Mother Earth

To the Enemies of Free Speech

By Wm. Francis Barnard

“As well to lay your hands upon the Sun And try with bonds to bind the morning light, As well on the Four Winds to spend your might, As well to strive against the Streams that run; As well to bar the Seasons, bid be done The Rain which falls; as well to blindly fight Against the Air, and at your folly’s height Aspire to make all power that is, be none. As well to do all this as to impeach Man’s tongue, and bid it answer to the schools; As well to do all this, as give us rules, And bid us hold our words within your reach; As well all this, as try to chain man’s speech, So others learned before ye lived, O fools!”

A Year’s Struggle

This is the twelfth number of “Mother Earth.” Contrary to the wishes of some “good friends” and the police, the magazine has lived to celebrate its first anniversary.

The experience gained by the publishers during the year does not quite harmonize with the joyous hope enthusiastically entertained at the birth of the magazine. They had dreamed of a publication wherein independent science, literature and art should celebrate their happy union with Anarchism. The magazine was to be the armory of modern libertarian thought and of the revolutionary spirit of the times; it was to treasure the gems of daring thinkers, the creations and criticisms of independent literateurs, who have risen above the hollow allurements of popular success.

They hoped “Mother Earth” would prove the banner around which would gather men and women, to whom the stock phrases of the present are mere dross; men and women who demand new values for our social, literary and artistic life.

All too high ideals! The publisher did not sufficiently consider the American spirit of commercialism and the lack of interest in any struggle whose practical success is not measurable in dollars and cents.

The spirit of commercialism, dominating literature, has transformed it into a trade, whose main object it is to secure one a good income. The grocer deals in spices; the journalist—in ideas, necessarily commonplace, because intended for popular, wholesale consumption. Thus the journalists, instead of being the torch-bearers of ideals, the pathfinders of a higher life, become the slaves of popular prejudice, the conservators of superstition and of the undeveloped tastes of the masses.

Publications like “Mother Earth,” seeking to make accessible new thought-centres, dangerous to the existing order of things, can count, under such conditions, but upon very few able contributors. Slowly they gather their literary fellow-fighters.

On the other hand, “Mother Earth” was in danger of becoming the noose, with which the liberty of the publisher and contributors was to be strangled.

The October number contained several articles analyzing the personality and act of Leon Czolgosz. They had the good effect of breaking the philistine silence in the ranks of our "radicals,'—the dead silence which had for years enshrouded the case of Czolgosz. The articles further resulted in the well-known persecution and brutality on the part of the police.

Examination into the motives of the act of 1901 must have necessarily lifted the veil from one of the most abominable presidential epochs of this republic, thus disclosing the most sensitive spots of governmental authority—the very spots which official hypocrisy eternally endeavors to hide from the public gaze. The people must not be suffered to suspect their supposed servants in Cabinet and Congress.

On the day of the police hearing in the case of the publisher of “Mother Earth” and the other accused comrades, charged with participation in a meeting of “criminal Anarchy,” we could see detectives diligently studying the pages of “Mother Earth.” They marked various places in the magazine, underscoring passages they deemed dangerous. They were evidently equipping themselves mentally for the coming struggle with Anarchy. They failed miserably. The subsequent court proceedings disclosed the pitiable ignorance of the police officers, an ignorance gigantic in extent.

The persecution on the part of the authorities achieved nothing, though they succeeded in causing some “radical” organizations and agents to withdraw the magazine from sale, which action resulted in considerable financial loss to “Mother Earth.”

If, notwithstanding all these difficulties, the magazine has continued its publication, it is due primarily to the loyalty and financial assistance of individual comrades who could not be terrorized out of their convictions. Their faithful efforts aided our own defiance and determination not to permit the magazine to become a victim to the arbitrariness and baseness of the Pretorians of Law and “Order.”

Our lawgivers have been legislating against Anarchism, but they have so far by no means succeeded in conquering either Anarchism or “Mother Earth.”

With renewed energy and hope we enter upon the second year. We are endeavoring to gain new, able coworkers and we hope to still further increase the propagandistic and literary standard of the magazine.

And you, Comrades, can materially aid our efforts by enlisting new friends for “Mother Earth.”

Observations and Comments

The liberal movement has recently suffered some heavy losses. In the last number of Mother Earth was reported the death of Ernest H. Crosby, an interesting character sketch of whom the readers will find in this issue. To-day we regret to note the death of Mr. Hugh O. Pentecost, who passed away Saturday evening, February 2d, after a long and painful illness.

We shall speak of Mr. Pentecost’s life and activity in our next issue; for the present we would merely say that we mourn the loss of a charming and brilliant worker in the cause of emancipation, and a true friend.

Secretary of the Treasury Shaw is still busy adducing proof for his recent assertion as to the wonderful prosperity of the American people.

He says that the banks show greater returns, our exports have increased, and that sixty million dollars were spent during the year for automobiles; last, but not least, our trade in jewelry is flourishing.

Mr. Shaw need subject his mighty intellect to no further strain to bring more similar proofs. Pierpont Morgan is buying up the works of old masters, and a few millions more or less make no difference, even though the Rembrandts occasionally prove to have been manufactured by Mr. Bonhomme, Herr Lehman or Isidor Cohen. Mr. Morgan can afford to be swindled out of fifty thousand dollars, since the American people enjoy such great prosperity.

The President wishes the shipbuilders to be subsidized by the Government; do we need a better proof of prosperity, than that the people are willing to support the shipbuilders with public funds? We will at least have the pleasure of knowing that our own shipbuilders pocket the profits heretofore absorbed by their European competitors.

A very rich woman has founded a hospital for consumptive rats, and Mrs. Russel Sage has donated a million dollars for a polytechnic institute; this proves again that the American people are enjoying great wealth.

No Russian statesman, however, would be so silly as to claim prosperity for the Russian people, on the ground that the Romanoff dynasty is the richest reigning house in the world.

Such fancy-lies are believed only in a Republic, by a democracy, because here we still believe the pathetic fairy tale that no dynasty exists in our land, and that the prosperity of Wall Street is identical with national well-being.

Our two Presidents have taken their final stand in the case of Moyer and Haywood. The one actively, in favor of the accusers, the perjurers and mine owners, the other negatively, cravenly ignoring the demands of justice and right—Roosevelt and Gompers.

According to the last message of Governor Gooding to the Legislature of Idaho, President Roosevelt is heart and soul with the Standard Oil agents who have inaugurated a murderous campaign against the leaders of the Western Miners’ Union.

Roosevelt understands his mission. As Chief of a Government controlled by the moneyed oligarchy, he wages war against all demands of the so-called lower strata antagonistic to this oligarchy. Those understanding the true mission of government will expect nothing different from Teddy. It is astonishing however, with what brazen effrontery he takes his stand on the side of Labor’s enemy.

The cowardly manner in which the President of the American Federation of Labor has evaded this important issue is truly despicable. Asked by the Central Federated Union of New York to call a national conference in the Moyer and Haywood matter, Gompers declined on the ground that the moment was not opportune for any public action in their behalf,

The most important labor organization in the United States is making no decisive effort to save labor leaders from the cannibals of Mammon. The millionaires, reverends and prominent citizens of the Civic Federation have good reason to be satisfied. Their coquetting with the labor organizations, their dining and wining of Gompers, Mitchell, et al., has unnerved organized labor and made it unfit for an earnest fight with the enemy.

Powderly, during the infamous Haymarket Trial, had at least this excuse for his shameful attitude—the defendants were Anarchists. Gompers lacks even this refuge.

The case of Moyer and Haywood is very simple. The Western Miners’ Union was a thorn in the side of the operators; its leaders were never banqueted, nor were they conferred with as to the pacification of Labor and Capital. The Western Miners’ Union, led by these revolutionary spirits, could neither be bribed nor subdued. The kidnapping and trial of their leaders is the result. The authorities have once more proved themselves the faithful lackeys of the exploiters.

All that is self-evident. It is terrible, however, to realize that an organization like the American Federation of Labor should so shamefully forsake its brothers in distress. Or perchance 'tis not the organization, but the leaders?! If so, the outraged rank and file should, stormlike, sweep away the débris of their rotten officialdom.

The strenuous efforts of the Police Anarchist Squad have ended in a farce. They have tried to save the country by making arrests on three occasions, but each time the grand jury and the District Attorney have dismissed the cases, on the ground that the police testimony Was too incoherent and stupid to warrant an indictment. Most of the arrested were fortunate enough to be bailed out soon after their arrest, while those who could not be bailed out were forced to enjoy the hospitality of the Tombs—some for 30, others for 70 days; the latter learned, as part of their prison experience, that the turnkeys, being of a better clay than the common mortal, were not ordinary thieves, but kleptomaniacs—things and money sent by friends never reached their destination.

The police are now trying to avenge their failure by terrorizing the hall-keepers. The police club continues to be the strongest argument of the American Constitution. We, however, are more than ever determined to continue our work and to show that neither brutality nor ignorance can stop the growth of Anarchism.

Moral New York will not suffer the performance of “Salome.” The men all say the opera is shockingly immoral; yet they would all flock to see and hear it, if it were given for “gentlemen only.” The women chime in, “Oh, ‘Salome’ is so perverse!” Yet they think, “What a bore our correct, moral marriage is!” They would all dearly love to see “Salome,” just because of its alleged perversity ; but if their secret desire were publicly known, oh, what would Mrs. Grundy say!

Meanwhile, the discussion as to whether the opera is sufficiently moral or all too immoral displays the ignorance and barbarism of the participants. Only Puritans and barbarians measure art in the common scale of morality. If judged, however, by its artistic quality and pulsating life, “Salome” takes first rank. Authors who have anything original to say about humanity, its tragedies and comedies, should by concerted action refuse their works to American managers and publishers, because it is not wise to cast pearls before puritanic swine.

But few Socialists have the courage of Mr. H. G. Wells. The latter sees in the State the supreme arbiter, whose control of the individual—from cradle to grave— should be absolute. Other Socialists, however, would be ashamed to acknowledge such idolatry. Asked what latitude individuality would enjoy under their régime, they pleasantly reply, “Oh, certainly, it will be looked after.”

Mr. Wells is more consistent. To him, the State is THE aim, to which all other aims must be made subservient.

In an article on “Motherhood and the State,” in the New York Herald, he makes the following statement:

“Socialism says boldly the State is the over-parent, the outer-parent. People rear children for the State and the future; if they do that well, they do the whole world a service, and deserve payment just as much as if they built a bridge or raised a crop of wheat. . . . The State will pay for children born legitimately in the marriage it will sanction. A woman with healthy and successful offspring will draw a wage for each one of them from the State so long as they go on well. It will be her wage. Under the State she will control her child’s upbringing.”

In the present State we have merely converted love into a trade and degraded it into prostitution; that, however, does not reach the height of Mr. Wells’s poetic fancy. He aims toward a higher development in the Socialistic State: the consecration of motherhood to prostitution.

Not mankind, but the believers only are acknowledged by the Church as God’s children; so does Mr. Wells and his future State see in men not individualities, but servants of the State, instruments to be utilized for the benefit of that monster deity.

But, Mr. Wells, will the mere legitimacy of children suffice for the purposes of the State? Even correctly-born children may grow up idiots, misfits, and paralytics. Matrimony itself is an idiotic institution. To be sure, permission to marry would be conditioned by a medical examination—very suggestive of all well-regulated brothels where such practice obtains even now. But even the most careful examination cannot guarantee that the unborn child will be worth the State-paid price for its production. Besides, how easily an illegitimate baby can be passed off for a legitimate child; Mankind is so corrupt! It is just possible that notwithstanding a perfectly correct marriage a woman should fall in love with another man. Could the State prevent their intimacy or the possible result of an offspring? Think how the dignity of the State would suffer if Mr. McCarthy should palm off upon the State a child whose real father is Mr. McIntyre! Mr. Wells can go but one step further in his State idolatry. To realize his highest ideal, and that no mistakes happen, the strictest inspection of cohabitation must be exercised by the State.

On the stage the hero often administers a thrashing to the villain, though both are secretly striving toward the same end—to seduce the daughter of the honest man. The villain is thrashed because it produces a good moral effect on the honest man.

The thrashing the radical French Ministry is now administering to the Catholic Church reminds one of theatrical farces. The priest has to play the villain because the Ministry wishes to make a good impression on the working-class. The latter, however, are interested in other things. They have been repeatedly advised by MM. Millerand and Jaurés that they must secure political influence in order to improve their economic and social condition. The necessary influence has now been partly gained. Side by side with the bourgeois radicals— who, too, prate a good deal of social and economic improvement—there are Social Democratic members in the Ministry. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. Now is the time to show results. Confidentially the gentlemen in authority admit that they can accomplish nothing. The government is the political representative of the possessing class, whose very existence is the cause of labor’s enslavement and the poverty of the masses. Consequently, should justice ever be realized and the producer emancipated from exploitation, private property must cease. In other words, Government and Capitalism must be abolished. But can we reasonably expect that the radical ministry will abolish itself? Yet something has to be done to show the people the good-will of the ministry. Hence, the war against the Church, in the hope to divert the attention of the people from more important issues.

It is quite natural that the Socialist member in the Ministry, Briand, is proving himself the most strenuous opponent of the Church. In his ante-ministerial days he dreamed of the Social revolution, direct action and the general strike. Now nothing would please him better than to blot the past from the memory of his constituents.

One of the essays of the French writer, Urbain Gohier, contains a comparison of medieval tyranny with that of the present day. He concludes that modern tyranny, though masked as democracy, is characterized by much more cunning and fraud than formerly. “Perhaps the cleverest act of the bourgeoisie,” says

Gohier, “has been its exploitation of the spirit of patriotism. The feudal lords never thought of this. Having established their domination over the land, they accepted the task of defending it against all enemies. During the middle ages it was a generally accepted principle, which was as just as it was logical, that every man owed military service to the country in proportion to his wealth, especially in proportion to his landed wealth. The person who owned nothing had nothing to defend, and so was not expected to do military service. - . . It was the Bourgeoisie, become sovereign, that invented obligatory and unpaid military service. . . . The ancient régime kept in check the working classes by mercenaries, generally Swiss, Germans or Irish. But the bourgeois régime of to-day decimates strikers by the hands of the sons of these very strikers; proletarians are shot down by proletarians, an arrangement which is as economical as it is amazing.”

Yes, that’s the trick of democracy—to rob, oppress and kill the people in the name of the people.

Among Barbarians

By Emma Goldman

The difference between a barbarian and a truly civilized being is this: While the former sets up his own opinion as the universal criterion, the latter recognizes no stagnation in the world of ideas; the barbarian condemns; the civilized man endeavors to understand.

The barbarian says, “We live in the most progressive land; we have achieved all that is possible.” He considers contrary opinions as criminal and disturbing the harmony of things.

Barbarism is a stagnant swamp; intellectual liberty is the flowing river, the raging torrent carrying away the riff-raff of old, decayed institutions.

This barbarism is the great foe of the libertarian and revolutionary element in America. Not the revolutionists only, but also the innovators in the fields of art and literature have no less to endure from the barbarians, though in different form.

The Anarchists are persecuted by absurd legislation; the revolutionaries in art and literature, by our public opinion and moral standards. Anarchists are the victims of police brutality; the artists, dissatisfied with the art conceptions of parlor estheticists, suffer the condemnation of Mrs. Grundy.

Woe to the American artist who will not be the slave of Puritanic hypocrisy. He would die of starvation were he to depend upon his art for the means of subsistence.

It would be difficult to find a judge in the United States who could see in Anarchistic defendants the representatives of a new conception of life; a new world-philosophy, intimately related with the social, scientific, artistic and economic currents of past generations.

In this respect the revolutionists of Europe have the advantage. The authorities of France, Germany, Italy and Russia lack the spirit of the American parvenu, whose most characteristic trait is conceit. Worldly successful, he considers himself perfect; but the self-made man is usually a god-made ass.

European civilization has outgrown the spirit of the parvenu. World-changing revolutions have taken place; and where these lacked, deep-rooted currents developed the consciousness that humanity cannot remain at a standstill.

There, even the powers that be have to some extent fallen under the broadening influence of a higher civilization. Naturally, their interests will determine their inimical attitude towards the heralds of new ideas; still, their antagonism is not of a character to stamp the revolutionists as criminals and degenerates, as is the case in this country.

A Parisian judge, daily passing the site where formerly stood the Bastille, or the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Gardens—each and every stone loudly proclaiming the historic mutability of all that is—must necessarily awaken to a clearer appreciation of revolutionary ideas than his American colleague. The latter firmly believes that the path of our social and intellectual growth has been finally and irrevocably marked out by the revolutionary fathers of the republic.

Recent Adventures of St. Anthony

By M. B.

His term of service was at an end. His long years of activity as the Pinkerton of his country’s morality brought a rich harvest. Patiently he had endured scorn, contempt and contumely, but neither ridicule nor cowhiding succeeded in awakening his intelligence.

In art circles he was looked upon as a wild boar that, breaking through the brush, roots up the tender sprouts in order to destroy the young germinating life.

Writers of consequence were of the opinion that the postal censorship in his hands was equivalent to placing a sharp carving knife in the hands of a hydrocephalus with instructions for indiscriminate attack.

With the exception of Hearst’s literary hacks, no one favored the objects of this nudity sniffer. His cause seemed on the decline. The government were glad to dispense with his services at the first opportunity.

St. Anthony grew still more pious and moral as this fear took possession of him. Possibly he would be even called upon to return the pictures and figures of nude women and the obscene literature he so zealously confiscated from the sinners against the postal censorship. He had grown so attached to those unclothed things and loved to scrutinize them in their minutest details.

Worriedly he gazed into the mirror. Oh, the contrariness of nature! Instead of giving him the aspect of a Saint, she had endowed him with the looks of an abortive faun. Again it was apparent that nature is a mean woman. And yet—murmured our hero—I wish I were a woman, that I might wear a veil to hide my ugly nudity,

His sorrow was soon changed into great joy. Postmaster-General Cortelyou sent him a letter of congratulation and appreciation. “The services you have rendered the cause of morality have been very great. Your term of office will therefore be continued. The government has voted you a high salary—what do we care about public opinion!”

Cortelyou has fully grasped the mission of government. The latter needs patient subjects and submissive slaves. These are most successfully reared with the catechism, patriotic lies and by moral preachers who extoll moderation, submission and resignation as the highest virtues.

The exposition of naked truth is dangerous to government, because it stimulates the love of life and the joy of the senses. The masses, however, must work rather than enjoy. Were they to grasp the depth and beauty of life, they would speedily cease their helot existence and turn their faces to the light of life.

The government must therefore acknowledge only untruthful art. The artist must market such pictures only which represent the prodigal son as feeding on husks, because he failed as a profit-maker, or as Roosevelt, storming the hill and thus saving the republic from destruction.

Such pictures stimulate virtue and patriotic murder.

“Oh, dear Cortelyou! You, at least, have not proved a disappointment to me”—thus spoke Anthony.

That night he was in high glee, and as he fell into the arms of Morpheus, he dreamed of his beautiful clay figures and the virtuous Diana.

Next morning he took a stroll through the town. On his way he remarked that all the canines made haste to escape at his approach. Be their object on the street corners ever so important, they lost no time as soon as they beheld our hero. Highly surprised, he mused long over the strange phenomenon. At last he approached one of the streetcleaners, “Kindly tell me what is the matter with the dogs in your district,” he asked. “Oh, came the reply, our dogs are very intelligent. They know that Cortelyou has continued you in your position and they fear lest you should reproach them with their naked legs.”

Sabbath in the country! Though January, a soft breeze tenderly whispers among the leafless branches. The sun-kissed spots are as warm as spring. Puritanism reigns supreme through the length and breadth of the country. In the houses stupidity, grey and toothless, sits brooding, undisturbed by the Sunday city papers. If a god of joy created the world, he purposely punished the Puritans with the terrible Sunday ennui for their sacrilegious libel of life and ignorance of its joy. Proceeding on his way, Anthony beholds a frog in the act of jumping into the brooklet. “Ashamed of his nakedness, in my presence,” soliloquises our saint. Moved to tears by such praiseworthy morality, Anthony exclaims, “There are only two beings in the whole wide world that understand me—Cortelyou and the frog.”

The Thieves’ Convention

From “The Public.”

A number of thieves were conversing.

“I was not punished,” said one: “I merely stole franchises, and they became vested rights before the people realized it.”

“I was not punished,” said another: “I was a public official and stole from the public. They only made me pay it back.”

“They did not punish me,” said a third; “I stole more than the people could count.”

“I was not punished,” said the banker; “I only stole from depositors. They have no rights which are bound to be respected.”

“I was not punished,” said the politician; “I stood in with the machine which could not afford to lose one of its trusted members.”

“I was not punished,” said the man of social prominence; “there were too many involved with me.”

“I was punished,” said the wageworker; “I had no money, no friends and no job. I stole a loaf of bread to keep my family from starvation.”

Ellis O. Jones.

The Democracy of Walt Whitman

By Elisabeth Burns Ferm

(Concluded.)

If class or caste were anything else than ideas, they would long ago have been consigned to a museum and classed with other antique things. For my part, I would treat an idea or opinion, that had nothing to recommend it but its age, as I would treat a wig, and old stove-pipe hat, a flounced dress, or an old hoop skirt.

Although the signs of democracy are obscured in the present conventional life, there are signs—spasmodic, uncertain and contradictory though they be— which show that democracy is still a disturbing factor to our accepted aristocratic notions.

Respect for the leisure class is dead or almost so, and with it has gone the admiration for the lisping, clinging, dinky type of woman. The fainting woman is now as uncommon as she was once common. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, when the men showed that they were no longer willing to run for water and support her drooping form, women stopped fainting. As man developed a wider knowledge of himself, he became impatient with the clinging, because it hampered his own movements.

Woman, at the present time, is aware of the change. She knows that she must walk the highway with man and ask no quarter from him, or take the alternative of sitting by the road with the prospect of being picked up, by him, on his way back. For man is no longer willing to stunt his own growth to keep the relationship. Woman has realized this, and see how it has influenced her. Instead of the old affected timidity and delicacy, she is now ashamed of them and tries to hide the fact, if such is her actual state.

The woman of to-day does not cling to the man; she walks beside him as his equal. Of course changes have come to the woman from trudging on the highway in the sun and air. She has lost her alabaster-like skin, enlarged her feet and expanded her whole body. If she is to be the companion of the man she must take strides to keep up with him. So the proverbial 344, or never larger than 4 shoe, has been discarded. The eighteen-inch waist did not allow for any breathing capacity, so the old contrivances have been thrown off, until the woman of to-day is, I think, as freely dressed as the man. As united man and woman is the unit of society, the relation which they hold to each other must vitally affect the whole social structure.

The child forms his conceptions of human equality from the sense impressions which he receives from his relation to his parents and their relation to each other. If there is no equality between his father and mother, the child’s instinct of equality will be overlaid by other impressions and conceptions. If equality is repudiated in the lives of his parents, where is the child going to find it?

The strongest sign of a conscious democracy is to be found in the sense of equality between man and woman at the present time.

The contrast between the Old World and the New World is also significant. The life in the Old World found its satisfaction in the ideals which it held before and above man.

Man in that old life was unable to realize the qualities which he felt were inherent in human life; so he projected his unsatisfied craving into the arts. Painting, sculpture, music and literature diverted man from the actual things and conditions about him, and cultivated an imagination which made him content with the image of that which he should have realized as palpable and tangible in his own life.

The customs of the Old World tend to express veneration and respect for the past. The New World expresses none of those things. America has other work on hand. She has no time to idealize or dramatize the phases of human life. She is busy preparing a race of men and women that shall be fitted to realize their humanity through living the human life. When man has touched his own soul, by fulfilling the law of his own being, his own life will be revealed to him. When man has realized the force and necessity of his own particular life, what is left for him to aspire after, hope for, or imagine of life.

In the transition stage of the present time the ideas and opinions of the past are outgrown. We are like a youth fluctuating between boyhood and manhood. We agree to do more than we are able to execute. Our efforts are spasmodic and our expressions contradictory. The hero’s return is worked up to the highest pitch of excitement, but before the pageant is well out of sight the hero is half forgotten, and the people are again concerned about the details of their everyday life. Monuments are built to celebrate a victory, and they crumble down because they were too flimsy to last, and the people have lost the enthusiasm which is necessary to rebuild them. Even our Fourth of July has lost its significance, although we make just as much bluster with powder and shouting. Perhaps more than when the day was sacred in the memory of Americans. When the hero of Manila Bay returned, he received the greatest demonstration that has ever been given to any man, but how did the people receive the proposition for his nomination for President? They ridiculed the idea, and yet it is not very ancient history that General Grant was nominated and elected President for no better reason than his success in battle. In the first heat of enthusiasm Admiral Dewey could not walk on Broadway. The people were so anxious to touch or look at their idol that he had to seek refuge with Mrs. Dewey in one of the stores. I suppose he comes to New York now, but not even the newspapers refer to his arrival.

In these convulsive actions lies our great encouragement. They are the throes of the dying aristocrat in America.

It is true that over six thousand human beings were recently drenched to the skin trying to catch a glimpse of a Prince. That is a discouraging fact, but when I think of the many times six thousand souls who did not show that flunkeyism its aspect is not so serious.

Ideality, sentimentality and gush about men are falling away. They were the swaddling clothes of the race. The time has come for man to realize, in his own life, the qualities which heretofore were looked upon as abstract and unattainable.

Bishop Potter may deplore the loss of manners in America; Cardinal Gibbons the masculine traits which women are showing, and the lost art of entertaining.

Their lamentations will not restore old states and old conditions; so it behooves them to wipe their spectacles and take a good look at the sturdy American which these United States is breeding.

To shatter ideals and break down the goals by which man has heretofore been lifted up and out of himself may seem like an attack on all that is beautiful and true in life. Ideals are often only another name for idols. I have seen the effect of idealistic states on others and I have realized them in my own life, and my conclusion is, that such transports have great shadows trailing after them.

The cloister casts a reproach on the whole outside world, and it is, ignorantly, I think, responsible for the distorted sex conceptions which none are free from except the very young child. Whitman says:

"I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!

These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you."

Whitman is the poet of democracy. He experienced the life of humanity by living the life of a man. He felt the force of human impulses in the life of others, but he recognized that men and women were unconscious of their human condition. Whitman has loosened the tongue of humanity by daring to say the word which it could not utter.

Whitman knew the word would release the pent-up feelings of individual man.

Our actions must prove whether the word is our word or not; whether it is worth all that it cost Whitman to say it.

The response that Whitman craved from his fellow beings was their realization of democracy.

If I interpret Whitman correctly, he did not shatter the ideas of man and then idealize man. Whitman did vastly better than that. He took man down from Heaven, drew him out of Hell, and placed him with his feet on the solid earth, so that he might realize his humanity.

Whitman saw all the good and bad aspects of human action, but he also saw that man was intact as man, no 'matter what form his life took. Whitman knew that a man was never lost in an act, but unfolds his consciousness of life through his act. Whitman excludes no expression of man from life. He saw that every manifestation was an expression of life; that it proceeded from life and must ultimately be conjoined to life again in man’s consciousness.

Whitman realized that every virtue and every vice were common to himself—not potential, not possible, not probable, but experienced in and through his daily life.

“What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is me— Me going in for my chances, Spending for vast returns.”

Through his knowledge of himself Whitman was able to see the true proportions of other men. He knew that experience was necessary to consciousness. The form and degree of an experience he knew could never be identical with another’s; but the essential thing, which constitutes and makes an experience an experience, he knew was the same in every man.

Form must be as “fluid and flowing” as life itself. A fixed form, a conventionality, is a check and obstruction to the flow of life. In the degree that man realizes this it releases him from conservatism and conventionality. Conservatism and conventionality are the outcome of crude conceptions, which try to grasp and hold things in a fixed and changeless form. As man unfolds a broader consciousness he finds that so many fixed things hamper his own life; so he relinquishes them and frees himself.

When he is a free man he is able to look every man, whether titled or untitled, rich or poor, distinguished or degraded, learned or ignorant, dirty or clean, in the face; unabashed, unafraid, because he knows that when he looks into another man he looks into himself.

This sense of human equality will compel the democrat to take no privilege and give no privilege. To secure no influence for himself and use no influence for others. He will not accept freer conditions nor greater opportunities for himself than the commonest man may have. Indeed, there shall be no common man in a democracy unless, as Ernest Crosby says, it comes to mean common life, common aspirations, community of interests, communion of man with man.

The democrat will recognize in humanity what he knows to be true of himself, that every vice is balanced by a virtue, and every virtue is balanced by a vice. The ideal, the wonderful, the extraordinary, will be realized by the democrat in the simple ordinary living of the ordinary man and woman.

"Not to chisel ornaments,

But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous supreme Gods, that the States may realize them walking and talking."

There is no vicarious atonement, so Whitman cannot establish a democracy for us. We must desire to see the earth so peopled before we can hope to realize it. Many of us are not ready to share or give up our advantages, so we must satisfy ourselves with the husks of democracy—the idea of it.

When we are truly anxious to establish the democratic life, we shall find that the material is very close to hand and has ever been. So, in the life of the child. If we adults were in full earnest about the democratic life, we would recognize the signs in childhood and devote our lives to its preservation. Not by teaching the child about democracy, not by training him to be one, but by recognizing that he is one, and not attempting to instill into his life the artificiality and conventionality with which we were inoculated. We must do our part toward the realization of the democratic life consciously, as befits adult life.

Let us begin by removing the outer restrictions which our ignorance of life has caused us to place about the child. And if our development will not allow us to go as far as the child, why should we hinder his advancement? What do we know about that particular unique expression of human life, that would warrant us in directing or hindering it?

We do not understand ourselves sufficiently to be able to decide readily as to what is best in the relation of our own life, so why assume a wisdom in dealing with another life which we do not possess? I believe that if we are ever to understand the all-rounded nature of the human being, we must sit humbly at the feet of the child to get that knowledge.

When Seton-Thompson wants to learn something about animal life, he does not go to the “Zoo.” He goes to the far West, and when he gets there he hides himself, if need be, in a “garbage heap” so that his presence may not divert the animal from his natural way. When we are willing to do as much for knowledge of child life, we may expect to understand what our children are trying to manifest. To understand children we are not forced to hide or disguise ourselves; all we have to do is to live with them. They are ready for us, but we do not seem to be ready for them.

When we are ready to live with them, we will know that the child must have freedom to express himself as a whole, so that he may develop a large sense of self.

The child has the impulse to work from within; let us respond to that impulse. When the child works from within he gets in touch with his own soul. His whole being is invigorated when he works from an inner necessity.

“The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson but its own.”

Then let us strive to preserve the spirit of democracy which our children show, by recognizing that it exists among them,

Even if we cannot free ourselves from the conventional rut into which we have fallen, we can, if we are even half earnest, stop driving our children along the same road.

“Only the kernel of every object nourished. Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me.”

Some Reminiscences of Ernest Crosby

By Leonard D. Abbott

It seems appropriate that I should get a request from “Mother Earth” for an article on Ernest Crosby, for my first vivid memory of Crosby has to do with his fellowship with Anarchists. One afternoon—it is eight years ago now—he wrote me that he was “going up to Justus Schwab, the Anarchist, to have an interview with Emma Goldman. They want me to help secure the pardon of a Homestead rioter,” he said, “and perhaps you would like to meet them.” I knew Crosby very slightly at the time, but was eager to know him better, and I accepted his invitation with alacrity. I remember, as though it were yesterday, our walk together through the darkening streets of the East Side. Our objective point was Schwab’s saloon on First Street, and when we entered, Schwab was standing behind the counter dispensing liquor to his guests. I thought he looked more like a poet than a saloon-keeper, and I liked his fine blonde head and blue eyes, from the first. Emma Goldman was there, too; and it turned out that the "Homestead rioter’ mentioned in Crosby’s letter was no other than Alexander Berkman, at that time confined in prison. We had a lengthy conference about Berkman’s case, and Crosby promised to do everything in his power to secure the prisoner’s release. He took this attitude not merely because he thought Berkman had been too severely punished, but because, as he explained to me, he did not believe in prisons. The next day he wrote a letter in Berkman’s behalf to Andrew Carnegie. It brought no tangible results. Berkman had to serve out his term. But the incident was typical, and that is why it is worth recounting here. Crosby was forever the knight-errant, championing the cause of those who could not help themselves. Whether it was Berkman in jail in 1898, or John Turner held at Ellis Island in 1904, he was always ready with his service, always brave and fearless, always loyal to the uttermost truth.

I remember another occasion when Crosby came into dramatic contact with the Anarchists. He had been invited to address an East Side Anarchist Club, and he chose to discuss the question of “Force or Non-Resistance” as a working policy in life. The little hall was packed, and some of the ablest Anarchist thinkers were there. I have never heard Crosby speak better, and the burden of his message was this: “Anarchism is a noble ideal, and it will conquer. But it must be won by love, not by force.” The debate that followed his speech was tense and prolonged. I do not think he won many converts to his point of view. Almost all who participated in the discussion took the position that force was regrettable, but probably inevitable.

By reason of its contrasts and its apparent paradoxes, Crosby’s career was in some ways the most remarkable, the most romantic, that I have ever known. He came of conservative environment, and married a very wealthy woman. During the greater part of his life his ideals were merely conventional. He was thirty-eight years old when the great change fell upon him that revolutionized his whole nature. He was living in Alexandria, in Egypt at the time, and he was getting $10,000 a year as a Judge of the International Court there. The whole story of the inner change through which he passed may never be known. But he has told me that quite suddenly, quite definitely, one day, a radiant vision, an entirely new thought of life, came to him. He had been unhappy and in great spiritual travail. The heartless and luxurious life around him, a growing sense of the hideous injustice involved in Egypt’s slavery to the Powers, a growing disinclination to sit in “judgment” upon any man—above all, a chance book of Leo Tolstoy that had fallen into his hands—all these things had paved the way for a kind of spiritual re-birth. He threw up his position at Alexandria, made a pilgrimage to Tolstoy in Russia, and then came back to the United States to devote his life to a crusade in behalf of ideals. Tolstoy was always his master. It was Tolstoy who told him of Henry George, and through George’s influence he became an ardent Single-Taxer. The third great influence in his life was Walt Whitman.

Crosby was more of an Anarchist than a Socialist, and his differentiation between the two philosophies was not a slight thing. It was a point to which he recurred again and again. He made a careful and detailed study of the Socialist position, but came out of his investigation apparently more hostile to Socialism than when he started. At the conference in the Stokes mansion at Noroton last year, he sided with the Individualists rather than with the Socialists, and when Jack London was last in New York, Crosby took strongly anti-Socialist ground in arguing with him. The last communication that Crosby ever sent me was an article supporting Lafcadio Hearn’s theory that Socialism is a “reversion” to outgrown social forms. The article closes: “All praise to the Socialists for their condemnation of current injustice! But when they ascribe it to individualism they make a mistaken diagnosis. It is the denial of true individualism by monopoly and prejudice that lies at the root of our social ills, and the remedy lies in making the individual still more master of himself and not in enslaving him to an organization raised to life from prehistoric tombs.” I tried constantly to argue Crosby out of this attitude, urging upon him the claims of a libertarian Socialism. He said that he liked the spirit of many Socialists, but that he regarded the Socialism of Marx, in its world-sense, as a menace to human growth and liberty. Taking up the point at length in one of his letters, he wrote to me: “A Socialist state would require an angelic spirit in all its members, and that we shall not have for centuries. Meanwhile, the securing of justice seems to me a big enough field for political work, while outside of politics we can all do what we can to foment the co-operative spirit. The temptation to join a great world-movement is immense, but I cannot do it, just as I cannot join the Roman Catholic Church, because its dogmas are contradicted by my reason. I am consoled by the fact that others see things the same way. Tolstoy for instance, and I am sure Whitman would have joined no party, nor do Carpenter’s Essays seem to point that way either. It would be a delight to me to ‘pitch into’ something, and I know that I am not without talents in that line, for I was a very fair Republican politician in my time, but conscience prevents.” Yet, in spite of these words, I claim for Crosby a fellowship in that larger Socialism which embraces such men as William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Eugene Debs, George Herron and Maxim Gorky. Morris’s portrait hung on the wall of his study. He wrote a little book interpreting Carpenter to Americans. He knew and loved Debs and Herron. And he visited Gorky both in Staten Island and the Adirondacks.

In one sense, Crosby was Socialistic rather than Anarchistic. He believed in the ballot. In his earlier poems, it is true, he contemptuously links the ballot-box with the musket, and for several years he refused to vote “on principle.” But during the last part of his life he took a lively interest in politics. He voted on several occasions and explained at length his reasons for so doing. These reasons disappointed many of his friends. Speaking for myself, I felt that Crosby’s acceptance of the ballot as an instrument for promoting social advance, was a step forward, but I heartily regretted that he chose to vote for men so infinitely inferior to himself as Alton B. Parker and William R. Hearst.

Ernest Crosby was a man of amazingly large sympathies; he was as remarkable for his poise and tolerance as for his intensity. He was inspired by no hope of sudden or dramatic social change. “I do not look for anything special to happen,” he would say; “we must simply keep on working.” His own personal life was almost austere in its simplicity and loneliness, but his mind ranged over the whole field of life and thought. His vegetarianism was not a fad, but a deep-rooted conviction which he lived out at much personal inconvenience. His hatred of militarism was a passion with him. He was always interested in sex-problems, and followed the various sex-theories with keen interest. He read Lucifer every week, and wrote a letter to Moses Harman on his release from jail. He was on intimate terms with J. William Lloyd, of Westfield, New Jersey, and sympathized with Lloyd’s radical views. One day I lent him Edward Carpenter’s pamphlet on “Homogenic Love.” He returned it with the comment: “In the future I shall be more lenient to Carpenter’s homogeneous friends, but I am thankful I am not built that way.”

There was something almost tragic in Crosby’s isolation. A lesser man would have sought disciples. But he evidently felt, with Ibsen, that “he is strongest who Stands alone.” I think of Crosby as I met him returning late one night from a meeting on Long Island, at which he had been the speaker, It had been a fiasco, with only a handful of people in attendance. This was exceptional, of course. Crosby often spoke to large audiences. But he knew all the bitterness—as well as the ecstacy—of the pioneer’s experience. He was a leader of forlorn hopes. The Anarchists could never entirely claim him; he voted, and he repudiated the use of force. The Socialists felt—and correctly—his instinctive antagonism to their philosophy. Even the Single-Taxers did not regard him as quite “sound” in the doctrine. The consequence was that he stood absolutely isolated. He had very few intimate friends. His home-life must have been unhappy. He lived at Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, in a palatial home surrounded by nine hundred acres. The property was vested in his wife’s name. I always felt that Crosby was a prisoner, waited upon by servants and lackeys. Once when he was driving me over his acres he said: “This ought not to belong to me: and yet what can one do? Would it accomplish any real, any enduring good to distribute it among the people here?” He has confessed his embarrassment when called upon by his conventional neighbors and associates—such men as John Jacob Astor, or Ex-Governor Levi Morton—to defend his theories. He felt it was useless to argue with these people. They were separated from him by chasms. He had quite definitely turned his back on the “respectable” classes. His sympathies were all with that nether world that struggles upward to the light. “I should like to live like Edward Carpenter,” he once said to me, with farm-work in the country, and simple rooms in the city." Yet to the end he remained enslaved by his possessions!

No one who knew Crosby would doubt his absolute sincerity. The man was honest and pure to the very core. I never detected a false note in him, and I have seen him in all kinds of situations. There was not the slightest trace of egotism in his nature. He was as humble as a little child. He shunned newspaper notoriety, and used to say, jokingly: “Whenever I do or say anything that I would like to get in the papers, they never report it; but when something comparatively unimportant happens to me, they write it up at great length!” He was sometimes bitterly attacked and shamefully misrepresented, but I never heard him say an unkind word of any living being. He was the soul of generosity, and gave away money to all kinds of causes, to all kinds of people.

Crosby was a natural-born leader. With his magnetism, his magnificent presence, his great abilities, he could have worn the highest political honors. As is well known, he was at one time closely associated with Theodore Roosevelt in the New York State Legislature. He might have been mayor, or governor, or president. Instead, he chose to become an apostle of unpopular ideas, “despised and rejected of men.” And who can dare to say that he was ineffectual? Ideas are the most potent things in the world, and the seer and the teacher influence life at its very sources. A man of imagination and vision is untrue to his highest self if he abandons his dream to handle the machinery of worldly power and ambition. The greatest men that have ever lived have been the men who impressed the greatest ideas upon their generations. And Crosby’s ideas were world-encircling, world-inspiring, in their power and breadth.

Ernest Crosby was a moral genius. There was much of the poet and artist in him, too. But, under all, one felt his moral intensity burning at white heat. He always seemed to me the very incarnation of that superb line of Whitman’s: “Moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants forever!”

Thomas Cantwell

By H. Kelly

Tom Cantwell was a member—and not the least important member—of that circle of charming and most delightful people, “The Freedom Group.” The date of the group’s formation is lost in antiquity—way back in the ‘80s somewhere, and it is not for me, the youngest of the group and a member since 1898, to discuss an event that must inevitably concern itself with the age of some of the others. Cantwell never spoke of his age; probably considering it a matter unimportant to the publishing of “Freedom” and the “Commonweal.” He was associated with the latter paper under the different editorships of Wm. Morris, Belfort Bax, David Nicol and later under H. B. Samuels. In spite of his eighteen or twenty years’ active work as a propagandist of revolutionary Socialism and later of Anarchist-Communism, he could not have been more than forty years old, but he had crowded more experiences in that time and was the friend and associate of more truly great men and women than the major portion of humanity. He had visited America and spent about three years here many years ago, and it is more than probable that his intense hatred of authority, and more particularly of that branch of it known as the Police, was due to that visit.

Cantwell was neither a great writer nor speaker, yet he did both well whenever he made the attempt. His specialty was spade work—he often comes to my mind when I listen to the excuses of those who think they cannot be useful without genius. The arranging of meetings, distribution of hand bills and the hundred and one things incident to the revolutionary movement where hard knocks and privation prevail, without the compensating advantages of glory or notoriety were his specialty. A martyrdom that finds its only satisfaction in its splendid isolation and the feeling that you are expressing the best of yourself, even though the world owes nothing or is indifferent to your sacrifices.

Cantwell had a theory that everyone who associated himself with the Anarchist Movement should learn to set type, and in this way be able to spread the ideas by leaflets, papers or pamphlets under any and all circumstances. He learned to set type years ago in the “Commonweal” office, and from that time till his breakdown from heart disease he worked as a compositor on the “Commonweal” and “Freedom.” He seldom received more than two and a half to three dollars a week, supplementing his scanty income by selling literature at the various meetings indoors during the winter; at the parks and street corners in the summer. Crusty in manner, he was a terror to bores and detectives, the most frequent visitors at Anarchist publishing offices, impressing the first with the fact that an Anarchist printing office is a place where work has to be done, and that he had neither time nor inclination to indulge in “hot air;” and the second that he was a disagreeable person to bother during working hours. I have heard that he once aspired to the affections of the lady who afterwards became Mrs. John Turner, and it is possible that John’s success in that direction made Cantwell more or less of an ascetic. Certain it is that during all the years we knew each other I never suspected him of anything but feelings of comradeship for the women he associated with in the movement. Devoted as he was to the cause, he lived on almost nothing, quite happy in his self-denial—a philosophic trait all too rare in these times when men barter liberty for the flesh pots of Egypt.

The last time I saw Cantwell was about three and a half years ago, shortly after his breakdown. He had never quite recovered from the six months’ hard labor he received at the opening of the Tower Bridge, about eleven or twelve years ago. His indignation and outraged sense of justice moved him to protest against the ceremony of that event, and he did so against what he called the “Royal Swine” in the person of the Prince of Wales (the present King of England) and other “royal” and “noble” parasites coming to take credit for the building of the new bridge, credit rightfully due the workers who produced that splendid piece of work. Cantwell and Carl Quinn got out a poster on which some vigorous language was used, with a stanza from one of Mr. Morris’s poems; they appealed to the masses to attend and protest. A crowd appeared, but failed to protest; Cantwell and Quinn got six months hard labor for what was considered an incitement to violence. Even the conservative papers ridiculed the conviction and sentence, but once in the hands of the English Government, there is no hope of release until the sentence expires, except by royal pardon. In Great Britain there are no courts of appeal for criminal cases, and a pardon being out of the question, our comrades served their time. The rigors of an English prison affected Cantwell’s heart, and he was never the same man afterward. He broke down in 1903, and was taken to St. Pancras Infirmary at the top of Highgate Hill, where I visited him. The air was good and the treatment satisfactory, he said, making no complaints. He was in the danger-ward with a large number of other patients whose cases were considered so hopeless that visitors were allowed at any time during the day. If a patient was able to look out of the window, he was comforted by the sight of the cemetery attached to the infirmary and the cheerful looking gravestones dotting the ground. It must have been a real inspiration to those poor, hopeless mortals to see one after the other passing away, and then look out over that cemetery. Cantwell was made of stern stuff, and after staying there four months he insisted on leaving, much against the advice of those in charge. He was too weak to do propoganda work, but being too independent to live off anyone and wanting something to do, he started a little store in Fulham Road.

Pressed for time, I was unable to see Cantwell again before returning to America. The following is an extract from a letter written by a comrade, a member of the “Freedom Group,” on January 8th:

"Since you wrote me we have lost poor Cantwell. I saw him a month ago, when he was much as usual, but I suppose that all these months he has been in the infirmary, heart disease was taking firm hold of him, though he suffered no pain. He felt unwell the Sunday before Xmas and stayed in bed; six days later he passed quietly away in his sleep. He suffered greatly for two days, but the pain left before death, I am glad to say.

He was buried beside his sister in Edmonton Cemetery, miles away to the N. E., on the 3rd inst. Only a few of us were able to get to the cemetery, owing to the distance, etc.—it is a pretty, rural spot, and the grave lies in an open, sunny place, just as poor T. C. would have liked. The group sent a wreath, as did the Hydes and one or two other friends. There was a religious ceremony, in spite of Mrs. Hyde’s protest (she knows the family well) and Kitz, who was armed with an address to deliver at the grave, had to remain silent, there being too few comrades present. At the burial there was an element of humor which poor C. would have rejoiced in, viz.: a vigorous verbal argument across his coffin before it left the undertaker’s, between Mrs. Hyde and C.'s dreadful old missionary uncle, who, as soon as he caught sight of the card on our wreath, went for us like a mad bull, but he was pretty well handled by Mrs. Hyde before calm was restored. They are a queer, hard sort of people. C.'s mother visited him at the infirmary, but his father has never been near him since he gave up the little shop in Fulham two years ago. We shall all miss poor T. C., in spite of his many crochets."

A. D. asked me—a short time ago—to send some picture postal cards to Cantwell, but she forgot to give me his address; it’s too late now! Farewell, Tom Cantwell! It was worth while meeting you.

Anent My Lecture Tour

By Emma Goldman

Owing to the necessity of my presence at the celebration of the first anniversary of “Mother Earth” (February 21), I shall begin my lecture tour March 3rd, at Pittsburg. From there I shall go to Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Louis, where meetings have already been arranged.

I should like to hear as soon as possible from the cities West of St. Louis.

I shall lecture on the following subjects: The Revolutionary Spirit in the Modern Drama; Misconceptions of Anarchism; The Building of True Character; Direct Action versus Politics, and other subjects.

Emma Goldman.

Free Speech Defense Fund

Previously Acknowledged — $478.30
Group “Bread and Freedom,” per N. Notkin — $3.40

Per Subscription Lists:

I. Brooks, Pittsburg — $10.50
Mrs. N. Seldes, Pittsburg — $9.00
Wm. Simonds, Toronto — $4.00
Italian Anarchists, Sacramento — $3.40
G. Kupferschmid — $9.75
S. Djerve — $3.85
Wm. Schenk — $1.00
Carl Nold — $1.00
Mrs. Rosenzweig — $2.00
S. Weiss — $2.50
Dr. Pyborn — $2.50
From the Freie Arbeiter Stimme Defense Fund — $50.00
Total — $581.20

FREE SPEECH FUND EXPENDITURES

To Pentecost & Campbell — $200.00
To Mayer London — $75.00
To the Arrested Comrades:

1. Zetlin — $19.00
2. M. Moscow — $20.00
3. M. Rubinstein — $24.00
4. H. Lang — $4.00
5. Wm. Gordon — $8.00
6. Beckie Edelson — $5.00
7. Annie Pastor — $2.00

Sent per Kerner to the Tombs — $8.00
Expended for the Arrested Comrades in the Station House and Tombs — $15.00
Meals Sent to the Tombs, per J. Edelson — $24.50
Incidental Expenses in Connection with our First and Second Arrests — $30.00
Postage and Stationery — $10.00
Loss to “Mother Earth” through Police Interference — $100.00
Total — $544.50

Balance — $36.70

N. B.—The amount on hand, together with the sums collected on outstanding subscription lists, will be turned over to Comrade L. Galleani’s Defense Fund. His position being very serious, we request that the money collected by the Freie Arbeiter-Stimme should be turned over for the same purpose.

Notice.—Those having subscription lists will please return them to me at once.

Emma Goldman.

“Mother Earth” Sustaining Fund

Previously Acknowledged — $106.35
Group Edelstadt, Chicago — $40.00
Social Science League, Chicago — $10.00
Syracuse Comrades, per Gesin — $15.00
Proceeds from my Lecture in Brockton, Mass. — $15.00
Proceeds from A. B.'s Lecture at the Germinal Group — $10.35
Miss Anna Riedel — $10.00
Mrs. Rosenzweig — $1.00

Per Subscription Lists:

Kipfer — $5.00
Menandez — $3.10
Brodsky — $1.00
Total — $216.80

Dr. Pyborn’s Contribution Deducted — $2.50
Net — $214.30

B. G.

The $2.50 credited to Dr. Pyborn in a previous number as a contribution to “M. E.” Sustaining Fund should have gone to the Free Speech Defense Fund. We rectify the error in this number.

John Brown the Anarchist

By Nicholas Kopeloff

When the Slave Bill was passed in 1850, compelling everyone to return fugitive slaves, one of its most bitter antagonists was John Brown of Osawatomie. Even in Boston, Mass., negroes were caught and sent back South to endure the torture of their cruel masters. But John Brown loved his fellow-men, whether colored or not; he longed to help the negroes escape their torture, and with that end in view he formed a faithful band of negroes in Springfield, Mass. (most of them refugees), to resist the attempts of the government to send back fugitives. This band of loyal and faithful negroes was called The Branch of the United States League of Gileadites; their motto was, “Union is Strength.” On the recommendation of John Brown they adopted a resolution, called “Words of Advice.” In this resolution we can trace Brown’s attitude towards the slave enactment. “Do not delay one moment after you are ready; you will lose all your resolution if you do. Let the first blow be a signal for all to engage; and when engaged, do not do your work by halves, but make clean work of your enemies.” And then come the noble and stirring words, “Stand by one another and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession. Union is strength.” Could anything characterize his forceful and determined nature better than this idea of doing a thing thoroughly, and then, if necessary, dying for it? Again, he says in a letter to his wife, "I, of course, keep encouraging my colored friends to ‘Trust in God and keep their powder dry.’ "

Brown was an Abolitionist of the highest type. Essentially a man of action, he was ready to do more than merely talk, should the time come for it, and it did come. It came at Harper’s Ferry, in 1859. With a handful of loyal and trusted men he attacked the garrison at Harper’s Ferry. But what chance had those few men of winning?

This Essay was read by Master N. Kopeloff, a young Anarchist, at the Ethical Culture Society, to the great consternation of the teachers and pupils of that highly ethical institution of the ethical Mr. Adler.

With the flame of liberty in their eyes, and the spark of freedom in their hearts, they fought against terrible odds. What mattered it if a few lost their lives, when such an issue was at stake. They fought to the last drop, till, run through in a dozen places, Brown and his comrades dropped to the ground unconscious. He did not cease fighting when he had regained consciousness. He fought to the gallows for his cause.

When asked by a Virginian, when he was in prison, “Are you Captain Brown?” he answered, “I am sometimes called so.” “Are you Osawatomie Brown?” Lying there on his pallet pierced with bayonet wounds, he answered, “I tried to do my duty there.” That is the way Brown held to his duty.

But we have not sufficiently examined Brown’s actions ; we have not followed his thoughts, his real objects.

John Brown was working in the interest of the slaves; his aim was to make them free. He wanted liberty— not only for himself, not only for the white race, but for all mankind. And he wanted liberty, even if he had to fight for it, and to defy the Constitution and break the laws of his country. In this sense John Brown was an Anarchist; that is to say, a man who prizes liberty above laws, above constitutions.

I trust that I am not misunderstood when I speak of John Brown as an Anarchist. I am aware that the popular mind is deluded with a false idea as to the real meaning of Anarchism. Some people imagine that Anarchists are people who roam about with knives in their hands, ready for indiscriminate attack. But in reality the Anarchist is a man who loves humanity and who, disbelieving in submission and invasion, hates only injustice and tyranny.

John Brown was such an Anarchist. Not that he did not love his country, but he loved liberty more, and at the call of liberty he was ready to break all laws, all constitutions, even to sacrifice his own life, like a true Anarchist.

John Brown, the Anarchist, belongs on the side of those other Anarchists who shared his fate—not at Harper’s Ferry, but at Chicago, in 1887. The similarity between John Brown and the Chicago Anarchists is but this: the former lived, worked and died for the liberation of the negro; the latter did the same for the modern white slave.

I find much similarity in the expression of last sentiments on the part of John Brown and the Chicago Anarchists.

On a memorable occasion, John Brown said:

“Had I so interfered in the manner which I admit— had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great—and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”

Albert Parsons:

“Had I chosen another path in life, I might be on an avenue of the city of Chicago to-day, surrounded by luxury; I would not stand here to-day on the scaffold; I would be pardoned if I were a millionaire.”

I quote John Brown again:

“Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, unjust enactments—I submit; so let it be done!”

Said August Spies:

“And if you think that you can crush out these ideas that are gaining ground more and more every day, if you think that you can crush them out by sending us to the gallows—if you would once more have people suffer the penalty of death because they have dared to tell the truth—I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Call your hangman! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruto, in Huss, Galileo, still lives. They and others, whose number is legion, have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!”

And now I quote from perhaps the most poetic of those noble men that suffered martyrdom:

“To-day, as the autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheeks of every free man, I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again . . . I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence; above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”

Could a more noble sentiment be expressed by anyone, Anarchist or not? How much more poetic, yet as real and firm as John Brown! And yet look how those men were hounded and slandered by the very people who revere Brown. They died in ignominy, as did Brown. But we have learned to respect and love him for his noble work. May the time soon come when we will learn to revere and love those noble men as we do John Brown of Osawatomie. Let us ignore whether a man believes as we do or not, but if he do a noble deed, let us praise him.

International Libertarian and Communist Labor Congress

Comrades:—

When in 1893 the Socialist Workers’ Congress assembled in the Tonhalle of Zurich, the more revolutionary elements among the socialist and libertarian fractions decided to meet apart and to stand in opposition to the reformist parliamentary current. Several delegates to the General Congress and a number of Anarchists, aware of the object of these revolutionary meetings, came every evening to the Platten-garten of Zurich to attend our congress. The Congress of Anarchists, as it was at once named by the press of various countries, had become a fact, the signification and success of which were acclaimed with general satisfaction in revolutionary circles.

A second congress of the same kind, and as on the previous occasion during the session of the Socialist General Congress, was held in London in 1896. And it will be remembered that in London, owing to the decisive exclusion pronounced against the Anarchists by the Socialist Congress, a clean and definite split occurred between the parliamentary Socialists and the revolutionary Communists; from this arose the necessity for special common action among the libertarian Communist and revolutionary elements in the Labor movement.

At the time of the International Exhibition of Paris in 1900, preparations were made to hold another international revolutionary Labor Congress. The Waldeck-Millerand (the Social-Democrat Millerand) Ministry prohibited the Congress, but at several secret meetings held in Paris and its precincts the comrades who had arrived from two continents were at least able to discuss certain important questions.

The undersigned federations of libertarian and communist Labor groups have now decided to convoke a fourth international Congress, the arrangements for which have been assumed by Belgium and Holland, and which will be held at Amsterdam during the summer of 1907, on a date to be subsequently fixed.

We intend that this Congress shall be open not only to delegates of libertarian and communist groups, but equally to comrades who attend on their own initiative. Although it may perhaps prove desirable to count voices for and against certain propositions, the existence of a majority and minority will not have the same meaning attached to it as that given by parliamentary bodies and Congresses, where minorities are expected to submit to the decisions of the majority. We do not admit decisions of an obligatory character, but this does not prevent our considering it of interest perhaps to know how many groups and comrades hold a given opinion.

The discussions at our sittings will be of a similar character to those at international scientific congresses. We see no reason why comrades who come individually should not receive as ready a welcome to the Congress as group delegates, provided we know they come in good faith.

Besides libertarian groups and comrades, all Trade-union delegates and individual Trade-union organizers, all delegates from Communist colonies, etc., will be equally and as heartily welcome. We address all those whose desire is to work in preparation for a better Society, a Society in which the principles of Liberty and Communism will reign.

At our Congress we shall call upon you to discuss not merely one side of our principles and libertarian and Communist propaganda, as, for example, is done at Free Thought and Antimilitarist congresses, but to discuss these principles and this propaganda to their fullest extent, believing that the necessity to reach a mutual understanding on several essential points in principle and tactics, renders our presence at an international reunion as useful as indispensable.

During the last years libertarian, Communist and Anarchist principles and tactics have widened their sphere. Without wishing to anticipate the order of the day, to be subsequently fixed by the groups, we would remark that Direct Action has been so forcibly and consciously inaugurated in several countries, precisely through the influence of our comrades, thereby bearing witness to the progress of our ideas in Labor circles, that a discussion of the problems it raises would of itself justify the convocation of an international Congress.

But there are other questions as interesting, such as Antimilitarist propaganda, the relation between the libertarian, Communist and Anarchist movement on one side, and that of certain religious movements (Tolstoyism, Christian Anarchism) on the other—a point which it was not possible to discuss at the Congress of 1900. Finally, the methods to be adopted so as to assure more direct international relations, claim exhaustive discussion. And so on.

The discussions at the Amsterdam Congress will preferably be in French, German and English. Should it appear desirable to employ another language, this would be done only in the case where the translation would not offer too many difficulties. As the Congress must be held either in the month of

July or August, we ask that all reports required to be read or distributed during the course of the sittings, may be sent before the first of June to the address of the Secretary of the Libertarian Communist Federation in Holland, Joh. J. Lodewijk, Cornelis Anthoniszstraat No. 49, Amsterdam, Holland.

We also solicit all groups and federations who in the meantime shall decide to send delegates, to communicate with us prior to the above date. Attention to these suggestions will greatly facilitate the preparations for the Congress and reception of the comrades. Finally, the arrangements for the Congress will necessitate expenses for which the Dutch and Belgian groups cannot alone be responsible. Although we may come to a mutual agreement subsequently as to the manner of defraying the costs of assembling the groups and persons attending the Congress, we nevertheless give notice that a portion of said expenses (especially those connected with printing, which will include perhaps that of reports), will necessarily become due before the opening of the Congress.

All money remittances in aid of the Congress should be sent to the Treasurer of the Netherland Federation: J. L. Bruijn, No. 170 Kepplerstraat, The Hague, Holland.

Such remittances will be acknowledged in the Bulletin de l’Internationale Libertaire, where all subsequent informations and communications relative to the Congress will also be published. The address of the Bulletin is: Georges Thonar, No. 97 rue Laixheau, Herstal-Liege, Belgium.

Comrades, work with all your energy for the success of the Libertarian and Communist Labor Congress of 1907 at Amsterdam.

LONG LIVE THE LIBERTARIAN INTERNATIONAL!

For the Libertarian Communist Federation in Holland, The Secretary: Joh. J. Lodewijk.

For the Libertarian Communist Federation in Belgium, The General Secretary, G. Thonar.

For the Anarchist Federation in Germany, The General Secretary, Paul Frauboese.

For the Anarchist Federation in Bohemia, K. Vohryzek and L. Knotek.

For the Federation of Yiddish-speaking Anarchists in London, The Secretary: A. Schapiro.

Editorial Note

Though we do not believe that a Congress of Anarchists can have a lasting effect upon the movement, yet we think that it is a useful and beneficial means of bringing the comrades of various countries in touch with one another. The presence at a European gathering of Anarchists, as the one proposed by our Dutch and Belgian friends, would prove of great benefit especially to native American Anarchists, as well as to the foreign element who has lived too long in the deadening atmosphere of this country. We therefore recommend that groups and individuals seriously consider the matter.

The Blood of the Prophets

Under this title a collection of rebel verses, full of accusation, power and resolution, is offered by Dexter Wallace. The “Ballad of Jesus of Nazareth” and “Samson and Delilah,” while in no sense well-ordered composition, having great faults of arrangement, are nevertheless splendid pieces of fire, as well as many of the minor poems. The writer often outrages our sense of musical propriety, but even these outrages are direct and strong, as for instance:

“Man’s wingéd hopes are white at dawn, But the hand of malice smuts. O, angel voices, drowned and lost Amid the growl of guts! O spirit hands that strain to draw A dead world from the ruts!”

This is execrable, but we forgive him the “guts” for this: "Though a good tree brings forth good fruit, What tree bears naught but good? What gum of saintly life contains No grain of devil’s food?

What purest truth when past its youth Is not its own falsehood?

And every rod wherewith the wise Have cleft each barrier sea,

That men might walk across and reach The land of liberty,

In hands of kings were snakes whose stings Were worse than slavery."

And for this, from “Samson and Delilah”:

“The lords and captains greatly err, Thinking that Samson is no more; Blind, but with ever-growing hair, He grinds from Tyre to Singapore; While yet Delilah plays the whore.”

The following little “Epitaph for a Dead Senator” illustrates to the height the author’s tendency to swing the “Saxon hammer”:

“Alas! he died when swill flowed far and near, While there were other pearls and deeper mud. Muse of the belly, drop a briny tear, The educated hog has crossed the flood.”

This is good. It bites and rings.

But listen, Dexter Wallace, you may give the belly a muse, on suitable occasion, and we will overlook the “growl of guts”; but in your natural strength strike out a style for yourself and cease to haunt us with the ghost of Wilde and the presence of Swinburne.

When one reads the “Ballad of Jesus of Nazareth,” One constantly hears behind it the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”; and when one sees this to Delilah:

"Because thou was most delicate, A woman fair for men to see,

The earth did compass thy estate,

Thou didst hold life and death in fee, And every soul did bend the knee,"

One seeks out Swinburne to Aholibah, and finds

"In the beginning God made thee A woman well to look upon,

Thy tender body as a tree Whereon cool wind hath always blown Till the clean branches be well grown," etc.

No matter how well a writer handles another’s tools, no reader likes to be conscious of a sense of imitation. You are big enough to make a style of your own.

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.

White Fang

By Jack London

(The Macmillan Co.)

White Fang! One feels the rudimentary hair along his backbone making an ineffectual attempt to bristle, as Jack London bares the white fangs of his pack of northland wolves before us, and depicts them “on the trail of the meat,” which in his opening scene happens to be human meat! An Arctic wind blows frost into one’s bones and desperation into one’s soul as one figures himself abroad in the wild, alone, battling for life. The rudimentary savage leaps in his prison, and one suddenly realizes how thin is the crust of associative sympathy, spread over the abysmal depths of wild and warring instincts, waiting the hour and the environment to leap out with slashing fangs and tearing claws.

“White Fang” is the companion-piece of “The Call of the Wild.” The latter depicts the life of a noble dog, the “friend of man,” the creature of ease, civilization and associative effort, but with a slight strain of the wolf in him, inherited from his mother. Stolen and carried away to the Yukon country to serve as a sled dog over the Arctic trails, he passes through various experiences, most of them harsh and cruel, till at last he becomes the very embodiment of the spirit of the pitiless wild, and after the snapping of the cord of love through the death of his master, he is a wolf among wolves, more cunning and fierce than any.

“White Fang” is the same story told backwards. White Fang is a wolf with a quarter strain of dog in him, wild by nature, ferocious through the evil treatment received on the threshold of life from the hands of men and the teeth of dogs, solitary with the solitude of the unconquered wild, but finally subdued by the same great overmastering power, the loss of which had sent the real dog irrevocably to the wild—the power of love for a generous and kindly man. Under the spell of the “Lovemaster” the quarter dog develops into a whole dog, just as the quarter wolf had developed into a whole wolf under the pressure of environment. Into the shackles of civilization the wolf goes, and bows his proud head to the indignities he receives, all for the love of a man. He finally wins the right to all the honor that ever goes to dogdom for its predominant characteristic, “faithfulness:” with his white fangs and his wolf-quickness he fights and kills the escaped convict who is seeking the life of his master’s father, “Judge Scott.” And here comes in probably the strongest passage in the book, introduced, after the manner of a modern novel (and of real life too) as an incident.

The convict was “a ferocious man.” He had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterized as carnivorous.

In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall, but they were the treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum—soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be formed into something.

It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he had encountered a guard who was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost him his credits, persecuted him. The difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth. But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other’s throat, just like any jungle animal. After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine. Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated all things. For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe. For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.

And then, one night, he escaped. The warden said it was impossible, but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in and half out of it lay the body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to avoid noise.

He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards— a live arsenal that fled through the hills pursued by the organized might of society. A heavy price of gold was set upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him with shotguns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet. And the Sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society, with telephone and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail night and day.

Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded through barbed wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading the account at the breakfast table. It was after such encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.

And then Jim Hall disappeared. The blood-hounds vainly quested on the lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by armed men and compelled to identify themselves; while the remains of Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain sides by greedy claimants for blood-money. In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received sentence. And in open court room, before all men, Jim Hall had proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on the judge that sentenced him.

For once Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves, of “railroading.” Jim Hall was being “railroaded” to prison for a crime he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions against him, Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.

Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was a party to a police conspiracy; that the evidence was hatched and perjured; that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it, and was hand and glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the courtroom until dragged down by half a dozen of his bluecoated enemies. To him Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped."

With consummate skill the picture has been so drawn that at every line there flashes before our eyes again a like picture of White Fang, enclosed in a cage by a brutal master, and purposely maddened to develop the fighting spirit in him, teased and tortured till he hates everything that lives, and having for his one purpose to rend and tear to glut his hate on everything that comes within reach of his fangs; all to earn prize-money for his owner. Since it is an animal we read of, we never dream of blaming him or expecting any other result, and our whole antipathy is towards the miserable beast on two legs who tortures him. How is it with Jim Hall? Does the “commonwealth, reading the account at the breakfast table,” analyze its own sensations, as it laughs at the hunters who “stampede through the barbed wire fence?” Are they not playing the torturer, enjoying the discomfiture of their dogs at the same time “siccing” them on? Do they remember Tracy? The wolf has the fortune of having his submerged tenderness at last brought out by love, but Jim Hall never had, He died in his hate. And the ordinary mind says, “You can’t do anything with such people. If he hadn’t done the crime he was punished for, he might have; and it was a good thing to put him in prison anyway.” The sum of their logic is: “The bad deserve no justice; let them be good.” Praise be to Jack London that he proclaims “Justice to the bad.”

For the rest, the effective idea in both the dog-story and the wolf-story is the same: Environment is the principal thing, it wakens or puts to sleep whatever element of heredity responds to it. This is good socialism, whether it is good science or not, only long time can determine. Perhaps heredity plays a larger role than is accounted.

From a purely literary point of view, one is rather sorry White Fang was written, seeing that the Call of the Wild was already written. The repetition of characters, scenes and incidents, is so pronounced as to amount to a duplication. One senses a poverty of invention, a thinness of vein, which one does not like to discover in an author whose previous work had so strong a stamp of originality. Besides, there is too much of the smell of meat about it; an unwelcome touch of excess of brutality pervades these works, and others such as the Sea Wolf. But better this, than the flatness and effeminacy from which the present literary tendency is a reaction.

International Notes

ENGLAND.

All who are in any way familiar with the English anarchist movement will learn of the death of Thomas Cantwell with a feeling of deep sorrow that one of “the old guard” has gone down, and of deep relief that he who in his last years had suffered so intensely can now suffer no more. Cantwell was one of the men of which one feels that it would be good if the main portion of the movement were composed of such. A simple man, plain and quiet, a worker, sturdy, steady and tenacious, there was in him no pretense and no surrender. When he took up his work, it was for his whole life long, and that was what one knew when one had worked with him ever so little. He was one of the children of the old socialist league, a league the like of which one never hears of now, since socialism has become so much identified with parliamentarism, for it meant a body of enthusiastic young socialists concerned with an economic gospel and imbued with the idea that the workers needed only to be aroused to the desirability of it, and they might be trusted to accomplish it by their own direct action. Cantwell did his share, and never shirked the humble and disagreeable tasks, nor any actual conflict with the authorities. For this he served a term in prison, short, but enough to leave its mark upon his not over-robust constitution. For nine years he worked with Freedom Group, of London. In 1902 he broke down, and though he lived on five long years, he was never able to take up active life again. Yet his spirit remained the old, unconquered and unconquerable essence of liberty, upbearing till the end. Peace and the immortelles of faithful memory to him who was the incarnation of faith.

“Freedom” announces the “Voice of Labour,” to be published weekly, beginning with January 18. Hail to the new voice; may it cry the gospel in the wilderness! (The first two numbers are already out.) The comrades are having a rather strenuous discussion of “Esperanto.” A correspondent attacks the whole idea of an artificial language with an energy which the occasion hardly seems to call for. As usual in such disputes, the debaters endeavor to read Anarchism in or out of such an effort, the one holding that it is the voluntary attempt to supply an international means of communication, and therefore anarchistic; the other that it is a purely artificial, arbitrary creation, opposed to the method of evolution, etc., and therefore unanarchistic. This sounds very much like our fledgling scientists who used to hunt for anarchism in the amoeba. Disputes of this sort make anarchists more or less ridiculous. Let those who think Esperanto is a fad and a waste of time go their ways and smile a quiet smile—at least until governments begin forcing us to learn it.

Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread has at last been issued in English by Chapman and Hall; price, 10s. 6d. This is one of the most valuable additions to the literature of modern economy, and a storehouse of arguments for Anarchism. Some time since Mr. Joseph Fels, well known on both sides of the Atlantic for his soap and his social theories, leased 100 acres of land in Laindon, Mid-Essex, and initiated a farm-colony experiment, endeavoring in this way to assist paupers back to independent manhood; the idea being that the farm should be independently administered. At present, Mr. Fels declares the experiment a failure, because the Local Gov’t Board interfered with the management and reduced the independent colony to a branch workhouse. “The trail of the serpent.”

FRANCE.

The anti-militarist comrades of Besancon have recently issued a violent placard concerning the condemnation to death of a young soldier in punishment for his having struck his corporal. This is but one of many recent brutalities done in the holy name of “the Army” and “Our Native Land.” Not long since, a soldier found to be incapable of service on account of illness, incurred by exposure, was retired without a pension; being unable to walk, he was carried out by his own comrades, and lay by the gutter side for several hours before being taken by the civil authorities to a hospital. Another, being afflicted with a frightful disease of the ears, was nevertheless compelled to do duty, and in consequence committed suicide. Every incident of the kind is noted and used by the anti-militarists, who are rudely tearing off the veil of glamor from the military idea.

The French deputies recently voted themselves an increase of salary. Le Libertaire, of December 9, contains an ironical letter, purporting to come from a wealthy gentleman whose servants recently decided that their wages shall be increased from nine thousand to fifteen thousand francs a year! They also decided that instead of building three rather costly ships which he had fixed upon (though not in need of them) they will build six! The gentleman is troubled by a weakness of character which makes him hate to discharge a servant, no matter how big a rascal he may be, though he can very well get along without them altogether; he therefore asks advice of Le Libertaire, signing himself S. U., which in a private note, not for publication, he explains stands for “Suffrage Universal.”—If anyone believes in the “servant” theory of representative government, he should “see the cat.”

As before observed, the weekly rest-day law is a farce, and becomes more and more apparently so from day to day. A writer in Les Temps Nouveaux, commenting thereon, observes that the law was for twenty years a platform for union parliamentarists, and is a fruit of such labor. He adds that its ineffectiveness is a necessary result of the present idea of the centralized Union; the purpose of centralization is to confide power in the executive board, which is thereafter to issue fiats for the whole body. The natural consequence, however, is that the rank and file become indifferent, “They would accept the weekly rest, if somebody should bring it to them ;” but having entrusted their acting power to the central body, they have no lively interest in winning things themselves, expecting all to be done for them.

Probably the only error in this is that the rank and file always were indifferent, and the central body, with its semi-annual meeting and its red tape, is not so much the cause of the deadness of activity as the reflex of it. The employers are setting an excellent example to these law-abiding unionists; the law does not suit their interests, and they make no pretence of obeying it. The only thing they can be made to respect is a general decision by the workers not to work, which of course needs no

A pathetic incident is recorded in a report of a little entertainment given by the children of L’Avenir Social. Among the little ones, the children of the “Future,” whom Madeline Vernet has undertaken to make a home for, is the six-year old son of Ferrer, still in prison in Spain; he recited some verses, of which the following lines are a literal translation :

"My father is in prison! What has he done? A great crime:

He has tried to form brains, strong and clear,

He has tried to draw the oppressed from the abyss

Of ignorance and error, wherein kings chain them.

But in the shadow Loyola was watching! the traitor, The eternal enemy of all truth,

Full of hate awoke, in the robe of a priest And robbed my father of both peace and liberty.

My father is in prison! What will their “justice” do to him?

Will they send him, proscribed, to inclement skies ?

Tyrants have always an executioner for accomplice

And executioners always play the game of tyrants.

What will their justice do? What penalties are they forging?

Like my father, friends, whatever may happen,

Let us keep our souls strong and beautiful;

And though the door of the prison should open,

Ah, let us know, none the less, how to remember it."

The incident should be a sufficient reply to certain freethinking journals of this country which have made desperate statements to the effect that Ferrer was no anarchist, nor sympathizer with anarchists. His child would hardly be entrusted to L’Avenir Social, a distinctly anarchistic experiment, if this were true. Concerning the Ferrer case, a pamphlet “Contre l’Injustice,” by Raphael Fraigneux, has recently been published, 74 rue des Six-Jetons, Brussels, Belgium. Price, 5 cents.

Ernest Girault has written a life of “La bonne Louise,” which is said to be exceedingly interesting, though not so complete as would have been desirable.

We notice with pleasure that Sebastien Faure, who for a long time has been too absorbed by his educational and communistic experiment, “La Ruche,” to appear on the platform, has once more come before the general public.

Les Temps Nouveaux gives a list of twelve French anarchist papers published in France, two in Switzerland and four in Belgium; ages ranging from one to twelve years. And the United States barely supports three English ones!

GERMANY.

Readers will remember the announcement that Adolph Schiwe, after twelve years imprisonment, was to be released on the 7th of November; owing to certain legalities, he was not freed till nineteen days later, and now we learn that he came out only to die. Erect in spirit, but broken in body, he emerged from his living tomb ; at first, the joy of his welcome bore him up, but after a few days he was compelled to seek relief in a sanitarium for nervous diseases, and there he died. He was buried on the second of January, over a thousand people being in attendance; they were addressed at the grave by Paylovitch and Dr. Friedeburg; a full choir sang “A Son of the People.” Many anarchistic workmen’s organizations were represented. Seventeen uniformed policemen and many more of the secret police were present, but apparently found no excuse to interfere. Farewell, comrade. We will not forget. You are one more item in the account!

On account of its article on the death of Schawe, the issue of “Der Freie Arbeiter,” of January 5, was again confiscated. It was the first of the eight-page issue to which the paper has been increased.

On the 31st of December, another victim of class hatred was released after ten years imprisonment in the dungeons of Sonnenburg. Paul Kaschemann, who was accused and condemned for having sent an infernal machine to the Chief of Police of Berlin, is now thirty-three years old. In the fulness of his youth and power he entered prison, having been found guilty without evidence on account of his political beliefs. Let us hope his youth has saved him, and that his re-entrance into the world may also be a re-entrance into life and struggle.

In Bremerhaven, twelve comrades were arrested and detained for nine weeks in jail, charged with being members of a secret society. At the end of that time, eleven of them were released without further explanations, not even being told whether the proceedings are now ended. Meanwhile, it is winter; they have lost their jobs and their families are suffering. Such is the “security” of life and liberty guaranteed by the State.

“Der Revolutionar” of January 12 contains a call signed by the secretaries of the Federation of Free Communists of Holland, of the Free Communists of Belgium, of the Anarchist Federation of Germany, of the Anarchist Federation of Bohemia and of the Federation of Yiddish-speaking Anarchists of London, for the “International Libertarian and Communistic Congress,” to be held in Amsterdam during July or August. The discussions are to be held in French, German and English. All those who intend to be present, or to send communications, should notify the secretary before the first of June. Address: Joh. J. Lodewijk, Cornelis Anthoniszstraat 49, Amsterdam, Holland.

The German Federation will hold its fifth Congress at Easter.

The cases of Moller, Muller and Frauboese have been reconsidered and referred to another court.

Die Freie Generation, a monthly anarchist review, has been removed from London to Berlin.

The Child’s Question

(Translated from the Jewish of Liebin.)

It was a winter night. Outside there was a burning, cutting frost, a cold wind; outside it was Siberia; and, in the room? In the room it was New York, and as cold as it was outside, for in the room lived a workingman, a Jewish pants-maker; and from every corner bitter, killing Want looked out, for the pantsmaker was on strike. The striker was not at home, he was away at a meeting. His wife was sitting by the fire sewing something, mending her neighbors’ linen in order to help out her husband in the strike. The fire was going out, Evidently the striker’s wife must have felt the cold, for she lifted a stove-lid and looked in. With a deep and heavy sigh she glanced sadly at the empty coal bucket, and remained sitting, anxious and abstracted.

It was still in the room, only the wind beat on the frozen window panes, and once in a while tore down the chimney over the mantel-piece and wailed, so sadly, so heart-rendingly, almost as if it, too, had the bitter heart of a pants-maker, a striker.

“Mamma,” a child’s voice was heard calling, and the mother threw aside her work and ran into the bedroom. There slept her Cyrilla, her three year old child.

Cyrilla was hidden in a regular sea of rags, but she threw them off and wanted to get out of bed.

"Where to, my child?’ asked the mother, trying to cover the little girl up again. “Mamma, take me by the stove, I am cold,” begged Cyrilla.

“It is cold by the stove, my pet.” And the mother tucked in the child with yet another rag, seated herself near her and tried to put her to sleep. “Sleep, my child; sleep, my pet.”

“Take me near the stove,” begged Cyrilla.

“It is cold there, Cyra.” “Put some coal in,” suggested the child. “There is none, my sweet; no coal,” sighed the striker’s wife.

“There is.” “No, my dearest;—I will show you the bucket.”

And the mother went into the kitchen, took the empty bucket and showed it to Cyrilla. Cyrilla looked in the bucket, and drew a deep childish sigh, “No more coal,” she said, and her childish face grew gravely sad.

“No more,” repeated the mother.

“Go, bring some,” advised the child.

“I have no money, my sweetheart.”

“No pennies?” queried the child.

“Yes, my pet, no pennies.”

“Papa doesn’t bring any?”

“Yes, Cyra, Papa doesn’t bring any.”

“Why?”

“Because there is a strike, my daughter.”

Cyrilla looked at her mother so sadly, so longingly, but she could not understand what her mother had said, she did not know what a strike was.

“Sleep, Cyra.”

“I want something to eat, Mamma.”

“Soon, my child.”

And the mother went into the kitchen, cut a piece of bread, glanced searchingly in the cupboard, found nothing, and with another quiet but deep sigh, went into the bedroom to her hungry child.

“There, my child.”

“What is it?”

“Bread.”

“With butter?” asked the child.

“Yes, my daughter, with butter,” said the mother, trying to deceive the little one.

Cyrilla took the slice of bread, discovered the sorry deception at once, and did not eat, shaking her head.

“I don’t want it, Mamma.”

“Why not, Cyra?”

“Put butter on it.”

“There is none, my sweet, to-morrow I will put butter on the bread, eat it this way now.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then I can’t help it.”

“Give me supper.”

“There is no supper.”

“Give me meat and soup.”

“There is none, my child, there is none,” repeated the mother, kissing the child, her eyes brimming over with tears.

“Then give me some butter,” said the child, returning to her first demand.

“Now, my child, why would I not give it to you if there were any, my foolish little one?” coaxed the mother.

But Cyrilla would not believe, and pointed with her finger to the cupboard.

“See, now, I will show you,” said the mother, going to the closet, and taking the empty butter bowl, she showed it to the child. And Cyrilla looked at the empty butter dish with such longing looks. Then the baby, the poor little birdling of a wretched striker, drew another quiet, heartrending sigh.

“No more butter, Mamma,” said the child sadly, with a despairing motion of her little hands.

“No more, my dearest,” answered the mother, and there were tears in her voice.

“No pennies,” explained the youngling.

“Yes my daughter, no more pennies.”

“Papa doesn’t bring any.”

“No, my pet, he doesn’t bring any.”

“Why, Mamma?”

“I told you, apple-of-my-eye, he is on strike.”

For a while the child remained silent. But suddenly she asked:

“What is that, Mamma?”

“What, my child?”

“What for Papa doesn’t bring any pennies?”

“He is on strike.”

“Who is that?” asked Cyrilla again.

“Nobody, my child, it is a strike,” explained the mother, but Cyrilla did not understand and asked again.

“What is that, Mamma?”

“A strike, my pet.”

“A boogie-man?”

“No, my child, you cannot understand, you are only a young one, when you are older you will understand.”

The wind grew stronger, it began to beat cruelly on the window panes, the whole house shuddered and the blast sounded like a benumbed crying. Cyrilla pressed closer to her mother and trembled with fear.

“Foolish baby, don’t be afraid dearest.”

“Is that the strike, Mamma?”

“Silly child, that is only the wind.”

Cyrilla listened, cuddled close up to her mother and began to eat the piece of dry bread. From the mother’s eyes tears dropped down upon the child’s little head, and from Cyrilla’s eyes too, some childish tears fell upon the dry bread.

“Mamma!” cried out the child suddenly.

“What is it, Cyrilla? Woe is me, why are you crying, darling?”

“Where is Papa?”

“He will come soon, foolish little one.”

The child fell asleep with the piece of bread in her hand. And the striker’s wife wept silently.

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