it so that not even the night owls of literature would recognize it. The seamy side! This described, tabooed, horrible, unmentionable seamy side! Must we be forever polishing and decorating with the rotten fruits of a virtue grown stale by ennui the cold veneer of a conventional mahogany? Must no ray of light penetrate that neglected corner where dwells the human heart as virile and omnipresent as in the beaten paths of a tiresome didacticism? Shall virtue cry aloud that its fame is but of words, and honor hide her head because her shame is concealed? Is there no more true ring to the trumpets that intone the fanfare of this world? Is all perfect harmony? Is there no jarring clang that shrieks in horrid dissonances the clashes of rattling carnage? Has the rage that the art world makes over the breast of Isolde, exalted in its polyphonoid cirrus clouds, been but a mockery, but an affectation in its prostitution?

“Madame Bovary” answers all these raps at her door. It is not enough that we must die, we must slowly choke to death. And if one be but real obedient and docile we shall perfume these fumes for you. We are not much concerned how we live, nor what we miss, nor what golden dawns are obscured to us by the inflated ones on stilts, so long as we have a decent burial and a marble slab. What right have the breasts of these unsung nonentities to expand, who gave them permission to long for the fulfilment of their dreams? In the breast of Emma, Gods and Titans struggle for supremacy. The struggle is bitter, the contention is for the possession of the power of the universe. And the power of the universe is love. (Flaubert, despite his dédaigneux de femmes, knew it well.) At last she finds it, but the fire, she, too, has stolen from heaven, consumes her.

It is all done so subtlely, so apparently “scientific,” much like a well-weighed lecture to a class of students before the dissecting table, that we are inclined to conclude that we do not understand. In fact some critics did not. Emma is still but a woman utterly devoid of even a vestige of morality; the work, “a glorified harlotry.” When critics go about with dark lanterns o’nights, and wallow in sewers, it is high time to hold one’s nose. As for the author, very little of feeling, of sympathy, of pity marks his work. No twitch of a muscle betrays his personality; on, on, filing away; now chiseling, like one who had cut many such heart-rending figures, he produces his animated statues. It is this that makes us forget that we have to do with a “story”; here there is no longer a mere portrayal of human destiny, but a vivid flash into our own innermost being.

Darwin concludes his “Descent of Man” with the conviction that it is nobler for man to have risen from the anthropomoid ape than to have fallen from the perfection of the God-patterned Adam. Sad indeed that our golden ages are ever in the past, or perchance in the future, but never in the present. And more sad still that man is no better than he is. After we have duly wept over these facts, let us dry our eyes and soberly consider.

Sophocles painted his characters as they should be; Euripides, as they were. Among the Athenians, fashion could boast of as many votaries as among our own saltless Attics, and vogue enthroned the latter poet with no ambiguous crown. Yet Plato, whose central ideas still dominate the thought of the world, despite positive sciences and Spencerian synthetics, fell in with the fashion of the day. The master of the visionary, of the transcendental and geometrical mysteries, the initiate of esoteric Aryanism, became a “realist.” There was as much of tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee then as in our own day, only—and this is pertinent—men were sincerer in their opinions. It was well to know what man would look like if he were perfect, ideal. The general demand for these rare curios eventually produced a Phidias, a Praxiteles, a Ximenes, who knew well the value of their work. Yet after this was done, it was done. After Apollo and Zeus and Aphrodite, Vulcan and Silenus, too, wanted their sculptors. “Warum der gequälte Laokoon nicht schreit,” fills the volumes of Lessing, Winckelmann and William von Humboldt.

Yes, why, simpleton? Because he’s of marble. As one wit would say, “Did you never think of this before?”

Thus the realism of the Greeks stands out through their very ideal and stamps it truth. Prometheus, intensely real, a masculine Madame Bovary. Physiologically correct; a vulture gnaws at his liver; he is chained to a rock—how modern the pathology! Strength and force bind him, Hephaestus reluctantly directs—Industry pleads for the martyr—Enough.

These Greeks were real mean to anticipate our twentieth century progress so ruthlessly. Yet it is well known since Benjamin Kidd’s “Social Evolution” appeared that we are intellectually their inferiors.

There must have been indeed much jarring among the two and seventy sects whom the Persian astronomer poet confuted. I refer from observations of our own day that their disputes must have borne some resemblance to ours, as, for instance, that white is black, or not so black, or perhaps a little blacker, etc. Omar proved to them that it is red. So red indeed, that blood, when painted by artists, is painted in its real colors; and real music actually throbs in time to the heart. So red is the thing per se. And such an artist was Flaubert.

After a long silence, in which Paris was anxiously awaiting another “Madame Bovary,” Flaubert shocked them again, but in a different manner—he published “Salammbô.” The book is as unlike its predecessor as the tropics differ from the temperate zone. We have Carthage reconstructed, Hamilcar and the mercenary soldiers. Salammbô, the sister of Hannibal, is consecrated to religion; priests and slaves and warriors jostle us and stare their wild and fierce visages into ours, until we actually live amongst them. The story revolves about the sacred veil of Tanit, to touch which is death. Through the weird passion of Mâtho, Salammbô is led to touch the sacred fabric, for which she dies.

In this work the growing incrustations of the author become thoroughly crystalized. More impersonal than ever, we are led into a labyrinth of erudition and description which at first grows wearisome, only sustained by its brilliant execution. As we grow more familiar with this strange land and unknown people, of whom our knowledge is almost as scant as the builders of the Maya temples, we become irresistibly charmed. The halo that envelops the lovely Salammbô, like the blue mist over the hazy, moonlit sea, is now and then pierced by a warm, ruddy light which presages the dawn. Lamenting over her dear country, she seeks to revive the patriotism and love that once made it powerful.

The magnificent splendors of Salammbô strike us like a dazzling jewel glittering deep in the setting of distant murmuring harps. Echoes of a dead and gone antiquity come back to us through the rosy twilight of Dido’s passion. Memories of Aeneas waft us back to the period when Troy was sacked; when the Roman poet sought to flatter the imperial Augustus with fabrications of his divine descent. Despite its tendencies to incrustation and form, invading the realm of that psychology of characters we now demand, “Salammbô” offers rare and seldom equalled passages of genuine human emotions. Yet here again illusion is the tonic, through much modulation and simple Palestrinian harmony we at last reach this ever-recurring minor. “To read Salammbô,” says George Saintsbury, “has an effect something like the described effect of hashish or opium without the unpleasant results.”

Cold and austere as “Salammbô” appears, twinkling afar off in the black blue past, it needs but the lens of the mental telescope to bring it near and warm as a sun.

Paris was thoroughly dissatisfied with this work. She petulantly clamored for a love story; heroic pasts and mystic sequences proved too flatulent for her neurasthenic malady. Flaubert, curling himself up in his shell, went to work. After seven years he reappeared with “L’Éducation Sentimentale.”

In this work we have depicted the love of Frederic for a good-looking married woman of noble sentiments. It was a favorite conviction of Flaubert that every man must love on unrequited through his entire life. Here in the heyday of his wooing, where beneath the trestled vines that hung like harp strings over their bliss, they taste of love “as something as sweet, as glittering and as sublime as the twinkling of the stars.” On speed the years, Mme. Arnoux’s husband dies; still the irresolute lover cannot make up his mind to marry. Finally, when twenty years have elapsed, twenty years of yearning, of doubts and pangs, the fruit of which are but one single embrace, the lover shrinks from possessing his coveted prize. His idol has grown old, her wrinkles and gray hair now repulse and disgust him; his long-nurtured love flies hurriedly away.

“L’Éducation Sentimentale” is the crucible where love gradually becomes melted to a glowing heat, at length turning cold and dark as the heart weathers the blasts of time. Here Flaubert writes his own experience: Petrarch in the guise of modern science. His own soul rises triumphant over the mass of erudite débris that threatens to engulf it. At times the depths seen below his daring flights make him dizzy, yet the wings of this eagle are strong. He sustains his flight to the end.

The Trois Contes contain the stories of “A Simple Heart,” “St. Julian the Hospitable” and “Hérodias.” I prefer the first: one of those unsung nonentities, an old peasant maid, with no one to love and no one to love her in return, possesses a parrot, upon which she pours all the affection of her pent-up heart. The parrot dies; she has the bird stuffed. With a worship due only the gods of her faith, she cherishes it, reveres it until it assumes transcendent holiness. She had heard of the Holy Ghost, and in her simple mind this mystery takes the form of her beloved parrot. Upon her death she beholds it coming down to her as a huge white bird, which spreads out its capacious wings and carries her up to heaven.

In “St. Julien l’Hospitalier” the antinomies of self and selflessness melt precipitately into unity. The leprous beggar devours Julien’s last morsel, pollutes his dishes and insists that Julien shall warm him with his naked body as he lies in his cot. The former prince humbly obeys, the leper embraces him. Suddenly the leper becomes transfigured, his face and form grow radiant and strong. Christ appears and bears Julien up to heaven.

“Hérodias” treats of the well-known story of John the Baptist. Sudermann has woven the Biblical narrative into a strong, tentative drama. Flaubert shows us the dry, callous background of the Roman military, with the scenes and descriptions as stony as the outskirts of the city, somewhat relieved by the voluptuous license of the palace of Herodias. The dance of the bewitching Salome whirls its insinuating grace through the nerves of the reader.

The limits of this paper will not permit me to enter at length upon any of the works.

“Bouvard et Pécuchet” is a very apotheosis of illusion. It was published after Flaubert’s death.

(To be continued.)

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