Mother Earth

      NOTICE.

The Office of “Mother Earth” is now at 308 East 27th Street. All mail is to be sent to the above address.

From the Kasidah

of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self
      expect applause ;

He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps
      his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where none but
      Phantoms dwell,

A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the
      camel-bell.

Police Education

Our criticism of the police brutality at the arrests on October 30th seems to have done the “Safety” Department some good.

True, the word Anarchism still affects them like the proverbial red rag, but they have at least learned to perform their "duty " in a more or less decent manner.

After dogging our steps for nine weeks, their “perseverance” and “tenacity” have at last been rewarded.

Sunday, January the 6th, the police closed our meeting held under the auspices of the “Mother Earth” Club, and arrested the Chairman, John R. Coryell, Alexander Berkman and myself.

The Criminal Anarchy of the Chairman consisted in a five-minute talk on the educational aims and purposes of the “Mother Earth” Club. Comrade Berkman was guilty of even a more heinous crime—he had not spoken at all, but he is known to have enjoyed for many years the paternalism of Pennsylvania.

A criminal Anarchist, aged 15, who happened to be at the door when the detectives passed, was taken along to complete the quartet.

Three weeks previously I had delivered the same lecture—Misconceptions of Anarchism—before the Brooklyn Philosophical Association. And though the heroes of the American Third Section—the newly created Anarchistic Squadron—were present, no arrests followed. Even detectives are not so stupid as not to understand that their Cossack tactics at Anarchistic meetings could not be profitably applied to non-anarchistic elements. It might wake the law-abiding citizen to a realization of the true state of affairs.

Our hearing before the Police Court Magistrate resulted in our being held for further “examination.”

Comrades Coryell and Berkman were held in $1,000 bail each, while my bond was set at $2,000.

Inspector McLaughlin asked me,- quite naively, whether I did not intend to cease my agitation. On being told that I would not change my course, the wise man informed me that I am hereafter to be arrested every time I speak upon a platform.

We, too, have learned a lesson. 'Tis no more a question of free speech. It is a conspiracy against the spread of Anarchism.

         E. G.

Observations and Comments

The death of Ernest Crosby came as a great shock to all those who realize the lack of strong personalities in the world of thought and literature. To be true in the latter requires courage—we have but few Crosbys.

The trial of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone has again benn postponed, following the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that the forcible kidnapping of those men from Colorado was perfectly legal. The laws are rather elastic in the hands of power. Of course, the defendants’ counsel will have recourse to the law. We wish them success. However, if the American workmen wishes to prevent the slaughter of their champions on the altar of Mammon, they will have to meet plutocratic with their economic force. Answer the conspiracy of the money power with the general strike.

Barre, Vermont, has recently come into prominence through the arrest in that city of Luigi Galliani, an Italian Anarchist, who is accused of participation in the Weaver strike of 1902, at Paterson, N. J. As some of our readers probably remember, McQueen, Grossman and Galliani were then held responsible as the instigators of the disturbances that accompanied the Weaver strike, that is to say, the wealthy manufacturers of Paterson demanded that an example be made of those men. Accordingly, McQueen and Grossman were arrested, tried and convicted, and on being sentenced to five years both departed for Europe. McQueen subsequently was induced to return to keep his engagement with the State, while Grossman prolonged his visit abroad indefinitely. Galliani, by far the most sensible, did not think it necessary to await arrest. He went to Barre, Vermont, and there engaged in educational work. His sudden arrest after a lapse of almost five years can perhaps be traced to some unpleasant incidents of recent date. The English novelist Wells recently published an article in Harper’s Weekly enlarging upon his alleged interview with McQueen in the Trenton penitentiary. The article in question contained a direct denunciation of Galliani, as the inciter of the riots of 1902; while McQueen was sympathetically pictured as a man who endeavored to direct the strike along legal lines, in keeping with English methods. Mr. Wells’ article contained many erroneous statements. As a stranger he could not have possibly had personal knowledge as to the details of the Paterson strike—his information is evidently secondhand. Be it as it may, certain it is, however, that it was neither tactful nor courageous on the part of a would-be student of psychology to publicly denounce a man of whose activity and character he had no personal knowledge. Galliani is indicted on six charges and is held under $12,000 bail.

Cardinal Gibbons laments in the January “Century” the terrible increase of suicides, endeavoring to elucidate its causes. The Cardinal, however, neglects to mention the most significant cause, to be found in the Christian teaching of resignation: the earth is but a vale of tears, made somewhat endurable by the hope of the hereafter, where the faithful are to be rewarded. It is this very teaching that has enabled the oppressors of mankind to convert a beautiful world into a veritable hell, where every man is his neighbor’s devil, and the social and religious cardinals are the arch-fiends. If man were taught the possibility of earthly happiness and his power to create such happiness—instead of relying on mythical heavens and messias—the chief cause of despair and suicide would be removed.

Shakespeare’s immortal spirit sent a drama to a New York theatrical syndicate. Genius speaks for itself, thought the author of Hamlet. “I wish to show the surly, moralizing fossil Tolstoy that my plays deeply affect humanity, though the author be unknown.” And he chose a pseudonym. Months passed. At last the mail carrier of Olympus brought these tidings: “The manuscript you sent to our firm was booked as number 7036. We regret to state that we cannot encourage your hopes. Your work has two unpardonable faults: it lacks a happy ending, and the contents do not harmonize with our moral standards, to which all authors transacting business with our firm must conform.”

We should like to call the attention of our readers that the series of articles, “The Revolutionary Spirit in French Literature,” which appeared in the July, August and September issues of “Mother Earth” were reprinted from Mr. Alvan F. Sanborn’s work, “Paris and the Social Revolution.” The latter is one of the most interesting books in the market. It contains much stimulating food not only for the revolutionist, but also for the artist and philosopher. Price $3.50. To be obtained through “Mother Earth.”

We have received several pamphlets by Theodore Schroeder bearing on the Obscenity Laws and the right of Free Press. The principal argument is that, as it is utterly impossible to have a universal definition of obscenity, and that in consequence the citizen is dependent upon judicial interpretation of the law, or the peculiar sexual psychology of the jurors, and cannot know in advance whether his writings are obscene or not, the present law should be abolished, and complete liberty of circulation of literature allowed except to persons under eighteen, whose reading shall be guided by parents and guardians.

Incidentally, some interesting facts are given concerning the spread of venereal disease owing to the ignorance which the obscenity laws tend to foster. The pamphlets are written in the legal argumentative style and are well supported by facts. Freethinkers may be interested to know that very often prosecutions have been directed against ministers for efforts to preach sexual control similar to those taught by Ida Craddock, whom Comstock hounded to death a few years since. The pamphlets are reprinted from the Albany Law Journal for the Free Speech League.

On Suppressing the Advocacy of Crime

Theodore Schroeder

(From the stenographic report of a lecture.)

THE ever growing complexity of our social organism, with its creation of new relations and new conditions of human existence, constantly requires the re-interpretation and unprecedented application of our constitutionally guaranteed liberty. In making these new interpretations and applications, the judicial, as well as the popular mind, is prone to read into the Constitution its own prejudices, superstitions, or personal and class interests. It is the purpose of this discussion to discover the essential and fundamental, rather than the superficial, elements of these problems as they relate to our guarantee for liberty of speech and press.

Under the pressure of misconceptions, arising wholly from the superficial aspects of the problem, it has come to pass that in almost every controversy arising from an exercise of the liberty of speech and press, the official action has been in favor of its abridgment. The total absence of any serious protest against these denials demonstrates how the thoughtless public is incapable of seeing that the liberties of speech and press are the foundations of all other liberty; and, that by permitting them to be frittered away, all other liberty is being endangered.

In our military possession of the Philippine Islands we find executive authorities arresting an American editor for republishing our own Declaration of Independence. The excuse offered was that the Declaration of Independence would tend to incite Filipinos to insurrection; since, not illogically, they might conclude that we ourselves, in our government of them, were repudiating our own declaration about liberty and denying a fundamental liberty of theirs.

In Porto Rico we find an American editor subjected to seventy or more arrests, and, finally, in practical effect, banished from the island as the one condition under which he could escape, what might prove, life imprisonment. His offense consisted only in publishing what he believed to be true concerning some carpet-bag officials, appointed by the President. We have heretofore been led to believe that one might tell the truth from good motives; but, in the case of this editor, the court denied him an opportunity of proving his allegations to be true. These officials, though acting under the Constitution of the United States, assumed to set aside the provision guaranteeing freedom of speech and press, on the pretext that, to discredit American officials would promote insurrection among native Porto Ricans. The authorities in Washington were not sufficiently imbued with any love for liberty to even induce a reprimand of the petty officials, who had undertaken thus to amend the Federal Constitution.

Another vicious infringement of liberty has grown out of the development of our government by injunction. In labor difficulties, very frequently, we find courts issuing injunctions against strikers, which, under the pain of imprisonment, prohibit them from talking with the strike breakers, or even from walking upon the streets adjacent to their former places of employment. Here again the infringement of freedom of speech, by judicial injunction, would probably be justified, by those who can justify it, with the statement that such conversation might lead to a conspiracy in the restraint of trade, should the new employee decide to join the strikers. In passing it is worthy of note that no injunction is ever issued against employers to restrain them from conversation with one another, because it might lead to agreements in restraint of competition as employers.

In Idaho a few years since many striking miners were herded in outrageously unsanitary “bull-pens” by the militia of the State. An editor, who foolishly believed the Constitution of Idaho to be of some importance, propounded some questions in his paper, calculated to bring out that this conduct of the militia was unauthorized by law and in violation of law. For asking these questions, as to the source of the authority for the military conduct, he was also arrested and placed in a “bull-pen” with the others. Here, again, a petty official, deriving his sole authority under the Constitution, assumed to set it aside, primarily because another in the exercise of his freedom of the press, guaranteed by the Idaho Constitution, was personally offensive to this official. Perhaps those intelligent enough to frame a defense for such conduct would justify the abridgment of freedom by saying that such publication would tend to encourage resistance to the authority of the militia. It seems never to occur to those in power that others may properly inquire into the sufficiency of their authority and rightfully resist, even to the taking of life, if necessary, the exercise of power by persons holding office, when no adequate authority for its exercise can be found in the laws and Constitution.

Similarly we find in Colorado, at the time of the recent labor disturbances, that a Socialist editor was promptly arrested for exercising his right of freedom of press in criticism of local military authorities. Still insisting that he had the constitutional right to express whatever opinion he saw fit, about the conduct of military officials, the celebrated general, in charge of the official outrages, considered that he had sufficiently denied the right of the editor by saying, “to hell with the Constitution.”

Another most clear instance of a denial of freedom of speech and press is in the laws which have for their avowed object the suppression of obscene literature. We are now suppressing serious scientific discussions of the physiology, hygiene, ethics and psychology of sex, as well as some sane advocacy of unpopular opinions about the sociologic problems arising from sex. This is done, because in the unhealthy minds of some persons the epithet “obscene” can be applied to such books. The pretense is made that such books promote sexual immorality, and they are suppressed sometimes where that dreaded immorality is not even a statutory offense, and where the sole purpose of the suppressed print is to inquire if some conduct, lauded a moral, is not in fact immoral.

Another, and in some respects the most dangerous invasion of liberty of press, has developed out of a constructive contempt of court. With the abolition of government by divine right, we came to believe that we might with propriety criticise the official conduct of every public servant. However, since in contempt proceedings, as a rule, judges are law-makers, judge and juror combined, our judiciary has very often considered itself as still far too sacred for criticism. Recently in Colorado, Ohio and New York, editors have been punished for contempt of court, which consisted of criticism published in their newspapers, and not in the presence of the court; and therefore having no direct tendency to disturb its orderly proceeding. In Colorado, perhaps in the other States also, proof of the truth was excluded. Judges, who under such circumstances punish their critics for contempt, simply because the criticism is not of such lady-like character as to be pleasing to the esthetic judicial sense, are commiting a most extraordinary outrage on the freedom of the press. With but very slight extension this constructive contempt of court will, in the very near future, develop into the régime of an infallible tribunal, disposing of the property and liberty of citizens, and at the same time expunging the right of an adequate appeal to a public conscience for the reversal of iniquitous rules of injustice, by appropriate legislation, or election day protest. Once establish such an infallible judiciary, and the precedent will soon warrant a re-establishment also of the infallibility of legislators, and executives.

Another most extraordinary clamor has come against the discussion of the negro problem in the North. In Philadelphia a play was suppressed, which was obnoxious to the negro population. In Brooklyn a similar clamor for its suppression was unsuccessful. In Chicago loud protests were heard against an address by Senator Tillman. However, there the authorities fortunately still deemed it more important to suppress disorder which might possibly result from discussion than to suppress freedom of speech itself. Last winter in New York City there was a public debate held in a church, as to whether or not Socialist propaganda should be suppressed by law. These are other straws showing the tendency of our time.

Already one per cent. of the population of the United States hold 99 per cent. of all its property. It is estimated, if the present rate of concentration of wealth shall continue, that within a century one hundred families will own 99 per cent. of all the property. With the power on the part of the owners of such concentrated wealth to befuddle the mind of the public, through ownership of practically all popular periodical publications, and by their ability to purchase the election and the votes of those in power and to insure a “sane and safe” judiciary to explain away our constitutionally guaranteed liberties, the time may not be far distant when we shall have the legislative suppression of any adverse criticism upon political and economic theories, which are not advantageous to the rich few.

After the assassination of President McKinley a newspaper reporter attempted to get an interview with a United States Senator, who had had some personal differences with the President. The Senator declined to be interviewed, saying that because of his past personal differences he would have nothing to say. For exercising his freedom of speech by simply announcing that he had nothing to say, a large number of United States Senators, I think it was a majority, sent telegrams to a Southern paper, declaring their willingness to vote for his expulsion from the United States Senate. Here there was not even the excuse that the Senator’s offending silence promoted crime, and it is a most glaring illustration of the instability of freedom, even with the most dignified, and, presumable, the most enlightened body of men that can be gathered in the United States. It is sad to contemplate how slender is the thread whose severance terminates our liberties.

Under the influence of that same unreason and epidemic of hysteria, ingeniously developed to the highest pitch of excitement by our conscienceless press, came into existence that multiplicity of state and national laws, directed against the mere abstract opinions entertained by people calling themselves Anarchists. All this came in spite oi the fact that there was no evidence whatever that Czolgosz was an Anarchist. However, the word Anarchist was an effective epithet, and, hereafter all those to whom it could be even metaphorically applied must be denied their freedom of speech and of press, no matter how harmless or justifiable might be their political creed.

Under our present anti-anarchist laws, this government has established itself as an international police-force for the protection of all tyrants. Under our Federal statutes a foreigner who teaches "the propriety of unlawfully assaulting or killing any officer’ in the “organized government” of a cannibal chief, or of a human butcher acting under authority of an arbitrary brute, crowned as a Tzar, though such immigrant is not an anarchist, and desires only to establish a more humane rule, such a foreigner is denied admission to the United States as unfit to touch our sacred soil, and is deported to take such punishment as may be meted out to him by those from whom he was fleeing.

Within a few days it was reported that Russian officials are demanding that a refugee, who escaped from Siberia, shall be deported from these United States because he is advocating the cause of, and raising money for, the Russian revolution. If the law is impartially enforced his deportation will follow.

Under the laws of New York State one may be guilty of advocating “criminal anarchism” without advocating anarchism or being an anarchist in fact. This of course is a fair sample of legislative intelligence. A Social Democrat from Germany, who in-New York merely advocates the establishing of a German republic without the permission of Kaiser Billy the war lord; or the Irish nationalist who in New York verbally asserts the propriety of overthrowing the organized government of England within Ireland’s domain; the Russian or American patriot who would advocate the overthrow of the Tzar’s absolutism, and his Cossacks’ official brutality, “by any unlawful means,” though no lawful ones are provided; or whoever is voluntarily present at such discussion, is liable to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of $5,000 besides. The owner, agent, superintendent or janitor of a building who permits it to be used for any of the above discussions is liable to a fine of $2,000 and two years imprisonment. Furthermore, every editor and publisher of such articles as are above described, and innumerable such as have been published in our great dailies with impunity, is by this law presumed guilty of “criminal anarchy” until he proves himself innocent.

The metropolitan journals have nearly all violated this law, and no one protests. If relying upon these precedents, some unpopular victim of general prejudice, who is too poor to adequately defend his liberty, prints such matter, at once the luckless devil is pounced upon with a great flourish of righteous authority, and the use of unpopular and question-begging epithets, is sufficient to insure an unquesting public approval.

The unfortunate one goes to his prison cell, perhaps for advocating something most people believe in, or something the mob does not even understand, and then it thanks God that a “criminal Anarchist” has been made safe.

In all these cases, if we may take the justification for the abridgment of the liberty of speech to be made in good faith, the question involved is this: May a citizen advocate that which others esteem to be of immoral or criminal tendency? Since an affirmative answer to the latter implies an affirmative answer to the former, the problem in its broadest sense may be thus stated: Has any one the constitutional right to advocate the moral righteousness of conduct which the law has declared criminal ?

But clarity of vision requires that we differentiate between two possible conditions. If such advocacy of crime has resulted in the commission of the crime advocated, then the promoter becomes liable as a principal, or as an accessory before the fact. In that case penalties are meted out to him for his participation in the subsequent crime, not for its mere fruitless advocacy.

That case must be carefully distinguished from the one in which the advocacy of crime is without any directly resultant criminal act. Here I am concerned only with the latter. The problem then is: Can a man, under our Constitution guaranteeing liberty of speech and press, be properly punished for his fruitless advocacy of crime? It seems to me that if we are to reason upon the matter only in general terms, that then Professor Cooper in the following language has given us an unanswerable argument for an affirmative answer to our question.

"Indeed, no opinion or doctrine, of whatever nature it be, or whatever be its tendency, ought to be suppressed. For it is either manifestly true or it is manifestly false, or its truth or falsehood is dubious. Its tendency is manifestly good, or manifestly bad, or it is dubious and concealed. There are no other assignable conditions, no other functions of the problem.

“In the case of its being manifestly true and of good tendency there can be no dispute. Nor in the case of its being manifestly otherwise; for by the terms it can mislead nobody. If its truth or its tendency be dubious, it is clear that nothing can bring the good to light, or expose the evil, but full and free discussion. Until this takes place, a plausible fallacy may do harm; but discussion is sure to elicit the truth and fix public opinion on a proper basis; and nothing else can do it.”

However, the importance of the problem deserves more specific consideration and discussion. Let us begin by assuming that one may be properly punished for even the fruitless advocacy of that which tends to crime, and see where sttch a conclusion leads us to. I have written several arguments against the inexpediency of suppressing “obscenity.” The net results of those arguments in opposition to the suppression of obscene literature is that, on the whole, it is more beneficial to tolerate all obscenity in books than to allow, as we now do, the suppression of all thorough or searching discussion of sex problems. In other words, I am justifying, on the whole, the moral righteousness of so-called obscene literature. Necessarily my argument for the legislative and judicial annulment of those laws might encourage some one to violate them. ;

If under our constitutions we are not protected in the right to advocate the moral righteousness of that which the statute denounces as crime, it would seem to follow that in such a case, as the one I have just stated, the Legislature may properly prohibit us from adequately arguing for the repeal or amendment of our present criminal code. This is an intolerable proposition. On the other hand, if the Legislature cannot prohibit such arguments, then it follows that the constitution does protect the citizens in advocating the moral righteousness or anything which the law denounces as criminal.

If the contrary doctrine could be established, it would only be necessary to make some line of conduct criminal, as a preliminary justification for prohibiting all discussion of the subject. And it must be apparent, if we admit that we have no right to advocate the moral propriety of conduct which the statute denounces as crime, that then we are admitting that there is practically no invasion of the liberty of speech which can not be legally accomplished. Already it is crime to smuggle dutiable eoods into this country in violation of our tariff laws. To denounce a protective tariff as immoral and a robbery of the masses for the benefit of the protected monopolists is a legitimate argument for its abolition. However, such nm argunient necessarily tends to encourage some toward the crime of evading the tariff. If then we have not the right to advocate the moral righteousness of that which the law denounces as a crime it would seem that Congress has the power to make a protective tariff the creed of a divinely established economic institution, which must be and thus can be maintained as a thing above criticism. It follows, therefore, that no line can be drawn between the unlimited freedom of speech and press (holding the speaker and publisher responsible for the direct but actual consequences of their utterances), and that condition where we will have no freedom of speech and press as a matter of right, but only as a matter of legislative or judicial permission.

We may next inquire as to what must have been the intention of the framers of our constitution with reference to this problem. We can best gather that intention if we make inquiry as to the character of the abridgments of freedom of speech and press which had theretofore existed and against which they sought to protect themselves and others in the future. We recall that prior to the Revolution there was a union of church andi state. Religious observances were enforced by the criminal law. Blasphemy, which was one of the number of excuses for invading the liberty of speech, consisted of language calculated to discredit the established religion, and tending to induce others to commit religious crimes, such as avoiding church attendance, and denying the correctness of what was there thought. In other words, our forefathers had been punished for advocating the verity and morality of that which was immoral and criminal under the existing law, and desired to make it impossible for others thereafter to be punished for the like advocacy of that which was of criminal tendency.

Another of the abridgments of the liberty of speech and press was the prohibition against seditious libel—of utterances which tended toward insurrection, rebellion and the general overthrow of the government. All of the participants in the American Revolution and all those who helped to bring it about, had no doubt been guilty of seditious speech and seditious libel; and apparently for the very purpose of protecting future generations in the right to advocate sedition and revolution, did they put in the Constitution a guarantee for the freedom of speech and of press, and omit the making of any exception.

If then we take a broad outlook upon our problem, whether we view it from a standpoint of mere expediency or from the viewpoint of the framers of our Constitution, we must conclude that, under their guarantees, it is the right of every man to advocate the moral righteousness of anything, even though such conduct has been denounced by the statute as a crime; and that every such advocacy was intended to be protected against punishment, excepting only the one condition, that a criminal act follows, as a direct and designed result of his utterances; and, in that event, he is to be punished for the subsequent crime and his intentional participation in it, and not merely for his utterances, as such,

If in accord with the intention of their framers our several constitutions guarantee freedom of speech and press to advocate sedition and revolution, holding individuals responsible only for an actual resultant invasion, then it must follow that Anarchists are clearly acting within their rights so long as they are content merely to talk to those who are willing to listen, and this no matter what may be the opinions which they express.

Some “radicals,” who object to a censorship of sex literature, join with others to justify the censorship of Anarchist literature. They would limit freedom of speech at the advocacy of what they consider “invasive” crimes, sexual “crimes” not being regarded by them as invasive.

Herein they are more reactionary than the conservatives who framed our charters of liberty, and those of us who still rely upon constitutions, because these documents recognize no such exception to our guaranteed freedom of speech and press. Mr. Comstock only disagrees with these “radicals” on what constitutes an invasion. He would tell you that anything which “destroys all faith in God,” or “discourages the sinners using common sense and being on the safe side,” or impairs or is opposed to the present legalized monogamy, is a direct invasion and destruction of the integrity and very fabric of the social organism. Such “radicals” forget that the line of partition between invasion and defense is always the very matter in issue, and their assumption that all persons are agreed with them upon what is an invasion is a mere begging of the whole question. Necessarily then every person has an equal right to disagree with any other, and verbally to express that disagreement whether it is about economics, theology, the ethics of sex or of justifiable homicide.

The laws of every civilized country recognize some homicide as justifiable. Laws and opinions differ as to the conditions which make it so. That question is therefore always a legitimate subject for debate.

I have read of a few theoretical non-resistants, but I doubt if any of these, who have a vigorous flow of good red blood in their arteries and who, under the tortures of the inquisition did avoid anesthesia, would not justify any practical use of violent resistance to such tyranny if exercised upon themselves.

Where is the beginning of tyranny, and where the limit of its silent endurance, and what the necessary degree of directness in fixing the responsibility for it, are all legitimate questions for debate, either in the abstract or concrete. Such discussions are conducive to a better understanding between rulers and the ruled. From the frankest of such criticism the rulers might be warned to re-examine the justice of their laws, as well as to inform themselves, or their partisan defenders, as to where is the need for correcting unjust criticism before a brooding over the matter, under compulsory silence, produces an unwarranted slaughter.

Like all natural phenomena, Anarchists of the violent type are not uncaused effects. If a man has been judicially declared sane enough to be electrocuted, for killing an official against whom he had no personal grievance, then surely the character and ethical sufficiency of his alleged humanitarian justification are a legitimate matter of unabridged inquiry and discussion.

I am not more infallible in my opinions about the ethics of justifiable tyrannicide than I am about those upon sexual psychology, or sexual ethics, or the thirty-nine articles of faith. If, then, I would maintain inviolate my right to express disagreement with others about religion, or another’s right to express disagreement with Mr. Comstock about sexual ethics, I must also defend every man’s right to express disagreement with me as to what constitutes justifiable homicide or tyrannicide.

For the reasons here outlined, I feel it my duty to protest against all laws which punish the mere expression of unpopular opinions, not having resulted in other acts prohibited by law. Every such abridgment of the freedom of speech or of press is a dangerous precedent from which will grow other like abridgments, until we enjoy any liberties only as a matter of permission and not as a matter of right.

Every such law is destructive of the fundamental equalities of human opportunity, and violative of the rights guaranteed by our constitutions. By these considerations I am impelled, at the risk of being misunderstood, or of deliberate misinterpretation, and of great unpopularity, to insist on both the legislative and judicial annulment of all anti-Anarchist laws, and every other law abridging even in the slightest degree the means of inter-communication between sane adult humans.

Lecture Tour

Emma Goldman

I intend to go on a lecture tour, the proceeds of which are to be devoted to the “Mother Earth” Sustaining Fund. I have already been invited by the San Francisco comrades, and, on my way to the Coast, I am prepared to lecture in the larger cities.

Those wishing to arrange meetings will please communicate with me at once.

EMMA GOLDMAN, 308 East 27th St., New York.

Events are the True Schoolmasters

Voltairine De Cleyre

I count it as one of the best fortunes of my life that in my early days as an anarchist it was my privilege to know Dyer D. Lum. These thirteen years he is in his grave, and yet whenever editors and contributors of anarchist journals fall to denouncing the actions of the unwise, the ebullitions of the mass, I hear his voice, as yesterday, saying in his short, brusque way: “Events are the true schoolmasters.”

There was in his day, as there is now, a certain percentage of propagandists who think that they possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (a perhaps enviable condition of mind, but certainly an intolerant one). They appear to think that by the application of certain abstract principles they have been able to chalk-line the course of progress, and that if it be strictly adhered to an unquestionable triumph of these principles lies straight ahead. They are essentially reasonable, cool persons, somewhat over-impressed with their lack of sentimentality, having definite “plans of campaign” in their heads. The trouble is that when the plan is put in action, it meets with the difficulties the mathematical builders of Laputa met when they put up a wall. The planners never look to right or left of the chalk-line to measure the quantities with which they are dealing, or get a relative estimate of their own forces compared with the forces they are endeavoring to guide so straightly. All at once some one of these unreckoned, undisciplined forces flies right across the well-laid-out path; helter-skelter, topsy-turvy goes all the patient work, and the “plan of campaign” is smitten in the house of its friends. Do the campaigners give a look around, now, and take in the situation? Do they begin to recognize that their little labored ant-track was just a bit of a groove bearing relation to the path of Progress, about as the rut of a toy cart-wheel to the whole Road; that the road is by no means straight, but full of hills and holes and curves and angles according to the obstacles met and the powers of the moving quantity ? Not they! The plan is all right; so much the worse for the campaign if it disregards the chalk! The planners adjust their blinkers, give a look in their pocket-mirrors that they may behold “the face of Anarchy” undegenerate, lift up their voices, call for clean water, and wash their hands, publicly, clean—very clean. They have nothing in common with these monsters of the depths which the Frankenstein of the State creates for its own undoing. Take notice, Frankenstein; if you lack epithets to vilify them we, the plumb-line anarchists, will supplement your stock. Nothing in common with these unregulated, undisciplined minds which are devoid of logic and filled only with unreasoning sentiments and the desire for foolish and inconsequent talk. Take notice, Prosecutor ; if you lack condemnatory arguments we will furnish them. “Our ways are ways of pleasantness, and all our paths are paths of peace.”

What a very pretty thing progress would be if all her ways were likewise; all will admit that unconditionally. However, progress has to do with all mankind, not alone with the calm, the wise, and the patient. There is youth in the world, and youth is generally neither calm nor patient; it does not like to sit in the rear rows and listen to mature considerations rendered in the tone of a stockmarket quotation concerning questions that are burning up its heart, itself silent; if it did, it might learn to be wise and calm,—and also ashy and inert. There is feeling in the world, and a very great quantity of it; and those who do the suffering and the sympathizing may be expected to say and to do many things not within the limits of logic. Sometimes these deeds take violent forms, sometimes they take merely foolish forms; but “Events are the true schoolmasters,” and in the twenty years that have elapsed since 1886, we have seen the wisdom of the wise confounded more than once, and the action of the resolute, the desperate and the foolish break the line of the opposition and make room for wider action and farther-reaching effort.

Through witnessing these unexpected acts and their still more unanticipated results, I have gradually worked my way to the conviction that, while I cannot see the logic of forcible physical resistance (entailing perpetual retaliations until one of the offended finally refuses to retaliate), there are others who have reached the opposite conclusions, who will act according to their convictions, and who are quite as much part and parcel of the movement towards human liberty as those who preach peace at all costs; that my part as a social student and lover of freedom is to get as wide an outlook as I can, endeavor to appreciate the relative values of contending and interplaying forces, try to detect among the counter-movements the net results, the general forward impulse cutting new barriers, and to move with it, quite confident that there is room and enough for me to hold my individual course within that broad sweep. If someone cuts my course, why, then, I suppose I am cutting his at the same time. No doubt the believers in forcible resistance feel that those of us who eschew force and preach peace are on the wrong track; no doubt the censorious among them think we are a nuisance, a drawback, a damage to the movement, in fact, no anarchists at all. But let us neither read out nor be read out. The ideal of society without government allures us all; we believe in its possibility and that makes us anarchists. But since its realization is in the future, and since the future holds unknown factors, it is nearly certain that the free society of the unborn will realize itself according to no man’s present forecast, whether individualist, communist, mutualist, collectivist, or what-not? Such forecasts are useful as centerizing points of striving only. Vast and vague the ideal persists, and a great social drift is setting towards it; somewhat of conscious anarchism therein, but infinitely more of the unconscious anarchism which is in all men. As well “put a bit in the jaws of the sea,” as try to control the movements of that great tide. Then why exercise ourselves because someone conceived a different plan of free association from ours? Why, since no one can know a perfect method, nor even act always according to the best method he himself conceives, why fly to the defense of progress and protect destiny? It is a little too much like a Christian Inquisitor protecting the Almighty against heretics.

I believe that if those who feel called upon to act as guardians of the anarchist movement once realized how little it is in need of their guardianship, what a trifle each individual contribution is, even theirs, they would be content to fight the battle with the enemy as it develops (not as they preconceive it ought to develop); and not think it necessary to turn about and add their stripes to those who will be quite sufficiently beaten by the State, merely because such have not waged war as per the cold-blood, wisdom and experience of the gray heads of others.

Courage

Matthew Arnold

True, we must tame our rebel will:

True, we must bow to Nature’s law: Must bear in Silence many an ill;

Must learn to wait, renounce, withdraw.

Yet now, when boldest wills give place, When Fate and Circumstance are strong, And in their rush the human race Are swept, like huddling sheep along ;

Those sterner spirits let me prize,

Who, though the tendence of the whole They less than us might recognize

Kept, more than us, their strength of soul.

Yes, be the second Cato prais’d! Not that he took the course to die— But that, when 'gainst himself he rais’d His arm, he rais’d it dauntlessly.

And, Byron! let us dare admire, If not thy fierce and turbid song, Yet that, in anguish, doubt, desire, Thy fiery courage still was strong.

The sun that on thy tossing pain Did with such cold derision shine, He crush’d thee not with his disdain— He had his glow, and thou hadst thine. i

Our bane, disguise it as we may, Is weakness, is a faltering course. Oh that past times could give our day, Join’d to its clearness, of their force!

The Democracy of Whitman

Elizabeth Burns Fern

To understand Whitman we must go out into the open, take a look at the life about us, and then turn that gaze in upon ourselves.

What a man sees, however, depends upon how a man looks. If he looks out upon life with a professional or commercial eye,—to gather facts and data for his class or book,—the real thing, the life, is sure to escape him. The same thing is true of one’s self.

Jesus looked in upon himself, but he looked m with an eye prejudiced in favor of the so-called good. He rejected the evil aspects of his nature, and, when he was fluctuating between the things of the world and the demands of his own inner life, he did not hold himself responsible for the struggle, but charged the devil with taking him up into the mountain and tempting him.

No religions, alone; no reformer, alone; no economist, alone; no politician, alone, could ever understand or interpret the full meaning of democracy. The poet had to sing its song, which is the song of man; and that poet had to be found in America. For if democracy is ever to be realized, it must be in these United States, where all races are mingled together with no formal recognition of class or caste.

The poet, in the evolution of the race, has always voiced the need of the time. The poet blazes the way which marks the road to freedom. Without apology, the poet dares to sing of that which his fellowmen are feeling, but which they dare not voice even to themselves.

And so in America, where to-day we are still found uncertain about our status as men, there springs from our midst a man from the multitude, with words so bold and strong that the impure of heart shrink away from —_ and the timid hardly know whether to trust him or not,

The word democracy can no longer be narrowed down to mean rule and government. Its meaning has broadened with our wider need and consciousness of life, until now it stands out clear and strong for human equality.

"I speak the pass-word primeval,
  I give the sign of democracy.

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have
  their counterpart of on the same terms."

Are these words of Whitman’s to be taken seriously, or are they only the bold irresponsible words of a poet? Does democracy demand that man shall assume no privilege for himself, no aggrandizement, no advantage over his fellow man; that he shall not only strive for equality of opportunity, but find true equality in the bare fact of his common humanity?

I honestly believe that this is what is involved in the life of the Democrat. Not absolutely true as all philosophies hold it, but a fact to be concreted and realized in the ordinary daily life of each man and woman. "One’s Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word en masse.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less.

And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them."

If we agree that the democratic consciousness will force man to throw off all the extraneous matter with which he has adorned and thereby disguised himself, that it will strip his soul bare until not one thing shall stand between him and another soul, then we may well hesitate before we proclaim ourselves democrats. For we must bear in mind that Whitman does not mean we shall see ourselves and find our equality in a specialized type like Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus, but also in the sponger, thief and prostitute.

“And such as it is to be of these more or less I am. And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

Whitman does not invite man to prove his humanity by organizing a retreat for the thief and prostitute, for such organization serves to specialize and divide them from the rest of their fellow creatures. He invites us to look into our own souls and see how much of the spongey, thief and prostitute there is in ourselves. Such introspection must, if anything can, help to restore our lost sense of humanity.

Poets, before Whitman, have dwelt on the passions of mankind, but none, I think it is safe to say, have so identified the passions of man with the life of man as Whitman has. He saw vice and virtue in relation to life. He knew that they proceeded from life and were both equally instrumental in furthering man’s consciousness and understanding of life.

“Every condition promulgates not only itself, it promulgates What grows out of itself. And the dark hush promulgates as much as any.”

When man marks a boundary line and conceives that he has enclosed the life of man within it, he has simply bound in his own conception of life, and life remains as free and unfettered by his act as if he had not acted at all. It is man’s own limited consciousness of life that forces him to exclude. If life is eternal, must he not expect to find it revealed in infinite variety of form?

Man has divided himself into three segments. The home has charge of his body, the school of his mind, and the church of his soul. Is it any wonder that man has so many conflicting ideas of himself? How can he work out from his own centre when he has no opportunity for self-activity? How can he realize himself as a whole, so long as he is treated in fragments? Before man can even feel the throb of manhood, he must gather himself together and express himself as a whole. He must work out from his own centre before he can understand himself as a man. He must realize himself as a man before he can comprehend humanity.

It may sound very modest not to lay claim to being more than a part of the whole, but I have found that with that paltry consciousness of self, there is a corresponding paltry conception of responsibility and relation to others. Self-depreciation and self-abasement are not to be trusted. They are the offspring of a poor conception of life.

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

Each of us inevitable.

Each of us limitless, each of us with his or her right upon the earth."

If we agree with Whitman, then we must conclude that man, any race or character of man, holds not only the potentialities for the fullest realization of democracy, but actually contains within himself, at the present time, the qualities that make the democrat. I do not believe that man is conscious of it, or that he even feels the impulse strongly within himself; but I believe, nevertheless, that it is innate in every human being, and man must realize democracy some day as a living factor in his own life.

It would be a vain hope for adults of the present time, however, to expect to realize democracy fully. The years spent in conventional living and thinking have made an impression which we cannot easily throw aside.

I have met adults who have had fine ideas about their relation to man, but I have never met one who did not show in his living the effect of his past thought.

In the conventional life we find the virus that creates class, caste, distinction, influence and privilege. Adults can never entirely rid themselves of these accepted ideas; for as Locke says, a vessel always carries the flavor of the first thing put into it. We are fortunate indeed when we are able to modify and change the form of our Gods, even though our new God spring from the old roots.

If we are trying to form a society, we search about us for a distinguished man or woman for President. We expect to find representative men presiding at public meetings. A movement will often rise or fall because of the support which names give to it. This fact is so well known, that not infrequently names have been used without permission. The poison is in our social blood, and it shows itself in the corrupt social ideas which we still find ourselves holding against our fellow beings. When we are truly in earnest about our relation to humanity, the social conscience will be aroused and we shall be able to see ourselves as we are, and then it may come to pass that we shall ask ourselves—taking ourselves all in all—how can we further the development of democracy?

Earnest Crosby struck the key-note of our relation to others, when he said that we must learn to look at our fellow man horizontally. We have either idealized man or we have degraded him. We have looked above man and below man, but not straight into man’s own eyes to let his own soul speak out for itself.

If it is true that we adults are still so influenced by the old aristocratic thought of the past, what are we to do?. Must we fold our hands and wait for death? Hardly! It would be more rational, I think, to recognize our own limitations and then look over the possibilities and see if we can in any way further a democracy, even though we may not hope to realize it in our own lives. I am inclined to believe in the evolution of a race consciousness. I think that the present consciousness is higher than that of our parents; and so I believe that the consciousness of our children must be broader and fuller than our own. That, however, is a matter of belief, speculation, or conjecture, and does not vitally affect the question of democracy. I am very sure of one thing, however, whether it is the outcome of evolution or not, and that is the fact that the child of the present time is a natural democrat.

The child, like Whitman, has no class, no caste, no creed which would separate or divide him from the rest of humanity. When we do try to instill ideas of distinction into his mind, see how he expresses the shame of it all. We tell the child to say lady instead of woman— meaning, of course, that only special females are to receive that title. The child, however, is too inclusive to do that, so he takes in the whole sex and reports back to us that he saw a lady drunk in the gutter, a lady fighting on the street, a lady in the patrol, the wash-lady, the beggar-lady, and so on. What the child does see is the very thing that we adults fail to see, and that is the human being in and through it all. I feel confident that the child would not even make a sex distinction if the outer dress: of man and woman were not in such sharp contrast,

The child does not sense that luxurious surroundings have any advantage. He feels that they cause him to be restricted, and so he prefers the simple living with greater freedom of action. The child is not fastidious; a faded flower, a crinkled piece of paper, a soiled ribbon, a scrap of bright paper can satisfy him and fill his hand. The child has no respect for private property that is not in use. He understands that where you are he cannot be at the same time, but your right to exclude the space about you has no weight with him. If he hears that the pussy willows are out in a neighbor’s yard, he has no moral compunction about taking them. The child has a natural sense that use is the basis of ownership.

The child has no idea of cleanliness, so he does not divide people into clean and dirty. A woman is a woman to him whether well dressed or poorly dressed, drunk or sober; a woman of the town or a cloistered nun. He has no moral, no ethical ideas, so he does not over-rate certain things or qualities at the expense of his fellow man.

You have seen how the smile, touch and chatter of a young child will break through the formalities of a public conveyance. People who have never met before will, under the genial influence of the child, begin to smile and nod, and I have heard many confidences exchanged by people who were introduced by the child and who were to part in a few minutes.

The child is attracted to any form of action, so the work of the laborer and mechanic interests him more than the occupations which we have become accustomed to look upon as more intelligent and refined. The child has no respect for words, so the closet life of the professional man seems unprofitable to him. The child wants to see you act, but does not care to hear you talk. He has no contempt for the jumper of the mechanic, and neither has he any respect for the dress suit of the man of fashion. The child, like Whitman, is not curious about God, but very curious about himself and the life about him. The child has no God and no devil, so the results of good and bad actions do not weigh heavily upon him. The child rejoices in his body. The child lives in the present, so he deals with everything promptly. The child is simple and direct in his relations. He speaks out plainly whatever he feels to his playmate, and his playmate accords him the right to do that and still hold a relation with him.

If you have ever had the good fortune to live intimately with children you will know that this is true. I am not claiming it as a superior state. I am only trying to show you that such a state is now existing and is natural to the child. Has the child always held a democratic relation? Is it true of our childhood or is it a sign, at the present time of a developed race consciousness? I agree with the Bible that as it was in the beginning, so it shall be forever and ever, and with Whitman that there—

"Will never be any more perfection than there is now.’

I do not believe that anything new is created as changes come and go. Growth, to me, is simply an awakened consciousness toward something which has always existed. We do not create things when we recognize them; our recognition is an enfoldment toward them.

I remember, as I look back over my childhood, that my interest was always with the actively producing men and women about me. Later I heard piano playing, painting, drawing and fancy work extolled, and manual work classed as low and menial. I accepted those conventional ideas and lived the life of a formalist and conformist by suppressing my natural inclination to be one “who did things.” I think that all children, in all times, have shown the same democratic spirit, and that the spirit is only overlaid by the conventionalities in the life of adults.

The effect of one day’s outing will show that the natural tendency of the human being is not inclined to formalism. And after a few weeks’ camping out there is hardly a remnant of the conventional left. The singular thing is, that the very ones who defend and maintain the necessity for the conventional, are the first ones, when they get the chance, to abandon it. Two weeks of free living in the open will undo the effect of fifty weeks of artificiality and affectation.

I saw enough of this one summer to convince me that this is true. We spent our vacation on the north shore of Long Island. You probably know enough about the simple rugged nature of that shore to know that the silly man or woman would know better than to try to do stunts in the face of those beautiful hills and no less beautiful sound. Such people were usually found on the verandas doing fancy work and talking over their ailments.

One woman accounted for her nervous prostration by tracing it to the yards and yards of baby ribbon she had used to decorate her under-clothing. Three women were there who had been born and reared at a popular seashore resort. They had never taken a public bath, but they were then discussing the propriety of doing so. One of them held firm to her first position that it was very immodest for a married woman to go in bathing. Two of the women finally decided that the shore being so secluded they would try it. They drove to the village and bought bathing suits with skirts more noticeable for their length than usefulness. The older woman —I suppose to preserve some show of decency—wore a hat with a quill stuck in the side, which gave her quite a rakish air. But they had broken through the conventional lines, and that was a step gained. The natural triumphed over the conventional. The younger women showed how relieved they were to have the freedom which a bathing suit always allows. They used their suits very often just to lounge about the beach and play with the sand and pebbles.

The young men could not be distinguished from the men employed about the place. They were busy every day making rafts, painting and repairing their boats. The young men owned a gasolene launch. The engine was out of order. One of the young men worked for an hour or more every day in the broiling sun trying to adjust the engine. Their shirts were unbuttoned at their neck and their sleeves were rolled up to leave their arms as free as possible. They were as sweaty and grimy doing their work as any navvy, and could not be distinguished from one at a distance.

It proved to me that the early attraction of the individual to the making of things had not changed, and that there was no real contempt even among adults for the dress of the genuine workman nor for his occupation; for in their free life they were working as hard as any of the hired men, and harder than many, because they were doing the thing they wanted to do. I have no doubt that these very young men, when they again took up the conventional life of the city repudiated the dress of the workman and his kind of work as inferior in the scale of intelligence. And yet, when they were free to do the thing which they most desired to do, they took up the physical occupations and dressed even more negligently than the workmen.

Watching these people when they felt they were off guard, convinced me that there is nothing innate in man which separates him into a class or caste.

(To be continued.)

A Letter to St. Anthony

Maria Muggins

St. Anthony Comstock.

My dear Sir: When I seen by the papers that you had seized all them vile catalogs and Miss Robinson, I says, says I, “There is a man the mothers of America can be proud of. There is a man to which all things is impure and will pertect the virtue of American children,” so I take my pen in hand to thank God that American children has such a fearless and senseless pertecter. 'Too few knows that sex is vile and purity is clothes. Some Says we wasn’t born with clothes, and the Japanese mingles nood, but I says, '“Here we air, and we ain’t Japanese, and when Adam and Eve fell they was ashamed of them fig leaves, and they ought to be, and that shows what God thinks of the mood.” If I had known you was living I would have written you long ago about your temptation in Utah, when them vile wimin hung about you nood in the desert and you drove them off. "That is what I would expect from a Saint like you. Go on, noble Sir, in your precious crewsade agin vice and for clothes and may you and Mr. Madden, the Washington postmaster what pertects the males keep along in your good work till there is laws requirin babies to be born in garments and any girl who has nollege of sex is obseen.

Yours respectively,

MARIA MUGGINS, Per C. E. S. Wood.

Can the Kingdom of Heaven be Taken by Force?

Bolton Hall

FOR myself, I know nothing whatever about “right” or “wrong.” If anyone wants to know about them, he should ask a policeman. I know and care only about what is loving, which seems to me in each instance easy for me to decide for myself.

Miss Goldman says that if I had been brought up among the Russian peasants or students, I would be bitter and violent; that may be true, but, if so, it seems to me to show only my feeble imagination. The violence and outrages in Russia are shocking enough, but just as intense and prolonged suffering is caused not by violence but by economic conditions. It is horrible to read of the scourging of men, of the violations of women, of the hideous fortress of St. Peter and Paul, and of the Siberian quicksilver mines; but the slums of New York, with its crop of diseases, its girls forced into prostitution, its sweat shops and its hopeless struggles against want are less striking but just as real tortures–only we are more used to them. Because these inflictions come in a less dramatic way and from less personal sources, they do not so violently stir most persons to revolt.

Still, it seems clear to me that anyone living in Russia to-day, unless he is a thorough-going Tolstoyan, which I am not, must be driven to violence. Where free speech is violently repressed, they have no other recourse, for the time, but violent resistance; though I am not clear that the same fortitude and self-sacrifice and heroism which shine so bright in the Russian darkness would not have accomplished far more if it had been expended in passive resistance. For it is lamentably true that reprisals always involve many who are only indirectly and often remotely parties to the wrongs, and often those who are innocent, as far as one can be innocent of another’s wrongs. These undeserved sufferings of the widow of the assassinated officers, of the chance bystanders, of the children orphaned by the bomb, appeal to the sympathies even more strongly than the original outrages, which made thousands of widows and orphans, and so they help apologists for the outrages and defenders of the causes of them.

It is not denied that forcible repression exists in the United States as well as in Russia, and that here, also, free speech is often repressed by force; but whatever may be said for the propaganda by deed in Russia, I am with the plutocratic press in thinking that any violence here is a capital mistake.

I am aware that much of the press deprecation of violence is because authoritarianism is horribly afraid of it. That is part of the reason that it seems to me so certainly ineffective here. An assassination merely arrays the fears of the people; of the very ones who most need to be convinced, against our arguments. In the strikes the efforts of monopoly are always to bring about a riot, so as to be able to appeal to what they call the “sentiment of law and order,” which is mostly the nervousness of the people.

But more important than this is the deep-rooted feeling in men’s minds that reprisal does not constitute justice, but only adds a second wrong to the first. People think that reprisal for crime, when under government direction, is necessary and, though in each particular instance it generally repels the most of them, they call it punishment in order to justify it. They may be stupid, but they never can be convinced that a judicial murder, such as that of the Chicago anarchists, necessitates or justifies the killing of their prosecutors or their judges. Perhaps their feeling, not their thought, is that all men, even vicious prosecutors and unjust judges, are the product of their environment, so that they resent the deliberate visitation of the sins of society upon society’s representatives.

We must, above all things, avoid arousing needless and unreasoning antagonism, and try to get a hearing encumbered by as little prejudice of fear or of passion as possible. It seems to me that this is easiest done by teaching anarchy as applied to the education of children, which I hope to consider in another article.

BOLTON HALL.

“MOTHER EARTH” SUSTAINING FUND.

Previously acknowledged — $66.50
F. F. Mead — 5.00
B. M. Schade — 2.00
M. Cohn — 1.00
J. B. Rheimer — 1.00
R. Daverkosen — 1.00
Wm. Holmes — 1.00
Proceeds from R——e by Syracuse Comrades, per M. Slive* — 10.00
Per Lists:
Beckie Edelson — 12.60
West Hoboken Italian Comrades — 2.80
Several Friends (Paterson, N. J.) — 3.45

Total — $106.35

E. G.

FREE SPEECH DEFENSE FUND.

Previously acknowledged — $325.00
Through L. Camanita — 21.00
Through N. Notkin — 12.05
Through “Freiheit” — 10.00
Through K. Herlitz (Pittsburg) — 4.00
Through Slutzkin (Buffalo) — 5.00
Lynn Educational Club (Lynn, Mass.) — 15.85
Collected on Subscription Lists:
Rose Fritz (San Francisco) — $45.50
L. Camanita — 7.00
B. Blumberg (Carteret, N. J.) — 4.75
W. H. Educational Club (West Hoboken, N. J.) — 6.85
John Feodor (N. Y.) — 11.00
Beckie Edelson — 6.50
Unknown Collector — 3.80

Total — $478.30

An account of expenditures will be given when the cases are settled.

EMMA GOLDMAN.

*A. Goldman, of Rochester, N. Y., received the prize.

International Notes

FRANCE.

American freethinkers who are always agreeably surprised on visiting France to notice the absence of puri-. tanic Sabbath restrictions, read with mixed feelings of amusement and disgust of the recent Sunday-rest law enacted at the request of the organized workingmen, and their attempt to enforce it upon refractory employers. It is the old story: if they are able to compel their employers to give them one day’s rest they do not need the law, and if they are not able the law is of no avail. Already the workers have several times put themselves in the humiliating position of asking the officials to enforce the law, and been properly insulted for it. We in America have had all manner of experience with freak Sunday laws enacted from religious motives by a dead generation and remaining as a pestiferous tool for the living one, with the result that the law generally fines some insignificant candy-store keeper, barber, milk-dealer or newsdealer, while the great corporations steadily ignore it. Our brethren in France may expect like results; with this added sting, that while our workers may be excused for trying to make the best of a bad legacy, they have voluntarily created an obnoxious restriction, of no benefit to themselves as workers, and a nuisance to themselves and everybody else in other capacities.

As the result of the active anti-militarist propaganda, which has been at much pains to ferret out and expose abuses in the French army, the inevitable party of amelioration has arisen, as is evidenced by the present attempt of Minister Picquart to reform the Courts-martial. If the proposed reform is accepted, military offenders against the civil law in time of peace will no longer be tried by court-martial. Offenses against discipline alone are to be tried by court-martial; offenses against the civil law, even if commanded by a military superior, are to be tried in the common courts. Among these offenses are enumerated: abuse of authority, insubordination, desertion, whether in or out of the country, theft, pillage, destruction of edifices, corruption, prevarication, etc. The project also proposes the abolition of the death penalty in time of peace, and reduces the maximum term of forced labor on public works from ten to five years, and generally mitigates all penalties.

Meanwhile the anti-militarist propagandists continue to act and to suffer under the civil code.

On the 29th of November Comrade Baron was sentenced at Lyons to two years in prison, accused of complicity with Lafont, who prepared and threw a bomb. Lafont was condemned to eighteen months. The sole evidence against Baron was the testimony of Lafont himself that the former had listened to his plan and encouraged him.

The Anarchists of Rheims are publishing a new weekly Anarchistic paper, “La Cravache” (The Horsewhip). It is especially devoted to “educating the working class.”

In 1867, when Alexander II. of Russia visited Paris, not long after his murderous butcheries in Poland, a young Pole named Berezowski fired at the Emperor as he passed. The shot missed, but Berezowski was sentenced to New Caledonia for life. Now, after thirty-nine years, the Republic pardons him—old, broken in body, and with intelligence practically extinct. “Under the color of clemency the Republic disembarrasses itself of a troublesome corpse.”

SWITZERLAND.

The agitation for laws forbidding strikes continues ; the federated unions through their organ, “The Voice of the People,” calls for a congress to decide upon responsive action.

Philip Mischler has recently been condemned to eight months prison and costs, with four years’ loss of his political rights, for having refused for the second time to do military service. The severity of the sentence was no doubt augmented by his attitude at the trial. Judge by the following dialogue in court:

“Is it true that you are so destitute as you describe yourself?”

“I possess no more than the clothes I have on, a few sous in my pocket—and the catarrh which I owe to you, for the cell in which you have shut me up is enough to make me perish with cold.”

“Your parents?”

“I am a natural child. My mother was deceived. She is a brave woman who works very hard even yet. I have nothing to reproach her.”

“But the country, our common mother, and our motto, ‘One for all, all for one’?”

“The country, our common mother,’ is a bitter derision, and the motto a lie.”

“Is it because you are afraid that you do not like the profession of arms?”

"I cling to life that I may struggle with my comrades against you. I cling to life that I may do all the injury possible to our masters. But if my comrades have need of my life, I will give it to them; I will give it only to them. It belongs to them; it will never belong to you.

“Militant, I hold to life that I may fight in my rank as proletarian. But as a proletarian, I do not hold to life. The past has for me no happy souvenirs; the present is not attractive; the future is sombre. As a proletarian, as one of the exploited, I cannot then particularly cling to life, if not, as I have told you, to use it against you. At any rate, I will not give my life for the defense of the property and riches of people to whom I have no fraternal tie, people who are my conscious, wilful enemies, whilst my so-called enemies over the frontiers are so only unconsciously, involuntarily. Were we free, we, the workers—Swiss, French, German, Austrian, Italian—we would all fraternize.”

Bravo, Philip Mischler! It was worth eight months of prison to have said those words to a judge.

GERMANY.

During November and December meetings were broken up by the police in Frankfurt on the Main and Bremerhaven; in the latter city twelve comrades were arrested. On the second of November the police visited the office of “Der freie Arbeiter” and confiscated a bundle of No. 44, the offense being an article entitled “Revolution and Expropriation.”

On the 17th of November Comrade Rudolph Oestreich, of “Der freie Arbeiter,” was tried for the following six articles :

God—Anarchist. Charge: Blasphemy.

Police Attack on Labor. Charge: Resisting the law.

Moloch’s Victims. Charge: Instigation.

The Church Militant. Charge: Insulting the Christian Church.

Revolution—Expropriation. Charge: Advocacy of violence and lawlessness.

6. “Xantippe” and “Man Destruction.” Charge: Immorality.

The various sentences amounted to six months’ prison and a fine of thirty marks.

On the 20th of November Comrade Ernst Witte was fined 120 marks, and sent to jail for 12 days, for refusing to be photographed by the police who broke up the meeting at Frankfurt on the Main.

House searchings continue in all principal cities.

Dr. Friedeburg, erstwhile Socialist, has announced himself as an Anarchist.

All of our exchanges contain articles and speeches commemorating the 11th of November martyrdom; but the most complete and touching tribute is the one contained in "Der freie Arbeiter,’ of November 11.

HOLLAND.

“Les Temps Nouveaux,” of December 1, contains an, earnest article, much in the nature of an appeal, by Amédée Dunois concerning the proposed international conference to be held at Amsterdam during the coming summer. The work of preparing for this congress has been undertaken by the comrades of the Netherlands and Belgium, and the present flourishing condition of their groups and their papers suggests that they have the necessary organizing capacity. The ends to be proposed through such a conference are many; the degree possibly to be attained is proportionately very slight; and yet, slight as they may be, no other means is as adequate even as this. Dunois calls attention to the present condition of Anarchist development in the following words: "Certainly the spectacle presented by the present condition of Anarchism is a very strange one. Never was it more divided in its daily action, more uncertain of itself, more lamentably disorganized, more discordant. Strange and picturesque spectacle, this, of an Anarchism which comprises the most disheartening Stirnerian individualism to a Marxism most incontestable if not most orthodox, from the most gently Utopian ideology to anti-clerical Blanquism, anti-militarist and Jacobin!’ * * * * “The Congress of Amsterdam,” probably, will have to define terms, to formulate principles, to dissipate certain obscurities and misunderstandings under which Anarchism labors. * * * “It will have in some sort what the jurists call the constituent character.”

Without wishing to depreciate Dunois’ natural desire for unanimity and solidarity of action, we should be very sorry to see the Amsterdam Congress pose in any such “constituent character.” If it does it will certainly be a fiasco. Desirably or not, the Anarchist movement certainly does comprise all the antagonistic elements above cited; and what the Amsterdam Congress has to do is not to pronounce upon Stirnerism or Marxism, Anti-Militarism or Jacobinism, etc., but to furnish the opportunity for those who do believe in these various ideas and yet hold themselves Anarchists to come together and determine what principles they really do have in common, and to what extent they can work together, and by what means.

Certainly the few individuals who will come together in Amsterdam can neither make over the heterogeny of thought in the Anarchist movement, nor can they prevent those who do not subscribe to the principles formulated, from declaring themselves Anarchists. To attempt it, would be to make the Congress laughable.

ENGLAND.

“Freedom” reports that during the summer and _ fall excellent open-air propaganda continued in Liverpool; that on the 11th of November two successful indoor ineetings were held, one in commemoration of the Chicago martyrs. These meetings were addressed by the veteran speaker Kitz, one of the founders of the old Socialist League in pre-parliamentary days.

The case of Zingar, a Polish refugee employed in a Manchester factory for some five or six months preceding November 5, when he was arrested by order of Scotland Yard, demonstrates the gradual abandonment of England’s proud claim to be the asylum of refugees, and its alignment with the more tyrannical governments against the revolution. Zingar, who is only eighteen years old, is accused of having taken part in an attack on a police station in Varsovia; and his extradition was demanded by the Russian government.

BELGIUM.

Louis Xhayet, moulder, and Arthur Breny, printer, were recently sentenced, respectively, to three and two months in prison for anti-militarist propaganda in “L’Action Directe.”

CHINA.

“Tierra y Libertad” contains an extremely interesting communication concerning the progress of Anarchism in the Flowery Empire. It enumerates various pamphlets translated in Chinese by the comrades, including Bakunin’s God and the State, Anarchy by Carlo Cafiero, and pamphlets of Malatesta. Seventeen papers in the southern part of the empire have reproduced famous Anarchistic writings.

Gustave Flaubert

Charles Mierzwa (concluded)

IV.

It was the vogue at the time Flaubert’s works appeared to speak facetiously of “Flaubert’s skeleton.” Yet despite the at times cumbersome verbiage of erudition, despite the phraseology of the shop, these “skeletons” have within them the human power that thrills us to sympathetic concern. I venture that Flaubert’s admiration for Goethe materially helped to mold that stern self-denial of emotional indulgence which so largely contributes to make his art the model of fiction. Perhaps he was too rigorous, too severely descriptive in his unrelenting despotism to give vent to the feeling for an outcry. I have in mind two or three instances which might have been suppressed had consciousness guided the invisible pen of his irresistible genius. He himself writes to a friend: “I would gladly give the half ream of paper I have been filling with notes for the past five months merely to feel truly moved for three seconds by the passions of my characters.” Yet the art he had set aloft for his law was immutable, there was no appeal from its iron-clad decree. With mathematical precision he applies his micrometer to every detail, and the slightest deviation is an unpardonable infraction of this sacred law. He was forever pruning and adding and recasting. If not so copious in production, infinitely fertile in energy—the stuff that tells. He complains to du Camp: “I am thoroughly worn out. Have written twenty pages this month—it has quite exhausted me.” These twenty pages are not to be smiled at, more likely they represent twenty reams. He was fond of entoning aloud his wellmeasured periods; we find him exceptionally well pleased by the onomatopoeia of the word alternativemente at the conclusion of "Heriodas,’ spending many nights and days in seeking this harmonious resolution, and when found, muttering it over and over to himself with the delight of a child which recovers its long-lost doll. Guy de Maupassant was fond of relating how he was sent to the same street corner for months to describe over and over the same scene until finally the exactitude of the master was sufficiently satisfied to calmly comment: “Now I see the picture.” Five years were spent upon “Madame Bovary,” twenty upon the “Tentation de St. Antoine,” a whole life of 59 years produced seven volumes.

And this is art—Flaubert’s art. Were it necessary to become didactic and wield the hammer from above, much could be said. Whatever analogy he may bear to Beethoven, their method of work, at least, is precisely similar. “Genius is all work,” said the musician; and we, in the face of his stupendous achievements, must needs doubt. Flaubert cannot be quoted as saying the same, yet his whole life is a demonstration of it. The fecundity of Balzac, even with his vast versatility, offers no parallel to the prodigious labors of this still obscured giant. The notes taken for “Salammbo” alone filled ten volumes.

Perhaps the diamond would have a redder sheen had the artist known just how to cut it. It is very difficult to determine just what is germain and what not. How long the impulse buried in the author’s breast lay heavy upon his soul, how deeply its profound insignificance impressed him to the extent that he at times searched in vain for a medium to express what clamored within, we can never know. Macauley once said that everything can be expressed in words, yet Macauley was not musical; Flaubert had an enormous capacity for rhythm and harmony. In his munificent afflorescense the perfumes fragrantly sparkle with the dews of heaven-sent tears. The grandeur of expression, swinging aloft to unattained heights, startles us by its Olympian resonance. Sometimes, like the thrilling strains of the Marseillaise, sometimes in the whirl of a reason-crowned carmagnole the affinitive processions move before us. Everything is realistic accuracy; with photographic truth the characters and scenes present their features and passions in the light of this brilliant mind. He takes his pen, dripping with blood, and with his masterful hand writes over our very hearts, this is you.

*Dass ich mit Göttersinn und Menschenhand

Vermoge zu bilden, was bei meinem Weibe Ich kann und darf. —Goethe.*

The artist alone is master of the revels. The periphery of the soul expands and gradually fades as it is approached. In the starry decked dome of his violet-hued night he traces his finger and writes immortal I’s whose dots beam down upon our wondering gaze. Not always does the chisel hew them; often they are the flashes that dart from his dazzling eye, becoming fixed and immutable in their celestial sphere. An outburst, as of radiant light, irrepressible in the breast that would fain nourish them to more brilliant hues. Yet forth they spring, the mysterious uncouscious mocking the paining hand in 'its efforts to rival its product. Beneath the brilliant light rays there is always the needle-point of the disk, discernible to those eyes whose vision is telescopic. Once clearly seen it betrays the fiery tongues licking up vast chasms of chaos, bewildering pyrotechnics threaten to blind the eye which doubts the colorific power of art.

In measured tread the penults and the ultimas and the anti-penults march majestically over the dome; at times the dim, faint light of a meteor marks its path as it sends quivering through the air its brief and_ stifled death cry. Now the restful calm of the sheening sea that glows phosphorescent in its ghostly mask, or perhaps the moonbeams bathing in their unutterable peace tell tales that thrill with bliss. There are the pirouettes of the dancing stars that remind one of the scherzo of the Ninth Symphony. Or else it covers in giant strides the transitions from the imagined atomic infinitesimal to the awesome infinite. In the realm of greatness even the smallest thing is great. Mind alone stamps with its unmistakable seal the intrinsic worth of its ringing metal.

Flaubert’s prose has qualities that make mere phrase artists slink away in shame. It has depth, it has value inherent in its two-fold construction. Like the iron of the blacksmith it is heated in the furnace of his impassioned yearning. It grows brilliant, becomes liquid as it courses through the veins of the world; the hand that shapes strikes it with the hammer of his thought and it rings forth a melodious note, giving promise of its future strength and use. It is a practical prose. Before his blood, bursting from his overflowing heart, coagulates, he wields it into beauteous forms. If the spheres hoid converse, they use the prose of Flaubert.

"The Temptations of St. Antonius’ appeared in 1874. Here we have before us the experiences of a life fraught with the trials of a soul sterilized by bitterness, the artistic temperament matured by its rigorous and inexorable training. There is a twilight as of the dusk of the gods. In its sombre, rolling music we see the wringing of denial and desire. With the impetuous effervescence of truculent psychomacies the soul is poured forth until it lies pleading before our very feet. Far away into the dim past the doves with the olive leaf are sent to find the land midst the receding flood. Over the sinister gleam of its blood-shot eyes may be written the epitaph of that gay, brilliant dandy of Rome’s decadence, Petronius Arbiter:

Animas quod perdidat optat Atque in preetorita se totus imagine versat.

The Temptation of St. Antonius presents one long monologue of a night’s terror. Antonius stands before his hut on the mountain, which faces the Nile, gleaming as a lake in the sunset. Near the precipice a huge cross throws it gigantic shadow over the lowly hut. The exhausted ascetic beholds the night coming on and shudders. An irrepressible yearning fills his heart for the external world of sin and death. Memories of flesh and blood torment and tempt him. A vision of Ammonaria, whom he loved in his youth, flits before him; Hilarion, his beloved pupil, grown weary, has forsaken him. Bitterly regretting his isolation, he yearns for the cup and the fleshpots he had spurned. The usefulness of a craftsman, the contented labors of a professional, the activity and excitement of a soldier rouse within him the pangs of a wasted life; his soul cries out in its anguish. Again he turns to his Bible for the consolation the approaching night is fast taking away. Yet here he finds only more fuel for the torments that have tortured him. The contradictions he reads toss him about between indulgence and self-denials. He sees the shadows of the arms of the cross approach like two horns. His long martyrdom has been weary, he has suffered enough. He reviews the honors showered upon him by the world, proudly commending himself for his abstinence; he, who could have swayed: this world. Turning his gaze he observes that his waterjug is empty, and that the jackals have stolen his bread. Hunger now’ viciously attacks him.

Memories of theological wrongs come to him; the revenge of the councils inflame his blood. He sees the host of lovely women arise begging to be confessed, praying that they might remain with this hallowed saint. They become so intensely real that he puts out his torch to dispel these increscent shadows. The night floods in upon him, and his brain reels as he beholds the phantasmagoria of the heavens.

The succeeding vision conjures forth his dormant animal instincts that crave satisfaction. Then mercenary ambitions rise; he dreams of exalted positions among princes and emperors, dominating their crowns, the unseen power behind the throne. He riots in revelling and feasting until he himself becomes Nebucadnezar and finds himself a beast. Awakening, he chastises and tortures himself so long that he becomes ecstatic. He beholds the Queen of Sheba. She is a collective woman, her essence, her irresistible magnetism, perfumed with the fragrance of the poppy, surrounded with an aura like an inextricable web. Seized with desire, he stretches forth his arms toward her. Yet he arrests his lust; in a terrible voice he orders her away.

Hilarion, his pupil, now appears as a little weazened dwarf. He is the devil. Before the thirsting soul of the hermit he parades the clashes and contentions among the Christians, their ruthless cruelty and mocking precepts. He sees the mothers and wives and children weep over the desolation left in the wake of their carnage. And Hilarion grows. All the phantoms of heresy are assembled to din in the hermit’s ears their fearful antonymic pandemonium. Appolonius of Tyana comes upon the scene; in his boast of the miracles he has wrought he covertly sneers even in the face of Christ. All the gods of blood and revenge appear moving before him with their hideous visages. Some fall down, others are toppled over, others are whirled away, or else crushed, torn and precipitated into the deep. Some vanish or are consumed, some kill themselves. Buddha arises; his doctrines hint startlingly of anticipating the Saviour’s. Only when the Roman Crepitus, the god of digestion, hurls himself violently upon Jehovah, plunging together into the abyss, is there silence. And night reigns on.

Still Hilarion remains; he has grown immensely. His calm gaze, pregnant with the blue depths of infinity, Pierces the shivering frame of Antonius. He calls upon the Saint to adore him, to curse that mockery he had long worshipped—God. Antonius demands to know who he is. Hilarion answers “Science,” and vanishes. The hermit awakens—dangerously near the precipice. He is growing feverish; the long fasting and infliction are telling upon him. His visions begin anew. He sees the prehistoric fauna and flora; huge saurians and pachydermata appear. All things become grotesque; familiar objects assume ghastly and perverted shapes. He cries aloud his desire to become one with every atom of the universe, to permeate the seas and the sands and the air and the fires of the bowels of the earth.

Vice and Death appear; one as the fair alluring girl whose eyes knit irresistible webs, the other gray and wrinkled even as the winter of woman. A loud wrangle ensues over the person of the saint, gradually the mists rise, and they melt harmoniously into one. The night wanes, before the vanishing haze the sun appears, disclosing within its disk the face of Christ. Antonius arouses himself, and resumes his interrupted prayer.

The last vision brings before us the Sphinx and the Chimera. Immobile, save for a nervous clawing in the sand, tracing figures and alphabets, the Sphinx is gazing steadily towards the distant horizon. Suddenly it cries aloud for imagination to lift it out of its terrible ennui; it arrests the attention of the Chimera. The winged monster replies: “I am enamored of thine eyes. Fructify me.” The Sphinx rises; Chimera, fearing that terrible weight, flies in alarm.

Thus Science is the last word of “Antonius.” Amidst the wreck and ruin of the centuries it appears as that indomitable thaumaturgist ever creating anew worlds blasted by emotional seismics. Yet alone its spirit is sterile. Poetry must lend it those wings by which it alone can find the true heaven. The Sphinx, too, feels the poignant Weltschmerz; its vision becomes misty as it stares upon the mockingly unchanging horizon.

Flaubert regarded the “Temptation of Saint Anthony” as his masterpiece. It was the work of many years, typical of a life that felt deeper than mere biography could possibly demonstrate. The work is an epitome of a soul that had not only felt, but had preserved the deep incisions of the jarring tracer that encircles man’s eternal life. That unrest, that feverish impulse to attain conscious cognition of the Supreme—of the noumenon of the Greeks, of the Absolute of Hegelism so pre-eminent in the Gnostics, Manicheans and the numerous offsprings of Non-Platonism, finds a vague satisfaction somewhere between the Enneads of Plotinus and the fruits of Herbert Spencer’s inductions. Regrets conflict with duties, passion and contemplation engage hand in hand, the inherent virility cries aloud to feel, to spend itself, as it wrestles with the awesome, transcendent decree of mystical promises. Thus the world of phantasy recreates itself, Tanet becomes real, at least real enough for the ebbing, experienced sensitivity to doubt whether its abstinence has really been justified. Of all the golden precepts that have rained down upon man, urging him to renewed self control, none has yet explained with practical, scientific cogency the uses and purposes of life. I regard this last confession of Flaubert as truly monumental of the present state of our science and philosophy. And yet, the various chemicals constituting man’s existence, the elements beyond which no microscope or new discovery can ever hope to penetrate—Christ, Brahma, Osiris and Isis—seem contradictory only because their antithesis still looms prodigious above their synonyms. When Victor Cousin proclaimed error to be but a partial truth he expressed much that resolved the discordant dissonance into its correlative concord. I doubt not for a moment that harmony is the order of the universe. Antonius, pursuing the ideals blazed aloft upon smiling heavens, forgets that the deceit is palpable only to the eronaut. Science alone discloses the true heaven; within the ether of introspection is enfolded the starlight of man’s most natural desires.

The cry of despair that ends the work is mocked by the echo of the fluttering Chimera. Phantasy shall soar, even to the dizzy heights that baffle thought to climb, yet shall ever find its true resting place beneath the heart of this Sphinx. Science can never eliminate that deeprooted feeling in man for veneration, for all true science is essentially religious. Like all upward tendencies, religion refuses to abide by the tolerant imperfect, it must On, to that higher sphere, placing souls “in the calm of blest dwelling” even as young Bacchus, radiant with the sheen of wine, grows enraptured as he contemplates his divinest art.

With the general reading public Flaubert’s work may be considered a failure. In the sense only, however, that Success consists in the quantity of readers, and not in the quality of them. Monotony and dullness are too often but the dragging wheels of the reader’s own mind. Where the sensitive peer keenly through the gaudy drapery, the obtuse turn away their paining eyes. Like the waters of the Saragossa Sea,—when looked down into from the Surface,—they show neither particular depth nor clearness, yet the higher one ascends the clearer and deeper the waters appear.

We cannot close our eyes to the fact that Flaubert’s art still occupies its literary pre-eminence. There is substance and solidity; poetry and erudition are blended together in a style seldom equalled, certainly never surpassed. Even after the inspirational cathedral music of de Huysmans or the subterranean murmur of Maeterlinck, we dare not hestitate to give this verdict. But still, his work somehow lacks the charm of far lesser artists. The predominance of scenes over passions, the glories of color that often usurp the place of the bashful blush of the maiden’s heart, displease or estrange the sympathetic reader. Yet if Flaubert erred in his excessive realism, in his dread of emotionalism, such error remains indelibly stamped as a characteristic, itself worthy of emulation.

Flaubert died in May, 1880. The keynote of his seven volumes is Illusion. Had his life been less bitter, had the stern self-denial to the eye peered yet a little deeper into the bosom of the world, many of his cynical clouds would have had a silvery lining. Even in his own version of the face of Christ appearing within the sun’s disk was disclosed with dazzling truth that spirit in man which is slowly but surely making for peace and love and harmony.

The Masters of Life

Maxim Gorky

An Interview. (Translated from the original.)

“Follow me to the Source of Truth,” laughed Satan, and led me to a grave-yard.

As we slowly wound along the narrow paths among the dilapidated tombstones, he spoke in a drawling voice of an old professor disgusted with fruitless preaching.

“Under your feet repose the authors of laws that guide your life; your heel tramples upon the artisans who forged the cage for the beast that is within you.”

He laughed caustically in his contempt for mankind, the greenish glint of his cold, dreary glance lighting up the grass and the sepulchers. The rich soil of the Dead stuck to my feet in large lumps, and it was difficult to advance along the paths among the monuments on the graves of Life’s Wisdom.

“Why do you not bow in gratitude to the ashes of those who have moulded your soul?” Satan’s voice, like the raw blast of autumn’s wind, shocked my body, chilled my longing heart. Over the old tombs gently swayed the sad boughs of trees, cold and moist, touching my face.

“Pay tribute to the counterfeiters! It was they who bred clouds of petty, gray thoughts, the small coin of your soul; it was they who brought forth your habits, prejudices and the essence of your living. Thank them, you are the heir to the immense legacy of the Dead.”

Yellow leaves slowly fell on my head and dropped at my feet. The earth of the cemetery greedily absorbed the fresh food, the dead leaves of autumnal days.

“Here lies a Tailor that used to clothe the souls of men in heavy, gray garments of Prejudice. Will you have a look at him?”

I nodded silently.

The Devil stamped upon a rusty plate and said: “Eh, bookman, arise!” The plate lifted with a deep sigh of disturbed mud, displaying a shallow pit. From its dark gloom came a grumble:

“But who wakes the dead after midnight?”

“Do you see,” sneered Satan, “the Makers of Laws are true to themselves even after decomposition.”

“You, master?” remarked the skeleton, sitting down on the edge of the ditch, carelessly nodding his hollow skull to the Devil.

“It is I!” retorted Satan. “Here is one of my friends who has grown stupid among men that had learned your wisdom. He has come to the fountain-head to cure himself of the contagion.”

I regarded the sage with deference. There was not a Scrap of flesh on his skull, but the expression of self-complacency in his face had not decayed away. Every bone dimly gleamed with the consciousness of belonging to a system of bones, exceptionally perfect, absolutely unique.

“Tell us what you have done in the world,” said Satan.

The corpse impressively and proudly tidied up the dark shreds of flesh and shroud wretchedly adhering to his ribs, lifted the bones of his right hand with dignity, and, pointing into the darkness of the churchyard, spoke up monotonously and dispassionately :

“I published ten large volumes, inculcating the great idea of the superiority of the White Race over the colored races.”

"Rendered in the language of truth,’ remarked Satan, "it sounds thus: ‘I, a sterile old maid, was busy all my life knitting with the dull needle of my mind, making out of the wool of worn-out ideas fool’s caps for those loving to keep their skulls in repose and comfort.’ "

“Would not these words insult him?” I asked in an undertone.

“Oh, no!” the devil responded. "Even live sages hardly listen to Truth!’

“None but the White Race,” proceeded the sage, “could create such a complex civilization, elaborate such stringent principles of morality; this is due to the color of its skin, to the composition of its blood. I have proved it beyond cavil.”’

“He has proved it!” assented Satan. 'There is no barbarian more firmly convinced of his right to be cruel than a European."

“The Whites have evolved Christianity and Humanism,” continued the corpse.

“A race of angels that by right ought to own the earth,” interrupted the Devil. “That is why they dye the Earth red, their favorite color.”

“They created the richest literatures, have made the most marvelous technical progress,” argued the corpse.

“A score and a half of good books and numberless instruments of destruction,” commented the Devil, laughingly. “Where is life more differentiated, and where is Man degraded lower than among the Whites?”

“Perhaps Satan errs at times?” I asked.

“European art has attained immeasurable heights,” droned the skeleton.

"Perhaps Satan would fain be mistaken!’ exclaimed my companion. "It bores one to be always right! But men seem to live merely to feed my scorn. Insipidity and falsehood grow rich crops on earth. Here is a sower before you. Like the rest of his kin he gave birth to nothing new. He resuscitated the carcasses of old prejudices, arraying them in the garb of new words.

What has been accomplished in this world? Palaces for the few, churches and factories for the many! In the churches they slay the souls, in the factories they deaden the bodies, so that the palaces may stand unshaken. Men are sent into the bowels of the earth for coal and gold, and the wage for the disgraceful labor is a chunk of bread mixed with lead and iron."

"Are you a Socialist?’ I queried.

“I want harmony!” he retorted. “It is disgusting to see a whole-souled being, a man, fractured into tiny bits, turned into a tool of the cupidity of others. I want no slaves, slavery is distasteful to me. That is why I was hurled down from Heaven. Where there is authority, Spiritual slavery is inevitable, and falsehood flourishes. Let the earth be all alive! Let her burn all day, even though nothing but ashes remain of her toward evening. It is indispensable that all men should once fall in love. Love, like a miraculous dream, occurs but once, but it is the essence of being.”

The skeleton stood leaning against the black stone, and the wind blew through his ribs.

“He must be cold and uncomfortable,” I remarked.

“I like to see a scholar freed of superfluities. His skeleton is the gist of his idea. I can see its originality. Next to him lie the remains of another sower of truth. Let us wake him. In life they all love rest, and they toil to establish rules of thought, feeling, life; they distort new-born ideas and build cozy coffins for them. But dying they wish not to be forgotten. Comprachicos, arise! Here is a man that needs a coffin for his thought.”

Out of the earth arose a bare and hollow skull, toothless, yellow, but glistening with self-complacency. He must have lain long underground, for his bones were devoid of flesh. He stood at the stone and the framework of his bones seemed projected on it.

“Where does he keep his ideas?” I asked.

“In his bones, my friend! Their ideas, like rheumatism and gout, penetrate into the marrow of their ribs.”

“Is my book read, Master?” the skeleton inquired in a hollow voice.

“No, Professor.”

“Have men forgotten to read?” after a pause.

“No, they read nonsense gladly, as before. But dull trash sometimes has long to wait for its turn. The professor,” Satan turned to me, “had all his life measured women’s skulls in order to prove that woman is not a human being. He sized skulls, ears, counted teeth, and weighed dead brains. Work with dead brains was the professor’s favorite, as his books show. Have you read them ?”

“I do not enter temples through gin-mills. Moreover, I cannot study men from books. In books men are always fractions, and I am poor in arithmetic. Yet I presume that a being, beardless and in skirts, is neither better nor worse than a bearded being in trousers.”’

“Ves,” said the Devil, “a brain will be dull and commonplace independently of its hirsute covering or the garments of its possessor. Yet the Woman’s Question is interestingly put.” The Devil laughed. He always laughs ; that is why he is an agreeable interlocutor. Whoever can and does laugh in a graveyard loves life and mankind, believe me. 'Some who employ woman as wife and slave only, deny that she is human. Others, while enjoying the female, also attempt to exploit her working energy and assert that she is fully competent to work with man, that is, for man. Of course, both, after 'seducing the girl, deny her admission to their society; they are convinced that after her contact with them she is sullied forever. Yes, the Woman’s Question is very amusing. I love naive liars: they resemble children, and there is hope that they may grow up."

The Devil’s face clearly showed that he did not intend to say anything flattering about the future of mankind. But I can myself say a good many derogatory things about their present, and to prevent the Devil from vying with me in this pleasant pastime, I interrupted him:

“They say if the Devil fails in anything he employs a woman to do the job. Is it true?”

He shrugged his shoulders and said: “Yes, occasionally, when there is no clever and unprincipled man on hand.”

“It seems to me that you have ceased to love evil.”

“There is no evil any longer,” he replied, sighing. “There is only the commonplace. Formerly evil was a handsome force. To-day, even killing is done vapidly— the victim is bound. There are no villains, there are but executioners. The executioner is a slave. The hand and axe are guided by fear and terror. Those that are feared are killed.”

The two skeletons stood side by side, the falling leaves hitting their bones. The bleak wind played on their ribs as on strings and buzzed in their empty skulls. A damp, smelling darkness yawned from their deep eye-sockets. Both shivered. I pitied them.

“Let them resume their places!” I said.

“You are a humanist even in the cemetery!” exclaimed Satan. “And yet humanism is more appropriate among corpses; here it offends no one. In factories, on squares and street corners, in prisons and mines, among the living, humanism is ridiculous, and may excite malice. But here no one will mock it; the dead are always sober. I am sure they like to hear about humanism, for it is their stillborn child. Yet there was some reason in placing this beautiful screen on the stage of life to conceal the horror of torture, the cold cruelty of those few who are strong because of the folly of the many.”

Satan haw-hawed the grating laugh of ill-omened truth.

The stars quivered in the dark skies, motionless stood the black stones on the tombs of the past. But its decaying odor oozed through the soil and the wind wafted the breath of the corpses into the slumbering streets of the town, enveloped in the silence of night.

“There are a good many humanists here,” continued Satan, with a broad sweep of his hand. “Some of them have been sincere. Life is full of ludicrous incongruities, and this is perhaps not the most ridiculous one. Alongside of the humanists, peacefully and amicably, repose teachers of life of a different type, those who had attempted to build a solid foundation under the old structure of Lie, so painfully, so diligently erected by myriads of corpses.”

The sounds of a song reached us from afar. Two, three merry sounds floated vibrantly over the cemetery. Some reveler was heedlessly advancing in the dark to his grave.

“Under this heavy stone proudly decay the ashes of a sage who taught that society is an organism like that of an ape or hog. I forget which. An acceptable theory for those who consider themselves the brains of that organism. Almost all politicians and leaders of brigands endorse it. If] am the brain moving the hands at will, I shall always be able to suppress the instinctive resistance of the muscles to my kingly power. Here lie the ashes of a man who called mankind to return to the stage at which they walked on all fours and devoured worms. Those were the happiest days of the race, he zealously strove to show. Is it not original to walk on one’s hind legs, to wear a surtout, and to be urging men to grow a pelt? It is a fine plan to read poetry, listen to music, visit museums, traverse hundreds of miles in a day, and at the same time to preach the simple life in the woods, on four paws, for all others. This one consoled men, justified their lives by proving that criminals are not human, that they are the diseased will, a special antisocial type; they are by nature the enemies of law and morals, and should be treated with scant courtesy. Only death cures crime. That is what I call clever! Is it not shrewd to heap the crimes of all upon one, branding him as the natural receptacle of vice and the organic bearer of evil volition? There will always be found some one justifying the distorted make-up of life that cripples the soul. Yes, the graveyards are rich in ideas for the improvement of life in cities.”

“We will now have a parade of corpses, a rehearsal of Doomsday,” said Satan, striding before me along the serpentine path, amidst stones and knolls. "You know, Doomsday will come, and it will be earth’s happiest day. It will come when men recognize all the crimes perpetrated by their teachers and "legislators, who converted men into worthless shreds of senseless meat and bone. What at present bears the name of man is only a fraction; the whole-souled man is yet to be born. He will arise out of the ashes of Experiment undergone by the world, and absorbing the world’s experience, as the sea swallows the sun’s rays, he will burst forth like a new sun. I shall live to see it. I am the creator of man, I shall create him!?

The old fellow in his boastful vein plunged into unwonted lyrism. This I pardoned. Life distorts even Satan, oxidizing with its poison his well-forged soul.

In a stentorian voice the Devil shouted: “Who is here wise and honest?”

A moment’s pause, then suddenly the earth quaked under my feet, as if plowed by a thousand thunderbolts, or as if some colossus had nervously shifted in its bowels. Yellowish spots dotted the landscape; like blades of dry grass in the wind the skeletons swayed to and fro, filling the stillness with the rustle of bones. Jostling one another, the skeletons clambered upon the stones, surrounding us with a close network of ribs, full of noiseless bustle. The cold laughter of Satan drowned the formless sounds.

“Look, they all came out, every one of them,” he said. “Even the town fools are among them. The earth was nauseated, and vomited from her bowels the dead wisdom of men.”

The humid noise grew rapidly, as if some invisible hand were stirring up a heap of raw garbage.

‘What a large number of honest and wise men!’"’ exclaimed the Devil, spreading his pinions wide over the myriads of fragments that thronged around him.

“Which of you has done most good to mankind?” he asked in a loud voice.

"Let me pass to the front!’ some one cried languidly.

“Here I am, Master! I have demonstrated that the individual is zero in society.”

“I have surpassed him!” someone protested from afar. “I have taught that society is a sum of zeros; hence the masses must submit to the will of separate groups.”

"At the head of the groups stands an individual, and that is myself!’ someone announced triumphantly.

“Why you?” came in alarmed tones from a few.

“My uncle was a king!”

“Was it Your Highness’s uncle whose head was prematurely cut off?”

“Kings always lose their heads at the appropriate time!” was the proud response of the bones descended from bones that had once sat on a throne.

“Oh!” came in a gratified whisper. “We have a scion of Kings among us! Something that cannot be found in every cemetery.”

The humid whispers and rustling of bones merged into a single accord, growing more intense and profound.

“Is it true that royal bones are blue?” hastily inquired a small skeleton with a curved spine.

“Let me tell you,” began impressively a skeleton astride on a monument.

"Mine is the best plaster for corns,’ bawled some one behind him.

“I am the architect who”…

But a broad, squat skeleton, elbowing the crowd with the short bones of his arms, vociferated, drowning the swish of cadaverous voices.

“Brethren in Christ! I am your spiritual physician, who has applied the plaster of benignant solace to your souls’ corns, caused by tribulations of your life.”

“There is no suffering!” some one retorted petulantly. “It exists in the imagination only.”

“I am the architect who invented low doorways”

“I have invented ‘tanglefoot’ for flies.”
… “so that on entering the visitor must bow his head before the host,” dinned the plaguy voice.

“Am I not entitled to the palm, brethren? I have fed your souls, hungering to forget affliction, on the milk and honey of my cogitations about the vanity of all earthly matters.”

“Everything that is must be permanent!” buzzed a muffled voice.

A one-legged skeleton mounted on a gray stone stretched his limb, and cried: “Precisely!”

The grave-yard was transformed into a market-place where each was praising his wares. The dark desert of the night’s stillness was invaded by a turbid river of suppressed outcries, a stream of sordid brag, of squalid egotism. It was like a swarm of mosquitoes hovering over a stagnant swamp, singing, humming, droning, impregnating the atmosphere with the noisome emanation of the grave. They all crowded around the Devil staring at his face out of the dark orbits and grinning at him, as if he were the old clo’-man. One by one dead thoughts were resurrected and floated in the air like pitiable autumn leaves.

Satan’s green eyes looked upon this simmering, and his glance poured a cold phosphorescent gleam upon the jumble of bones before him.

The skeleton that sat at Satan’s fect raised his arms above his skull and, swaying them measuredly, discoursed as follows: '"“A woman must belong to but one man”…

But his lisp was intertwined with other sounds that embraced and pervaded his words:

“The dead alone are cognizant of the Truth.”

“A father, I used to say, is like to a spider”. …

“Our sojourn on the planet is a chaos of errors, opaque darkness.”

“I have been wedded thrice, lawfully” …

“All his life he ceaselessly weaves the web of family weal.”

“And each time to but one woman.”

There suddenly sprung forth a skeleton with loudly creaking yellow porous bones. He raised his crumbling face and volunteered the following:

“I died of syphilis. Nevertheless I respected morality. When my wife betrayed me I submitted her vile transgression to the judgment of Law and Society.”

He was swept away by the throng, and again like the howling of the wind in a chimney came the medley of voices.

“I invented the Electric Chair, which kills painlessly.”

“I consoled people by a promise of eternal bliss beyond the grave.”

“The father gives his children life and food. A man attains the dignity of a man only after he has become a father. Until then he is merely a member of a family.”

An egg-shaped skull with bits of flesh on its face spoke over the heads of others:

“I have proved that Art must bow to the concensus of Opinions and views, habits, and requirements of society.”

Another skeleton mounted on a monument representing a broken tree retorted:

“Freedom can be realized as anarchy only.”

“Art is an agreeable physic for the soul fatigued with life and toil.”

“It is I who has maintained that life is labor,” came from afar.

“Books must be pretty like boxes of pills sold in pharmiacies.”’

“All men must work, some supervise the work; the fruits are to be enjoyed by those predestined to enjoy them for their merits.and deserts.”

“Art must be beautiful and humane. When I tire, its songs lull me to rest.”

“I love free art,” interposed Satan, “art worshipping but one deity, the Goddess of Beauty. It particularly appeals to me when like a chaste youth, dreaming of immortal beauty, thirsting for its enjoyment, it plucks the gaudy raiment from the body of Life,—and beholds her an old reprobate, her flabby skin covered with wrinkles and ulcers. Fiery wrath, longing for beauty, hatred of the stagnant loughs of life,—these attributes of true art I admire. Woman and Satan are the poets’ best friends.”

A groan of brass escaped from the belfry of the chapel and floated over the City of the Dead, invisibly and evenly vibrating in the dark, like a huge bird with transparent wings. The drowsy watchman’s uncertain hand lazily pulled the rope of the bell. The brass sound diffused and died away. But before its last tremor was extinguished there came a sharp ring of the awakened bell of Night.

The surcharged atmosphere oscillated gently and the sorrowful clang of the vibrating metal was saturated with the rustle of bones and hiss of dry voices.

And again I heard the tedious speeches of irritating stupidity, the sticky words of dead banality, the impudent babble of triumphant lie, the mortified grumble of conceit. All the ideas on which people thrive in cities were revised, but not one of which they might be justly proud. There was the jangle of the rusty chains that bind the soul of life, but not one of those flashes that proudly illumine the gloom of the human spirit.

“Where are the heroes?” I asked of Satan.

"They are modest, and their graves forgotten. In life they were being choked; in the graveyard they are smothered by dead bones!’ he replied, flapping his wings to dissipate the concentrated odor of decomposition enclosing us like a dark cloud, in which were diffused the monotonous gray voices of the cadavers.

A shoemaker announced his claim to the gratitude of men; he was the first of his guild to make boots with pointed toes. A man who had described a thousand varieties of spiders asserted that he was the greatest scholar. The inventor of artificial milk peevishly droned, squabbling with the inventor of the rapid-firing gun, who stubbornly expatiated upon the usefulness of his invention. A thousand fine moist twines encircled one’s brain, curling around it like snakes. Whatever they discussed the dead spoke like rigorous moralists, like jailers of life, infatuated with their occupations.

“Enough!” cried Satan. “I am tired. I have had my fill of this both here, and in cities, the cemeteries of the living. You, guardians of truth, back to your graves!”

He shouted this in the iron voice of a potentate accustomed to be obeyed.

The gray-yellow mass of ashes boiled and whirled around like dust struck by a tornado. The ground gaped a thousand dark mouths, and smacking indolently, like a satiated pig, swallowed again the food it had thrown up, to digest it over again. The ghastly rabble vanished, the stones firmly stood in their places. There only remained the stiffling odor whose heavy and moist clasp seized one’s throat.

Satan sat down on a tombstone, leaned his head on his elbows, encircling it with the long fingers of his black hands, his distant gaze lightly fixed upon the monuments. Overhead twinkled the stars; the brass sounds of the bells serenely floated in the clarified skies, rousing the night’s stillness.

“Is it not edifying?” he turned to me. “On this unstable poisonous quicksand of stupid mould, unsophisticated falsehood and sticky banality stands the squalid structure of Laws of Life, a cage in which all of you are penned like sheep by these corpses. Indolence and cowardice to think, reinforce this prison. The true Masters of Life are the dead, and although you are actually ruled by living men, they, in their turn, are inspired by the dead. The Staves are the springs of temporal wisdom. Your Common Sense is a flower grown by the sap of corpses. Rapidly decaying in the ground, the dead yet strive forever to dwell in the soul of the living. The fine, dry dust of dead thoughts easily penetrates the brains of the living; that is why your preachers of wisdom are propagandists of spiritual death.”

Satan raised his head, and his green eyes fixed me like a pair of cold stars.

“What is being preached in the world most persistently ? What is it that men would see unshakably established ? Differentiation, contrast in station, and uniformity of soul; the rectangular monotony of all souls, so that, like bricks, they could be combined to form all geometrical figures desired by the few lords of life. This hypocritical preaching to reconcile the bitter pangs of the enslaved with the cruel and false will of the enslavers’ mind, is called forth by the base desire to slay the creative spirit of protest; it is the villainous attempt out of the voussoirs of falsehood to build the vault for the Spirit of Liberty.”

It was dawning. The stars were paling in expectation of sunrise. But Satan’s eyes were glowing brighter.

"What should be preached to inculcate a complete and beautiful life? Equality of station and individualization of souls. Then life would be a bush of flowers jointed at the root of regard of all for the freedom of each; then life would be a fire burning on the soil of universal Friendship and universal aspiration to rise higher. Then ideas would engage in combat, but men would remain comrades. Is it. impossible? It is bound to be, for it has not yet been!

“The Day is dawning!” continued Satan, with a glance toward the east. “But will the Sun bring joy when night nestles in the human heart? Men have no time to greet the Sun. The majority want but food; some are busy trying to curtail the freedom of others ; some roam about distractedly amid the vanities of life, in quest of freedom, unable to find it in the ceaseless struggle for Bread. In their despair, angered by their lonesomeness, the unfortunates wind up by reconciling the Irreconcilable. Thus founder the best men in the swamps of coarse lies, at first sincerely unconscious of their treason to themselves, later consciously betraying their Faith, their Aspirations.”

He rose and shook his mighty wings.

“I am off in the direction of beautiful possibilities.”

And, accompanied by the sad song of the bell, he flew away westward.

When I told my dream to an American that seemed more human than the rest, he grew thoughtful at first, then exclaimed, with a smile:

“Oh, I see! Satan is employed by a firm of crematory furnaces! That’s it! Ail that he has told you proves the necessity of cremating bodies. But what a splendid agent! To forward the interests of his firm he even appears in dreams!”

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