eager interest of a little child; not fiery John Most, "the old
war-horse of the revolution," unbroken after his ten years of
imprisonment in Europe and America; not grey-haired Louise Michel, with
the aurora of the morning still shining in her keen look which peers
from behind the barred memories of New Caledonia; not Dyer D. Lum, who
still smiles in his grave, I think; nor Tucker, nor Turner, nor Theresa
Clairmunt, nor Jean Grave--not these. I have met them all, and felt the
springing life pulsating through heart and hand, joyous, ardent, leaping
into action. Not such are the old, but your young heart that goes
bankrupt in social hope, dry-rotting in this stale and purposeless
society. Would you be always young? Then be an Anarchist, and live with
the faith of hope, though you be old.

I doubt if any other hope has the power to keep the fire alight as I saw
it in 1897, when we met the Spanish exiles released from the fortress of
Montjuich. Comparatively few persons in America ever knew the story of
that torture, though we distributed fifty thousand copies of the letters
smuggled from the prison, and some few newspapers did reprint them. They
were the letters of men incarcerated on mere suspicion for the crime of
an unknown person, and subjected to tortures the bare mention of which
makes one shudder. Their nails were torn out, their heads compressed in
metal caps, the most sensitive portions of the body twisted between
guitar strings, their flesh burned with red hot irons; they had been fed
on salt codfish after days of starvation, and refused water; Juan
Ollé, a boy nineteen years old, had gone mad; another had confessed
to something he had never done and knew nothing of. This is no
horrible imagination. I who write have myself shaken some of those
scarred hands. Indiscriminately, four hundred people of all sorts of
beliefs--Republicans, trade unionists, Socialists, Free Masons, as well
as Anarchists--had been cast into dungeons and tortured in the infamous
"zero." Is it a wonder that most of them came out Anarchists? There were
twenty-eight in the first lot that we met at Euston Station that August
afternoon,--homeless wanderers in the whirlpool of London, released
without trial after months of imprisonment, and ordered to leave Spain
in forty-eight hours! They had left it, singing their prison songs; and
still across their dark and sorrowful eyes one could see the eternal
Maytime bloom. They drifted away to South America chiefly, where four or
five new Anarchist papers have since arisen, and several colonizing
experiments along Anarchist lines are being tried. So tyranny defeats
itself, and the exile becomes the seed-sower of the revolution.

And not only to the heretofore unaroused does he bring awakening, but
the entire character of the world movement is modified by this
circulation of the comrades of all nations among themselves. Originally
the American movement, the native creation which arose with Josiah
Warren in 1829, was purely individualistic; the student of economy will
easily understand the material and historical causes for such
development. But within the last twenty years the communist idea has
made great progress, owing primarily to that concentration in capitalist
production which has driven the American workingman to grasp at the
idea of solidarity, and, secondly, to the expulsion of active communist
propagandists from Europe. Again, another change has come within the
last ten years. Till then the application of the idea was chiefly
narrowed to industrial matters, and the economic schools mutually
denounced each other; to-day a large and genial tolerance is growing.
The young generation recognizes the immense sweep of the idea through
all the realms of art, science, literature, education, sex relations and
personal morality, as well as social economy, and welcomes the accession
to the ranks of those who struggle to realize the free life, no matter
in what field. For this is what Anarchism finally means, the whole
unchaining of life after two thousand years of Christian asceticism and
hypocrisy.

Apart from the question of ideals, there is the question of method.
"How do you propose to get all this?" is the question most frequently
asked us. The same modification has taken place here. Formerly there
were "Quakers" and "Revolutionists"; so there are still. But while they
neither thought well of the other, now both have learned that each has
his own use in the great play of world forces. No man is in himself a
unit, and in every soul Jove still makes war on Christ. Nevertheless,
the spirit of peace grows; and while it would be idle to say that
Anarchists in general believe that any of the great industrial problems
will be solved without the use of force, it would be equally idle to
suppose that they consider force itself a desirable thing, or that it
furnishes a final solution to any problem. From peaceful experiment
alone can come final solution, and that the advocates of force know and
believe as well as the Tolstoyans. Only they think that the present
tyrannies provoke resistance. The spread of Tolstoy's "War and Peace"
and "The Slavery of Our Times," and the growth of numerous Tolstoy
clubs having for their purpose the dissemination of the literature of
non-resistance, is an evidence that many receive the idea that it is
easier to conquer war with peace. I am one of these. I can see no end
of retaliations unless someone ceases to retaliate. But let no one
mistake this for servile submission or meek abnegation; my right shall
be asserted no matter at what cost to me, and none shall trench upon it
without my protest.

Good-natured satirists often remark that "the best way to cure an
Anarchist is to give him a fortune." Substituting "corrupt" for "cure,"
I would subscribe to this; and believing myself to be no better than the
rest of mortals, I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my lot to
work, and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue to the end;
for let me keep the integrity of my soul, with all the limitations of my
material conditions, rather than become the spineless and ideal-less
creation of material needs. My reward is that I live with the young; I
keep step with my comrades; I shall die in the harness with my face to
the east--the East and the Light.

The Eleventh of November, 1887

Memorial Oration[A]

Let me begin my address with a confession. I make it sorrowfully and
with self-disgust; but in the presence of great sacrifice we learn
humility, and if my comrades could give their lives for their belief,
why, let me give my pride. Yet I would not give it, for personal
utterance is of trifling importance, were it not that I think at this
particular season it will encourage those of our sympathizers whom the
recent outburst of savagery may have disheartened, and perhaps lead some
who are standing where I once stood to do as I did later.

This is my confession: Fifteen years ago last May when the echoes of the
Haymarket bomb rolled through the little Michigan village where I then
lived, I, like the rest of the credulous and brutal, read one lying
newspaper headline, "Anarchists throw a bomb in a crowd in the Haymarket
in Chicago," and immediately cried out, "They ought to be hung."--This,
though I had never believed in capital punishment for ordinary
criminals. For that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence I shall
never forgive myself, though I know the dead men would have forgiven
me, though I know those who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as
it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die,--a bitter
reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited the first wild rumor of an
event of which I knew nothing, and, in my mind, sent men to the gallows
without asking one word of defense! In one wild, unbalanced moment threw
away the sympathies of a lifetime, and became an executioner at heart.
And what I did that night millions did, and what I said millions said. I
have only one word of extenuation for myself and all those
people--ignorance. I did not know what Anarchism was. I had never seen
it used save in histories, and there it was always synonymous with
social confusion and murder. I believed the newspapers. I thought these
men had thrown that bomb, unprovoked, into a mass of men and women, from
a wicked delight in killing. And so thought all those millions of
others. But out of those millions there were some few thousand--I am
glad I was one of them--who did not let the matter rest there.

I know not what resurrection of human decency first stirred within me
after that,--whether it was an intellectual suspicion that may be I did
not know all the truth of the case and could not believe the newspapers,
or whether it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy which often
prompts the heart to go out to the accused, without a reason; but this I
do know that though I was no Anarchist at the time of the execution, it
was long and long before that, that I came to the conclusion that the
accusation was false, the trial a farce, that there was no warrant
either in justice or in law for their conviction; and that the hanging,
if hanging there should be, would be the act of a society composed of
people who had said what I said on the first night, and who had kept
their eyes and ears fast shut ever since, determined to see nothing and
to know nothing but rage and vengeance. Till the very end I hoped that
mercy might intervene, though justice did not; and from the hour I knew
neither would nor ever could again, I distrusted law and lawyers, judges
and governors alike. And my whole being cried out to know what it was
these men had stood for, and why they were hanged, seeing it was not
proven they knew anything about the throwing of the bomb.

Little by little, here and there, I came to know that what they had
stood for was a very high and noble ideal of human life, and what they
were hanged for was preaching it to the common people,--the common
people who were as ready to hang them, in their ignorance, as the court
and the prosecutor were in their malice! Little by little I came to know
that these were men who had a clearer vision of human right than most of
their fellows; and who, being moved by deep social sympathies, wished to
share their vision with their fellows, and so proclaimed it in the
market-place. Little by little I realized that the misery, the pathetic
submission, the awful degradation of the workers, which from the time I
was old enough to begin to think had borne heavily upon my heart, (as
they must bear upon all who have hearts to feel at all), had smitten
theirs more deeply still,--so deeply that they knew no rest save in
seeking a way out,--and that was more than I had ever had the sense to
conceive. For me there had never been a hope there should be no more
rich and poor; but a vague idea that there might not be so rich and so
poor, if the workingmen by combining could exact a little better wages,
and make their hours a little shorter. It was the message of these men,
(and their death swept that message far out into ears that would never
have heard their living voices), that all such little dreams are folly.
That not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in
mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any lasting alleviation come;
but in demanding, much,--all,--in a bold self-assertion of the worker to
toil any hours he finds sufficient, not that another finds for
him,--here is where the way out lies. That message, and the message of
others, whose works, associated with theirs, their death drew to my
notice, took me up, as it were, upon a mighty hill, wherefrom I saw the
roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the machines, the
things that men had made to ease their burden, the wonderful things, the
iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth in the living flesh of the
men who made them; I saw the maimed and crippled stumps of men go
limping away into the night that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown
up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide
in some dim corner where the black surge throws its slime.

I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the
man who tended it, and knew surely as I knew anything in life, that
never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.

I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of
the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than
that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a
day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm--I, and you, and
those others who never do any dirty work--those men had slaved away in
those black graves, and been crushed to death at last.

I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and
down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down
that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild
animal's hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to
labor there, with pick and shovel in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in
that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours
a day. Only slaves would do it.

I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the
coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that
"the record" of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies
who laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered bodies and
souls.

I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes driven by
sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his self-hood,
would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that
forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it.

And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar
refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost
their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
was slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists were
right,--the whole thing must be changed, the whole thing was wrong,--the
whole system of production and distribution, the whole ideal of life.

And I questioned the government then; they had taught me to question it.
What have you done--you the keepers of the Declaration and the
Constitution--what have you done about all this? What have you done to
preserve the conditions of freedom to the people?

Lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and got gain! You have
sold away the land, that you had no right to sell. You have murdered the
aboriginal people, that you might seize the land in the name of the
white race, and then steal it away from them again, to be again sold by
a second and a third robber. And that buying and selling of the land has
driven the people off the healthy earth and away from the clean air
into these rot-heaps of humanity called cities, where every filthy thing
is done, and filthy labor breeds filthy bodies and filthy souls. Our
boys are decayed with vice before they come to manhood; our girls--ah,
well might John Harvey write:

    "Another begetteth a daughter white and gold,
      She looks into the meadow land water, and the world
    Knows her no more; they have sought her field and fold
      But the City, the City hath bought her,
    It hath sold
      Her piecemeal, to students, rats, and reek of the graveyard
        mould."

You have done this thing, gentlemen who engineer the government; and not
only have you caused this ruin to come upon others; you yourselves are
rotten with this debauchery. You exist for the purpose of granting
privileges to whoever can pay most for you, and so limiting the freedom
of men to employ themselves that they must sell themselves into this
frightful slavery or become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and
murderers. And when you have done all this, what then do you do to them,
these creatures of your own making? You, who have set them the example
in every villainy? Do you then relent, and remembering the words of the
great religious teacher to whom most of you offer lip service on the
officially religious day, do you go to these poor, broken, wretched
creatures and love them? Love them and help them, to teach them to be
better? No: you build prisons high and strong, and there you beat, and
starve, and hang, finding by the working of your system human beings so
unutterably degraded that they are willing to kill whomsoever they are
told to kill at so much monthly salary.

This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and
defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To
hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions.
They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without
government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the
heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an
appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery
wherein there is any excuse for government.

It was for telling the people this that these five men were killed. For
telling the people that the only way to get out of their misery was
first to learn what their rights upon this earth were;--freedom to use
the land and all within it and all the tools of production--and then to
stand all together and take them, themselves, and not to appeal to the
jugglers of the law. Abolish the law--that is abolish privilege,--and
crime will abolish itself.

They will tell you these men were hanged for advocating force. What!
These creatures who drill men in the science of killing, who put
guns and clubs in hands they train to shoot and strike, who hail
with delight the latest inventions in explosives, who exult in the
machine that can kill the most with the least expenditure of energy,
who declare a war of extermination upon people who do not want their
civilization, who ravish, and burn, and garotte and guillotine, and
hang, and electrocute, they have the impertinence to talk about the
unrighteousness of force! True, these men did advocate the right to
resist invasion by force. You will find scarcely one in a thousand
who does not believe in that right. The one will be either a real
Christian or a non-resistant Anarchist. It will not be a believer in
the State. No, no; it was not for advocating forcible resistance on
principle, but for advocating forcible resistance to their tyrannies,
and for advocating a society which would forever make an end of riches
and poverty, of governors and governed.

The spirit of revenge, which is always stupid, accomplished its brutal
act. Had it lifted its eyes from its work, it might have seen in the
background of the scaffold that bleak November morning the dawn-light of
Anarchy whiten across the world.

So it came first,--a gleam of hope to the proletaire, a summons to rise
and shake off his material bondage. But steadily, steadily the light has
grown, as year by year the scientist, the literary genius, the artist,
and the moral teacher, have brought to it the tribute of their best
work, their unpaid work, the work they did for love. To-day it means not
only material emancipation, too; it comes as the summing up of all those
lines of thought and action which for three hundred years have been
making towards freedom; it means fulness of being, the free life.

And I say it boldly, notwithstanding the recent outburst of
condemnation, notwithstanding the cry of lynch, burn, shoot, imprison,
deport, and the Scarlet Letter A to be branded low down upon the
forehead, and the latest excuse for that fond esthetic decoration "the
button," that for two thousand years no idea has so stirred the world as
this,--none which had such living power to break down barriers of race
and degree, to attract prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic, Quaker
and Revolutionist. No other ideal but the free life is strong enough to
touch the man whose infinite pity and understanding goes alike to the
hypocrite priest and the victim of Siberian whips; the loving rebel who
stepped from his title and his wealth to labor with all the laboring
earth; the sweet strong singer who sang

    "No Master, high or low";

the lover who does not measure his love nor reckon on return; the
self-centered one who "will not rule, but also will not ruled be"; the
philosopher who chanted the Over-man; the devoted woman of the people;
ay, and these too,--these rebellious flashes from the vast cloud-hung
ominous obscurity of the anonymous, these souls whom governmental and
capitalistic brutality has whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage
and bitterness, these mad young lions of revolt, these Winkelrieds who
offer their hearts to the spears.

[A] Delivered on November 11, 1901, in Chicago.

Crime and Punishment

Men are of three sorts: the turn backs, the rush-aheads, and the
indifferents. The first and second are comparatively few in number. The
really conscientious conservative, eternally looking backward for his
models and trying hard to preserve that which is, is almost as scarce an
article as the genuine radical, who is eternally attacking that which is
and looking forward to some indistinct but glowing vision of a purified
social life. Between them lies the vast nitrogenous body of the
indifferents, who go through life with no large thoughts or intense
feelings of any kind, the best that can be said of them being that they
serve to dilute the too fierce activities of the other two. Into the
callous ears of these indifferents, nevertheless, the opposing voices of
conservative and radical are continually shouting; and for years, for
centuries, the conservative wins the day, not because he really touches
the consciences of the indifferent so much (though in a measure he does
that) as because his way causes his hearer the least mental trouble. It
is easier to this lazy, inert mentality to nod its head and approve the
continuance of things as they are, than to listen to proposals for
change, to consider, to question, to make an innovating decision. These
require activity, application,--and nothing is so foreign to the
hibernating social conscience of your ordinary individual.

I say "social" conscience, because I by no means wish to say that these
are conscienceless people; they have, for active use, sufficient
conscience to go through their daily parts in life, and they think that
is all that is required. Of the lives of others, of the effects of their
attitude in cursing the existences of thousands whom they do not know,
they have no conception; they sleep; and they hear the voices of those
who cry aloud about these things, dimly, as in dreams; and they do not
wish to awaken. Nevertheless, at the end of the centuries they always
awaken. It is the radical who always wins at last. At the end of the
centuries institutions are reviewed by this aroused social conscience,
are revised, sometimes are utterly rooted out.

Thus it is with the institutions of Crime and Punishment. The
conservative holds that these things have been decided from all time;
that crime is a thing-in-itself, with no other cause than the
viciousness of man; that punishment was decreed from Mt. Sinai, or
whatever holy mountain happens to be believed in in his country; that
society is best served by strictness and severity of judgment and
punishment. And he wishes only to make his indifferent brothers keepers
of other men's consciences along these lines. He would have all men be
hunters of men, that crime may be tracked down and struck down.

The radical says: All false, all false and wrong. Crime has not been
decided from all time: crime, like everything else, has had its
evolution according to place, time, and circumstance. "The demons of our
sires become the saints that we adore,"--and the saints, the saints and
the heroes of our fathers, are criminals according to our codes.
Abraham, David, Solomon,--could any respectable member of society admit
that he had done the things they did? Crime is not a thing-in-itself,
not a plant without roots, not a something proceeding from nothing; and
the only true way to deal with it is to seek its causes as earnestly, as
painstakingly, as the astronomer seeks the causes of the perturbations
in the orbit of the planet he is observing, sure that there must be one,
or many, somewhere. And Punishment, too, must be studied. The holy
mountain theory is a failure. Punishment is a failure. And it is a
failure not because men do not hunt down and strike enough, but because
they hunt down and strike at all; because in the chase of those who do
ill, they do ill themselves; they brutalize their own characters, and so
much the more so because they are convinced that this time the brutal
act is done in accord with conscience. The murderous deed of the
criminal was _against_ conscience, the torture or the murder of the
criminal by the official is _with_ conscience. Thus the conscience is
diseased and perverted, and a new class of imbruted men created. We have
punished and punished for untold thousands of years, and we have not
gotten rid of crime, we have not diminished it. Let us consider then.

The indifferentist shrugs his shoulders and remarks to the conservative:
"What have I to do with it? I will hunt nobody and I will save nobody.
Let every one take care of himself. I pay my taxes; let the judges and
the lawyers take care of the criminals. And as for you, Mr. Radical, you
weary me. Your talk is too heroic. You want to play Atlas and carry the
heavens on your shoulders. Well, do it if you like. But don't imagine I
am going to act the stupid Hercules and transfer your burden to my
shoulders. Rave away until you are tired, but let me alone."

"I will not let you alone. I am no Atlas. I am no more than a fly; but I
will annoy you, I will buzz in your ears; I will not let you sleep. You
must think about this."

That is about the height and power of my voice, or of any individual
voice, in the present state of the question. I do not deceive myself. I
do not imagine that the question of crime and punishment will be settled
till long, long after the memory of me shall be as completely swallowed
up by time as last year's snow is swallowed by the sea. Two thousand
years ago a man whose soul revolted at punishment, cried out: "Judge
not, that ye be not judged," and yet men and women who have taken his
name upon their lips as holy, have for all those two thousand years gone
on judging as if their belief in what he said was only lip-belief; and
they do it to-day. And judges sit upon benches and send men to their
death,--even judges who do not themselves believe in capital punishment;
and prosecutors exhaust their eloquence and their tricks to get men
convicted; and women and men bear witness against sinners; and then they
all meet in church and pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us!"

Do they mean anything at all by it?

And I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard, and is not
heard, save here and there; just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard,
save here and there; and others great and small are lost in the great
echoless desert of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible
effect, so my voice also will be lost, and barely a slight ripple of
thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse; even that the
next wind of trial will straighten and leave as unimprinted sand.

Nevertheless, by the continued and unintermitting action of forces
infinitesimal compared with the human voice, the greatest effects are at
length accomplished. A wave-length of light is but the fifty-thousandth
part of an inch, yet by the continuous action of waves like these have
been produced all the creations of light, the entire world of sight, out
of masses irresponsive, dark, colorless. And doubt not that in time this
cold and irresponsive mass of indifference will feel and stir and
realize the force of the great sympathies which will change the attitude
of the human mind as a whole towards Crime and Punishment, and erase
both from the world.

Not by lawyers and not by judges shall the final cause of the criminal
be tried; but lawyer and judge and criminal together shall be told by
the Social Conscience, "Depart in peace."

A great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto these: "I have within
me the capacity for every crime."

Few, reading them, believe that he meant what he said. Most take it as
the sententious utterance of one who, in an abandonment of generosity,
wished to say something large and leveling. But I think he meant exactly
what he said. I think that with all his purity Emerson had within him
the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite
features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for
all the sweetness, the tenderness, and the nobility of his nature, he
had the tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every bit
of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of
life, from the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all
virtue were germinal. Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and
I and all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice, do
not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom
you have helped to put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be
more even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or the
outside temptation has not come upon you.

I am no disciple of that school whose doctrine is summed up in the
teaching that Man's Will is nothing, his Material Surroundings all. I do
not accept that popular socialism which would make saints out of sinners
only by filling their stomachs. I am no apologist for characterlessness,
and no petitioner for universal moral weakness. I believe in the
individual. I believe that the purpose of life (in so far as we can give
it a purpose, and it has none save what we give it) is the assertion and
the development of strong, self-centered personality. It is therefore
that no religion which offers vicarious atonement for the misdoer, and
no philosophy which rests on the cornerstone of irresponsibility, makes
any appeal to me. I believe that immeasurable mischief has been wrought
by the ceaseless repetition for the last two thousand years of the
formula: "Not through any merit of mine shall I enter heaven, but
through the sacrifice of Christ."--Not through the sacrifice of Christ,
nor any other sacrifice, shall any one attain strength, save in so far
as he takes the spirit and the purpose of the sacrifice into his own
life and lives it. Nor do I see anything as the result of the teaching
that all men are the helpless victims of external circumstance and under
the same conditions will act precisely alike, than a lot of spineless,
nerveless, bloodless crawlers in the tracks of stronger men,--too
desirous of ease to be honest, too weak to be successful rascals.

Let this be put as strongly as it can now, that nothing I shall say
hereafter may be interpreted as a gospel of shifting and shirking.

But the difference between us, the Anarchists, who preach
self-government and none else, and Moralists who in times past and
present have asked for individual responsibility, is this, that while
they have always framed creeds and codes for the purpose of _holding
others to account_, we draw the line upon ourselves. Set the standard as
high as you will; live to it as near as you can; and if you fail, try
yourself, judge yourself, condemn yourself, if you choose. Teach and
persuade your neighbor if you can; consider and compare his conduct if
you please; speak your mind if you desire; but if he fails to reach your
standard or his own, try him not, judge him not, condemn him not. He
lies beyond your sphere; you cannot know the temptation nor the inward
battle nor the weight of the circumstances upon him. You do not know how
long he fought before he failed. Therefore you cannot be just. Let him
alone.

This is the ethical concept at which we have arrived, not by revelation
from any superior power, not through the reading of any inspired book,
not by special illumination of our inner consciousness; but by the study
of the results of social experiment in the past as presented in the
works of historians, psychologists, criminologists, sociologists and
legalists.

Very likely so many "ists" sound a little oppressive, and there may be
those to whom they may even have a savor of pedantry. It sounds much
simpler and less ostentatious to say "Thus saith the Lord," or "The Good
Book says." But in the meat and marrow these last are the real
presumptions, these easy-going claims of familiarity with the will and
intent of Omnipotence. It may sound more pedantic to you to say, "I have
studied the accumulated wisdom of man, and drawn certain deductions
therefrom," than to say "I had a talk with God this morning and he said
thus and so"; but to me the first statement is infinitely more modest.
Moreover there is some chance of its being true, while the other is
highly imaginative fiction.

This is not to impugn the honesty of those who inherit this survival of
an earlier mental state of the race, and who accept it as they accept
their appetites or anything else they find themselves born with. Nor is
it to belittle those past efforts of active and ardent souls who claimed
direct divine inspiration as the source of their doctrines. All
religions have been, in their great general outlines, the intuitive
graspings of the race at truths which it had not yet sufficient
knowledge to demonstrate,--rude and imperfect statements of ideas which
were yet but germinal, but which, even then, mankind had urgent need to
conceive, and upon which it afterwards spent the efforts of generations
of lives to correct and perfect. Thus the very ethical concept of which
I have been speaking as peculiarly Anarchistic, was preached as a
religious doctrine by the fifteenth century Tolstoy, Peter Chilciky; and
in the sixteenth century, the fanatical sect of the Anabaptists shook
Germany from center to circumference by a doctrine which included the
declaration that "pleadings in courts of law, oaths, capital punishment,
and all absolute power were incompatible with the Christian faith." It
was an imperfect illumination of the intellect, such only as was
possible in those less enlightened days, but an illumination that
defined certain noble conceptions of justice. They appealed to all they
had, the Bible, the inner light, the best that they knew, to justify
their faith. We to whom a wider day is given, who can appeal not to one
book but to thousands, who have the light of science which is free to
all that can command the leisure and the will to know, shining white and
open on these great questions, dim and obscure in the days of Peter
Chilciky, we should be the last to cast a sneer at them for their heroic
struggle with tyranny and cruelty; though to-day the man who would claim
their claims on their grounds would justly be rated atavist or
charlatan.

Nothing or next to nothing did the Anabaptists know of history. For
genuine history, history which records the growth of a whole people,
which traces the evolution of its mind as seen in its works of
peace,--its literature, its art, its constructions--is the creation of
our own age. Only within the last seventy-five years has the purpose of
history come to have so much depth as this. Before that it was a mere
register of dramatic situations, with no particular connection, a
chronicle of the deeds of prominent persons, a list of intrigues,
scandals, murders big and little; and the great people, the actual
builders and preservers of the race, the immense patient, silent mass
who painfully filled up all the waste places these destroyers made,
almost ignored. And no man sought to discover the relations of even the
recorded acts to any general causes; no man conceived the notion of
discovering what is political and moral growth or political and moral
suicide. That they did not do so is because writers of history, who are
themselves incarnations of their own time spirit, could not get beyond
the unscientific attitude of mind, born of ignorance and fostered by the
Christian religion, that man is something entirely different from the
rest of organized life; that he is a free moral agent, good if he
pleases and bad if he pleases, that is, according as he accepts or
rejects the will of God; that every act is isolated, having no
antecedent, morally, but the will of its doer. Nor until modern science
had fought its way past prisons, exilements, stakes, scaffolds, and
tortures, to the demonstration that man is no free-will freak thrust by
an omnipotent joker upon a world of cause and sequence to play havoc
therein, but just a poor differentiated bit of protoplasm as much
subject to the general processes of matter and mind as his ancient
progenitor in the depths of the Silurian sea, not until then was it
possible for any real conception of the scope of history to begin. Not
until then was it said: "The actions of men are the effects of large and
general causes. Humanity as a whole has a regularity of movement as
fixed as the movement of the tides; and given certain physical and
social environments, certain developments may be predicted with the
certainty of a mathematical calculation." Thus crime, which for so many
ages men have gone on punishing more or less light-heartedly, so far
from having its final cause in individual depravity, bears a steady and
invariable relation to the production and distribution of staple food
supplies, a thing over which society itself at times can have no control
(as on the occasion of great natural disturbances), and in general does
not yet know how to manage wisely: how much less, then, the individual!
This regularity of the recurrence of crime was pointed out long before
by the greatest statisticians of Europe, who, indeed, did not go so far
as to question why it was so, nor to compare these regularities with
other regularities, but upon whom the constant repetition of certain
figures in the statistics of murder, suicide, assault, etc., made a
profound impression. It was left to the new historians, the great
pioneer among whom was H. T. Buckle in England, to make the comparisons
in the statistics, and show that individual crimes as well as virtues
are always calculable from general material conditions.

This is the basis from which we argue, and it is a basis established by
the comparative history of civilizations. In no other way could it have
been really established. It might have been guessed at, and indeed was.
But only when the figures are before us, figures obtained "by millions
of observations extending over different grades of civilization, with
different laws, different opinions, different habits, different morals"
(I am quoting Buckle), only then are we able to say surely that the
human mind proceeds with a regularity of operation overweighing all the
creeds and codes ever invented, and that if we would begin to understand
the problem of the treatment of crime, we must go to something far
larger than the moral reformation of the criminal. No prayers, no legal
enactments, will ever rid society of crime. If they would, there have
been prayers enough and preachments enough and laws enough and prisons
enough to have done it long ago. But pray that the attraction of
gravitation shall cease. Will it cease? Enact that water shall freeze at
100° heat. Will it freeze? And no more will men be sane and honest and
just when they are compelled to live in an insane, dishonest, and unjust
society, when the natural operation of the very elements of their being
is warred upon by statutes and institutions which must produce outbursts
destructive both to themselves and to others.

Away back in 1835 Quetelet, the French statistician, wrote: "Experience
demonstrates, in fact, by every possible evidence, this opinion, which
may seem paradoxical at first, that it is society which prepares the
crime, and that the guilty one is but the instrument which executes it."
Every crime, therefore, is a charge against society which can only be
rightly replied to when society consents to look into its own errors and
rectify the wrong it has done. This is one of the results which must, in
the end, flow from the labors of the real historians; one of the reasons
why history was worth writing at all.

Now the next point in the problem is the criminal himself. Admitting
what cannot be impeached, that there is cause and sequence in the action
of man; admitting the pressure of general causes upon all alike, what
is the reason that one man is a criminal and another not?

From the days of the Roman jurisconsults until now the legalists
themselves have made a distinction between crimes against the law of
nature and crimes merely against the law of society. From the modern
scientific standpoint no such distinction can be maintained. Nature
knows nothing about crime, and nothing ever was a crime until the social
Conscience made it so. Neither is it easy when one reads their law
books, even accepting their view-point, to understand why certain crimes
were catalogued as against the law of nature, and certain others as of
the more artificial character. But I presume what were in general
classed as crimes against nature were Acts of Violence committed against
persons. Aside from these we have a vast, an almost interminable number
of offenses big and little, which are in the main attacks upon the
institution of property, concerning which some very different things
have to be said than concerning the first. As to these first there is no
doubt that these are real crimes, by which I mean simply anti-social
acts. Any action which violates the life or liberty of any individual is
an anti-social act, whether done by one person, by two, or by a whole
nation. And the greatest crime that ever was perpetrated, a crime beside
which all individual atrocities diminish to nothing, is War; and the
greatest, the least excusable of murderers are those who order it and
those who execute it. Nevertheless, this chiefest of murderers, the
Government, its own hands red with the blood of hundreds of thousands,
assumes to correct the individual offender, enacting miles of laws to
define the varying degrees of his offense and punishment, and putting
beautiful building stone to very hideous purposes for the sake of caging
and tormenting him therein.

We do get a fig from a thistle--sometimes! Out of this noisome
thing, the prison, has sprung the study of criminology. It is
very new, and there is considerable painstaking nonsense about
it. But the main results are interesting and should be known
by all who wish to form an intelligent conception of what a
criminal is and how he should be treated. These men who are cool
and quiet and who move among criminals and study them as Darwin
did his plants and animals, tell us that these prisoners are
reducible to three types: The Born Criminal, the Criminaloid,
and the Accidental Criminal. I am inclined to doubt a great
deal that is said about the born criminal. Prof. Lombroso gives
us very exhaustive reports of the measurements of their skulls
and their ears and their noses and their thumbs and their toes,
etc. But I suspect that if a good many respectable, decent,
never-did-a-wrong-thing-in-their-lives people were to go up for
measurement, malformed ears and disproportionately long thumbs
would be equally found among them if they took the precaution
to represent themselves as criminals first. Still, however few
in number (and they are really very few), there are some born
criminals,--people who through some malformation or deficiency
or excess of certain portions of the brain are constantly
impelled to violent deeds. Well, there are some born idiots and
some born cripples. Do you punish them for their idiocy or for
their unfortunate physical condition? On the contrary, you pity
them, you realize that life is a long infliction to them, and
your best and tenderest sympathies go out to them. Why not to
the other, equally a helpless victim of an evil inheritance?
Granting for the moment that you have the right to punish the
mentally responsible, surely you will not claim the right to
punish the mentally irresponsible!

Even the law does not hold the insane man guilty. And the born criminal
is irresponsible; he is a sick man, sick with the most pitiable chronic
disease; his treatment is for the medical world to decide, and the best
of them,--not for the prosecutor, the judge, and the warden.

It is true that many criminologists, including Prof. Lombroso himself,
are of opinion that the best thing to do with the born criminal is to
kill him at once, since he can be only a curse to himself and others.
Very heroic treatment. We may inquire, Is he to be exterminated at birth
because of certain physical indications of his criminality? Such
neo-Spartanism would scarcely commend itself to any modern society.
Moreover the diagnosis might be wrong, even though we had a perpetual
and incorruptible commission of the learned to sit in inquiry upon every
pink-skinned little suspect three days old! What then? Is he to be let
go, as he is now, until he does some violent deed and then be judged
more hardly because of his natural defect? Either proposition seems not
only heartless and wicked but,--what the respectable world is often more
afraid of being than either,--ludicrous. If one is really a born
criminal he will manifest criminal tendencies in early life, and being
so recognized should be cared for according to the most humane methods
of treating the mentally afflicted.

The second, or criminaloid, class is the most numerous of the three.
These are criminals, first, because being endowed with strong desires
and unequal reasoning powers they cannot maintain the uneven battle
against a society wherein the majority of individuals must all the time
deny their natural appetites, if they are to remain unstained with
crime. They are, in short, the ordinary man (who, it must be admitted,
has a great deal of paste in him) plus an excess of wants of one sort
and another, but generally physical. Society outside of prisons is full
of these criminaloids, who sometimes have in place of the power of
genuine moral resistance a sneaking cunning by which they manage to
steer a shady course between the crime and the punishment.

It is true these people are not pleasant subjects to contemplate; but
then, through that very stage of development the whole human race has
had to pass in its progress from the beast to the man,--the stage, I
mean, of overplus of appetite opposed by weak moral resistance; and if
now some, it is not certain that their number is very great, have
reversed the proportion, it is only because they are the fortunate
inheritors of the results of thousands of years of struggle and failure,
struggle and failure, but _struggle_ again. It is precisely these
criminaloids who are most sinned against by society, for they are the
people who need to have the right of doing things made easy, and who,
when they act criminally, need the most encouragement to help the feeble
and humiliated moral sense to rise again, to try again.

The third class, the Accidental or Occasional Criminals, are perfectly
normal, well balanced people, who, through tremendous stress of outward
circumstance, and possibly some untoward mental disturbance arising from
those very notions of the conduct of life which form part of their moral
being, suddenly commit an act of violence which is at utter variance
with their whole former existence; such as, for instance, the murder of
a seducer by the father of the injured girl, or of a wife's paramour by
her husband. If I believed in severity at all I should say that these
were the criminals upon whom society should look with most severity,
because they are the ones who have most mental responsibility. But that
also is nonsense; for such an individual has within him a severer
judge, a more pitiless jailer than any court or prison,--his conscience
and his memory. Leave him to these; or no, in mercy take him away from
these whenever you can; he will suffer enough, and there is no fear of
his action being repeated.

Now all these people are with us, and it is desirable that something be
done to help the case. What does Society do? Or rather what does
Government do with them? Remember we are speaking now only of crimes of
violence. It hangs, it electrocutes, it exiles, it imprisons. Why? For
punishment. And why punishment? "Not," says Blackstone, "by way of
atonement or expiation for the crime committed, for that must be left to
the just determination of the Supreme Being, but as a precaution against
future offenses of the same kind." This is supposed to be effected in
three ways: either by reforming him, or getting rid of him altogether,
or by deterring others by making an example of him.

Let us see how these precautions work. Exile, which is still practised
by some governments, and imprisonment are, according to the theory of
law, for the purpose of reforming the criminal that he may no longer be
a menace to society. Logic would say that anyone who wished to
obliterate cruelty from the character of another must himself show no
cruelty; one who would teach regard for the rights of others must
himself be regardful. Yet the story of exile and prison is the story of
the lash, the iron, the chain and every torture that the fiendish
ingenuity of _the non-criminal class can devise by way of teaching
criminals to be good_! To teach men to be good, they are kept in airless
cells, made to sleep on narrow planks, to look at the sky through iron
grates, to eat food that revolts their palates, and destroys their
stomachs,--battered and broken down in body and soul; and this is what
they call reforming men!

Not very many years ago the Philadelphia dailies told us (and while we
cannot believe all of what they say, and are bound to believe that such
cases are exceptional, yet the bare facts were true) that Judge Gordon
ordered an investigation into the workings of the Eastern Penitentiary
officials; and it was found that an insane man had been put into a cell
with two sane ones, and when he cried in his insane way and the two
asked that he be put elsewhere, the warden gave them a strap to whip him
with; and they tied him in some way to the heater, with the strap, so
that his legs were burned when he moved; all scarred with the burns he
was brought into the court, and the other men frankly told what they had
done and why they had done it. This is the way they reform men.

Do you think people come out of a place like that better? with more
respect for society? with more regard for the rights of their fellow
men? I don't. I think they come out of there with their hearts full of
bitterness, much harder than when they went in. That this is often the
case is admitted by those who themselves believe in punishment, and
practice it. For the fact is that out of the Criminaloid class there
develops the Habitual Criminal, the man who is perpetually getting in
prison; no sooner is he out than he does something else and gets in
again. The brand that at first scorched him has succeeded in searing. He
no longer feels the ignominy. He is a "jail-bird," and he gets to have a
cynical pride in his own degradation. Every man's hand is against him,
and his hand is against every man's. Such are the reforming effects of
punishment. Yet there was a time when he, too, might have been touched,
had the right word been spoken. It is for society to find and speak
that word.

This for prison and exile. Hanging? electrocution? These of course are
not for the purpose of reforming the criminal. These are to deter others
from doing as he did; and the supposition is that the severer the
punishment the greater the deterrent effect. In commenting upon this
principle Blackstone says: "We may observe that punishments of
unreasonable severity ... have less effect in preventing crimes and
amending the manners of a people than such as are more merciful in
general...." He further quotes Montesquieu: "For the excessive severity
of laws hinders their execution; when the punishment surpasses all
measure, the public will frequently, out of humanity, prefer impunity to
it." Again Blackstone: "It is a melancholy truth that among the variety
of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one
hundred and sixty have been declared by act of Parliament to be felonies
... worthy of instant death. So dreadful a list instead of diminishing
_increases_ the number of offenders."

Robert Ingersoll, speaking on "Crimes Against Criminals" before the New
York Bar Association, a lawyer addressing lawyers, treating of this same
period of which Blackstone writes, says: "There is something in
injustice, in cruelty, which tends to defeat itself. There never were so
many traitors in England as when the traitor was drawn and quartered,
when he was tortured in every possible way,--when his limbs, torn and
bleeding, were given to the fury of mobs, or exhibited pierced by pikes
or hung in chains. The frightful punishments produced intense hatred of
the government, and traitors increased until they became powerful enough
to decide what treason was and who the traitors were and to inflict the
same torments on others."

The fact that Blackstone was right and Ingersoll was right in saying
that severity of punishment increases crime, is silently admitted in the
abrogation of those severities by acts of Parliament and acts of
Congress. It is also shown by the fact that there are no more murders,
proportionately, in States where the death penalty does not exist than
in those where it does. Severity is therefore admitted by the State
itself to have no deterrent influence on the intending criminal. And to
take the matter out of the province of the State, we have only to
instance the horrible atrocities perpetrated by white mobs upon negroes
charged with outrage. Nothing more fiendishly cruel can be imagined; yet
these outrages multiply. It would seem, then, that the notion of making
a horrible example of the misdoer is a complete failure. As a specific
example of this, Ingersoll (in this same lecture) instanced that "a few
years before a man was hanged in Alexandria, Va. One who witnessed the
execution on that very day murdered a peddler in the Smithsonian grounds
at Washington. He was tried and executed; and one who witnessed his
hanging went home and on the same day murdered his wife." Evidently the
brute is rather aroused than terrified by scenes of execution.

What then? If extreme punishments do not deter, and if what are
considered mild punishments do not reform, is any measure of punishment
conceivable or attainable which will better our case?

Before answering this question let us consider the class of crimes which
so far has not been dwelt upon, but which nevertheless comprises
probably nine-tenths of all offenses committed. These are all the
various forms of stealing,--robbery, burglary, theft, embezzlement,
forgery, counterfeiting, and the thousand and one ramifications and
offshoots of the act of taking what the law defines as another's. It is
impossible to consider crimes of violence apart from these, because the
vast percentage of murders and assaults committed by the criminaloid
class are simply incidental to the commission of the so-called lesser
crime. A man often murders in order to escape with his booty, though
murder was no part of his original intention. Why, now, have we such a
continually increasing percentage of stealing?

Will you persistently hide your heads in the sand and say it is because
men grow worse as they grow wiser? that individual wickedness is the
result of all our marvelous labors to compass sea and land, and make the
earth yield up her wealth to us? Dare you say that?

It is not so. =The reason men steal is because their rights are stolen
from them before they are born.=

A human being comes into the world; he wants to eat, he wants to
breathe, he wants to sleep; he wants to use his muscles, his brain; he
wants to love, to dream, to create. These wants constitute him, the
whole man; he can no more help expressing these activities than water
can help running down hill. If the freedom to do any of these things is
denied him, then by so much he is a crippled creature, and his energy
will force itself into some abnormal channel or be killed altogether.
Now I do not mean that he has a "natural right" to do these things
inscribed on any lawbook of Nature. Nature knows nothing of rights, she
knows power only, and a louse has as much natural right as a man to the
extent of its power. What I do mean to say is that man, in common with
many other animals, has found that by associative life he conquers the
rest of nature, and that this society is slowly being perfected; and
that this perfectionment consists in realizing that the solidarity and
safety of the whole arises from the freedom of the parts; that such
freedom constitutes Man's Social Right; and that any institution which
interferes with this right will be destructive of the association, will
breed criminals, will work its own ruin. This is the word of the
sociologist, of the greatest of them, Herbert Spencer.

Now do we see that all men eat,--eat well? You know we do not. Some have
so much that they are sickened with the extravagance of dishes, and know
not where next to turn for a new palatal sensation. They cannot even
waste their wealth. Some, and they are mostly the hardest workers, eat
poorly and fast, for their work allows them no time to enjoy even what
they have. Some,--I have seen them myself in the streets of New York
this winter, and the look of their wolfish eyes was not pleasant to
see--stand in long lines waiting for midnight and the plate of soup
dealt out by some great newspaper office, stretching out, whole blocks
of them, as other men wait on the first night of some famous star at the
theater! Some die because they cannot eat at all. Pray tell me what
these last have to lose by becoming thieves. And why shall they not
become thieves? And is the action of the man who takes the necessities
which have been denied to him really criminal? Is he morally worse than
the man who crawls in a cellar and dies of starvation? I think not. He
is only a little more assertive. Cardinal Manning said: "A starving man
has a natural right to his neighbor's bread." The Anarchist says: "A
hungry man has a social right to bread." And there have been whole
societies and races among whom that right was never questioned. And
whatever were the mistakes of those societies, whereby they perished,
this was not a mistake, and we shall do well to take so much wisdom
from the dead and gone, the simple ethics of the stomach which with all
our achievement we cannot despise, or despising, shall perish as our
reward.

"But," you will say, and say truly, "to begin by taking loaves means to
end by taking everything and murdering, too, very often." And in that
you draw the indictment against your own system. If there is no
alternative between starving and stealing (and for thousands there is
none), then there is no alternative between society's murdering its
members, or the members disintegrating society. Let Society consider its
own mistakes, then: let it answer itself for all these people it has
robbed and killed: let it cease its own crimes first!

To return to the faculties of Man. All would breathe; and some do
breathe. They breathe the air of the mountains, of the seas, of the
lakes,--even the atmosphere in the gambling dens of Monte Carlo, for a
change! Some, packed thickly together in closed rooms where men must
sweat and faint to save tobacco, breathe the noisome reek that rises
from the spittle of their consumptive neighbors. Some, mostly babies,
lie on the cellar doors along Bainbridge street, on summer nights, and
bathe their lungs in that putrid air where a thousand lungs have
breathed before, and grow up pale and decayed looking as the rotting
vegetables whose exhalations they draw in. Some, far down underground,
meet the choke-damp, and--do not breathe at all! Do you expect healthy
morals out of all these poisoned bodies?

Some sleep. They have so much time that they take all manner of
expensive drugs to try what sleeping it off a different way is like!
Some sleep upon none too easy beds a few short hours, too few not to
waken more tired than ever, and resume the endless grind of waking
life. Some sleep bent over the books they are too tired to study, though
the mind clamors for food after the long day's physical toil. Some sleep
with hand upon the throttle of the engine, after twenty-six hours of
duty, and--crash!--they have sleep enough!

Some use their muscles: they use them to punch bags, and other
gentlemen's stomachs when their heads are full of wine. Some use them to
club other men and women, at $2.50 a day. Some exhaust them welding them
into iron, or weaving them into wool, for ten or eleven hours a day. And
some become atrophied sitting at desks till they are mere specters of
men and women.

Some love; and there is no end to the sensualities of their love,
because all normal expressions have lost their savor through excess.
Some love, and see their love tried and worn and threadbare, a skeleton
of love, because the practicality of life is always there to repress the
purely emotional. Some are stricken in health, so robbed of power to
feel, that they never love at all.

And some dream, think, create; and the world is filled with the glory of
their dreams. But who knows the glory of the dream that never was born,
lost and dead and buried away somewhere there under the roofs where the
exquisite brain was ruined by the heavy labor of life? And what of the
dream that turned to madness and destroyed the thing it loved the best?

These are the things that make criminals, the perverted forces of man,
turned aside by the institution of property, which is the giant social
mistake to-day. It is your law which keeps men from using the sources
and the means of wealth production unless they pay tribute to other men;
it is this, and nothing else, which is responsible for all the second
class of crimes and all those crimes of violence incidentally committed
while carrying out a robbery. Let me quote here a most sensible and
appropriate editorial which recently appeared in the Philadelphia _North
American_, in comment upon the proposition of some foolish preacher to
limit the right of reproduction to rich families:

"The earth was constructed, made habitable, and populated without the
advice of a commission of superior persons, and until they appeared and
began meddling with affairs, making laws and setting themselves up as
rulers, poverty and its evil consequences were unknown to humanity. When
social science finds a way to remove obstructions to the operation of
natural law and to the equitable distribution of the products of labor,
poverty will cease to be the condition of the masses of people, and
misery, CRIME and problems of population will disappear."

And they will never disappear until it does. All hunting down of men,
all punishments, are but so many ineffective efforts to sweep back the
tide with a broom. The tide will fling you, broom and all, against the
idle walls that you have built to fence it in. Tear down those walls or
the sea will tear them down for you.

Have you ever watched it coming in,--the sea? When the wind comes
roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing thunders up from the
water? Have you watched the white lions chasing each other towards the
walls, and leaping up with foaming anger as they strike, and turn and
chase each other along the black bars of their cage in rage to devour
each other? And tear back? And leap in again? Have you ever wondered in
the midst of it all _which particular drops of water_ would strike the
wall? If one could know all the factors one might calculate even that.
But who can know them all? Of one thing only we are sure: _some must
strike it_.

They are the criminals, those drops of water pitching against that silly
wall and broken. Just why it was these particular ones we cannot know;
but some had to go. Do not curse them; you have cursed them enough. Let
the people free.

There is a class of crimes of violence which arises from another set of
causes than economic slavery--acts which are the result of an antiquated
moral notion of the true relations of men and women. These are the
Nemesis of the institution of property in love. If every one would learn
that the limit of his right to demand a certain course of conduct in sex
relations is himself; that the relation of his beloved ones to others is
not a matter for him to regulate, any more than the relations of those
whom he does not love; if the freedom of each is unquestioned, and
whatever moral rigors are exacted are exacted of oneself only; if this
principle is accepted and followed, crimes of jealousy will cease. But
religions and governments uphold this institution and constantly tend to
create the spirit of ownership, with all its horrible consequences.

Ah, you will say, perhaps it is true; perhaps when this better social
condition is evolved, and this freer social spirit, we shall be rid of
crime,--at least nine-tenths of it. But meanwhile must we not punish to
protect ourselves?

The protection does not protect. The violent man does not communicate
his intention; when he executes it, or attempts its execution, more
often than otherwise it is some unofficial person who catches or stops
him. If he is a born criminal, or in other words an insane man, he
should, I reiterate, be treated as a sick person--not punished, not made
to suffer. If he is one of the accidental criminals, his act will not be
repeated; his punishment will always be with him. If he is of the
middle class, your punishment will not reform him, it will only harden
him; and it will not deter others.

As for thieves, the great thief is within the law, or he buys it; and as
for the small one, see what you do! To protect yourself against him, you
create a class of persons who are sworn to the service of the club and
the revolver; a set of spies; a set whose business it is to deal
constantly with these unhappy beings, who in rare instances are softened
thereby, but in the majority of cases become hardened to their work as
butchers to the use of the knife; a set whose business it is to serve
cell and lock and key; and lastly, the lowest infamy of all, the
hangman. Does any one want to shake his hand, the hand that kills for
pay?

Now against all these persons individually there is nothing to be said:
they may probably be very humane, well-intentioned persons when they
start in; but the end of all this is imbrutement. One of our dailies
recently observed that "the men in charge of prisons have but too often
been men who ought themselves to have been prisoners." The Anarchist
does not agree with that. He would have no prisons at all. But I am
quite sure that if that editor himself were put in the prison-keeper's
place, he too would turn hard. And the opportunities of the official
criminal are much greater than those of the unofficial one. Lawyer and
governmentalist as he was, Ingersoll said: "It is safe to say that
governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented."
Then why create a second class of parasites worse than the first? Why
not put up with the original one?

Moreover, you have another thing to consider than the simple problem of
a wrong inflicted upon a guilty man. How many times has it happened that
the innocent man has been convicted! I remember an instance of a man so
convicted of murder in Michigan. He had served twenty-seven years in
Jackson penitentiary (for Michigan is not a hang-State) when the real
murderer, dying, confessed. And the State _pardoned_ that innocent man!
Because it was the quickest legal way to let him out! I hope he has been
able to pardon the State.

Not very long ago a man was hanged here in this city. He had killed his
superintendent. Some doctors said he was insane; the government experts
said he was not. They said he was faking insanity when he proclaimed
himself Jesus Christ. And he was hanged. Afterwards the doctors found
two cysts in his brain. The State of Pennsylvania had killed a sick man!
And as long as punishments exist, these mistakes will occur. If you
accept the principle at all, you must accept with it the blood-guilt of
innocent men.

Not only this, but you must accept also the responsibility for all the
misery which results to others whose lives are bound up with that of the
convict, for even he is loved by some one, much loved perhaps. It is a
foolish thing to turn adrift a house full of children, to become
criminals in turn, perhaps, in order to frighten some indefinite future
offender by making an example of their father or mother. Yet how many
times has it not happened!

And this is speaking only from the practical, selfish side of the
matter. There is another, one from which I would rather appeal to you,
and from which I think you would after all prefer to be appealed to. Ask
yourselves, each of you, whether you are quite sure that you have
feeling enough, understanding enough, and _have you suffered_ enough, to
be able to weigh and measure out another man's life or liberty, no
matter what he has done? And if you have not yourself, are you able to
delegate to any judge the power which you have not? The great Russian
novelist, Dostoyevsky, in his psychological study of this same subject,
traces the sufferings of a man who had committed a shocking murder; his
whole body and brain are a continual prey to torture. He gives himself
up, seeking relief in confession. He goes to prison, for in barbarous
Russia they have not the barbarity of capital punishment for murderers,
unless political ones. But he finds no relief. He remains for a year,
bitter, resentful, a prey to all miserable feelings. But at last he is
touched by love, the silent, unobtrusive, all-conquering love of one who
knew it all and forgave it all. And the regeneration of his soul began.

"The criminal slew," says Tolstoy: "are you better, then, when you slay?
He took another's liberty; and is it the right way, therefore, for you
to take his? Violence is no answer to violence."

                       "Have good will
    To all that lives, letting unkindness die,
    And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made
    As soft airs passing by."

So said Lord Buddha, the Light of Asia.

And another said: "Ye have heard that it hath been said 'an eye for an
eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but I say unto you, resist not him that
is evil."

Yet the vengeance that the great psychologist saw was futile, the
violence that the greatest living religious teacher and the greatest
dead ones advised no man to wreak, that violence is done daily and
hourly by every little-hearted prosecutor who prosecutes at so much a
day, by every petty judge who buys his way into office with common
politicians' tricks, and deals in men's lives and liberties as a trader
deals in pins, by every neat-souled and cheap-souled member of the "unco
guid" whose respectable bargain-counter maxims of morality have as much
effect to stem the great floods and storms that shake the human will as
the waving of a lady's kid glove against the tempest. Those who have not
suffered cannot understand how to punish; those who have understanding
_will_ not.

I said at the beginning and I say again, I believe that in every one of
us all things are germinal: in judge and prosecutor and prison-keeper
too, and even in those small moral souls who cut out one undeviating
pattern for all men to fit, even in them there are the germs of passion
and crime and sympathy and forgiveness. And some day things will stir in
them and accuse them and awaken them. And that awakening will come when
suddenly one day there breaks upon them with realizing force the sense
of the unison of life, the irrevocable relationship of the saint to the
sinner, the judge to the criminal; that all personalities are
intertwined and rushing upon doom together. Once in my life it was given
to me to see the outward manifestation of this unison. It was in 1897.
We stood upon the base of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square. Below
were ten thousand people packed together with upturned faces. They had
gathered to hear and see men and women whose hands and limbs were
scarred all over with the red-hot irons of the tortures in the fortress
of Montjuich. For the crime of an unknown person these twenty-eight men
and women, together with four hundred others, had been cast into that
terrible den and tortured with the infamies of the inquisition to make
them reveal that of which they knew nothing. After a year of such
suffering as makes the decent human heart sick only to contemplate, with
nothing proven against them, some even without trial, they were suddenly
released with orders to leave the country within twenty-four hours. They
were then in Trafalgar Square, and to the credit of old England be it
said, harlot and mother of harlots though she is, for there was not
another country among the great nations of the earth to which those
twenty-eight innocent people could go. For they were paupers
impoverished by that cruel State of Spain in the terrible battle for
their freedom; they would not have been admitted to free America. When
Francesco Gana, speaking in a language which most of them did not
understand, lifted his poor, scarred hands, the faces of those ten
thousand people moved together like the leaves of a forest in the wind.
They waved to and fro, they rose and fell; the visible moved in the
breath of the invisible. It was the revelation of the action of the
Unconscious, the fatalistic unity of man.

Sometimes, even now as I look upon you, it is as if the bodies that I
see were as transparent bubbles wherethrough the red blood boils and
flows, a turbulent stream churning and tossing and leaping, and behind
us and our generation, far, far back, endlessly backwards, where all the
bubbles are broken and not a ripple remains, the silent pouring of the
Great Red River, the unfathomable River,--backwards through the unbroken
forest and the untilled plain, backwards through the forgotten world of
savagery and animal life, back somewhere to its dark sources in deep Sea
and old Night, the rushing River of Blood--no fancy--real, tangible
blood, the blood that hurries in your veins while I speak, bearing with
it the curses and the blessings of the Past. Through what infinite
shadows has that river rolled! Through what desolate wastes has it not
spread its ooze! Through what desperate passages has it been forced!
What strength, what invincible strength is in that hot stream! You are
just the bubble on its crest; where will the current fling you ere you
die? At what moment will the fierce impurities borne from its somber and
tenebrous past be hurled up in you? Shall you then cry out for
punishment if they are hurled up in another? if, flung against the
merciless rocks of the channel, while you swim easily in the midstream,
they fall back and hurt other bubbles?

Can you not feel that

    "Men are the heart-beats of Man, the plumes that feather his
        wings,
    Storm-worn since being began with the wind and the thunder
        of things.
    Things are cruel and blind; their strength detains and deforms.
    And the wearying wings of the mind still beat up the stream
        of their storms.
    Still, as one swimming up-stream, they strike out blind in the
        blast,
    In thunder of vision and dream, and lightning of future and
        past.
    We are baffled and caught in the current and bruised upon
        edges of shoals:
    As weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind-shaken
        souls.
    Spirit by spirit goes under, a foam-bell's bubble of breath,
    That blows and opens asunder and blurs not the mirror of
        Death."

Is it not enough that "things are cruel and blind"? Must we also be
cruel and blind? When the whole thing amounts to so little at the most,
shall we embitter it more, and crush and stifle what must so soon be
crushed and stifled anyhow? Can we not, knowing what remnants of things
dead and drowned are floating through us, haunting our brains with
specters of old deeds and scenes of violence, can we not learn to pardon
our brother to whom the specters are more real, upon whom greater stress
was laid? Can we not, recalling all the evil things that we have done,
or left undone only because some scarcely perceptible weight struck down
the balance, or because some kindly word came to us in the midst of our
bitterness and showed that not all was hateful in the world; can we not
understand him for whom the balance was not struck down, the kind word
unspoken? Believe me, forgiveness is better than wrath,--better for the
wrong-doer, who will be touched and regenerated by it, and better for
you. And you are wrong if you think it is hard: it is easy, far easier
than to hate. It may sound like a paradox, but the greater the injury
the easier the pardon.

Let us have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is without
wisdom. Let us work for the freedom of man from the oppressions which
make criminals, and for the enlightened treatment of all the sick. And
though we may never see the fruit of it, we may rest assured that the
great tide of thought is setting our way, and that

    "While the tired wave, vainly breaking,
      Seems here no painful inch to gain,
    Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
      Comes silent, flooding in, the main."

In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation

The light is pleasant, is it not, my friends? It is good to look into
each other's faces, to see the hands that clasp our own, to read the
eyes that search our thoughts, to know what manner of lips give
utterance to our pleasant greetings. It is good to be able to wink
defiance at the Night, the cold, unseeing Night. How weird, how
gruesome, how chilly it would be if I stood here in blackness, a shadow
addressing shadows, in a house of blindness! Yet each would know that he
was not alone; yet might we stretch hands and touch each other, and feel
the warmth of human presence near. Yet might a sympathetic voice ring
thro' the darkness, quickening the dragging moments.--The lonely
prisoners in the cells of Blackwell's Island have neither light nor
sound! The short day hurries across the sky, the short day still more
shortened in the gloomy walls. The long chill night creeps up so early,
weaving its sombre curtain before the imprisoned eyes. And thro' the
curtain comes no sympathizing voice, beyond the curtain lies the prison
silence, beyond that the cheerless, uncommunicating land, and still
beyond the icy, fretting river, black and menacing, ready to drown. A
wall of night, a wall of stone, a wall of water! Thus has the great
State of New York answered =Emma Goldman=; thus have the classes replied
to the masses; thus do the rich respond to the poor; thus does the
Institution of Property give its ultimatum to Hunger!

"Give us work," said =Emma Goldman=; "if you will not give us work, then
give us bread; if you do not give us either work or bread, then we shall
take bread." It wasn't a very wise remark to make to the State of New
York, that is--Wealth and its watch-dogs, the Police. But I fear me much
that the apostles of liberty, the fore-runners of revolt, have never
been very wise. There is a record of a seditious person, who once upon a
time went about with a few despised followers in Palestine, taking corn
out of other people's corn-fields, (on the Sabbath day, too). That same
person, when he wished to ride into Jerusalem told his disciples to go
forward to where they would find a young colt tied, to unloose it and
bring it to him, and if any one interfered or said anything to them,
were to say: "My master hath need of it." That same person said: "Give
to him that asketh of thee, and from him that taketh away thy goods ask
them not back again." That same person once stood before the hungry
multitudes of Galilee and taught them, saying: "The Scribes and the
Pharisees sit in Moses' seat; therefore whatever they bid you observe,
that observe and do. But do not ye after their works, for they say, and
do not. For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay
them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one
of their fingers. But all their works they do to be seen of men; they
make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their
garments: and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in
the synagogues, and greeting in the markets, and to be called of men,
'Rabbi, Rabbi.'" And turning to the Scribes and the Pharisees, he
continued: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye
devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers: therefore
shall ye receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin,
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, and mercy,
and faith: these ought ye to have done and not left the other undone. Ye
blind guides, that strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! Woe unto you,
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the
cup and platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Woe
unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited
sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but within are full
of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so ye outwardly appear
righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because ye build the
tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous; and
say 'If we had been in the days of our fathers we would not have been
partakers with them in the blood of the prophets'. Wherefore ye be
witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed
the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers! Ye serpents!
Ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell!"

Yes; these are the words of the outlaw who is alleged to form the
foundation stone of modern civilization, to the authorities of his day.
Hypocrites, extortionists, doers of iniquity, robbers of the poor,
blood-partakers, serpents, vipers, fit for hell!

It wasn't a very wise speech, from beginning to end. Perhaps he knew it
when he stood before Pilate to receive his sentence, when he bore his
heavy crucifix up Calvary, when nailed upon it, stretched in agony, he
cried: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

No, it wasn't wise--but it was very grand.

This grand, foolish person, this beggar-tramp, this thief who justified
the action of hunger, this man who set the Right of Property beneath his
foot, this Individual who defied the State, do you know why he was so
feared and hated, and punished? Because, as it is said in the record,
"the common people heard him gladly"; and the accusation before Pontius
Pilate was, "we found this fellow perverting the whole nation. He
stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry."

Ah, the dreaded "common people"!

When Cardinal Manning wrote: "Necessity knows no law, and a starving
man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread," who
thought of arresting Cardinal Manning? His was a carefully written
article in the _Fortnightly Review_. Who read it? Not the people who
needed bread. Without food in their stomachs, they had not fifty cents
to spend for a magazine. It was not the voice of the people themselves
asserting their rights. No one for one instant imagined that Cardinal
Manning would put himself at the head of ten thousand hungry men to
loot the bakeries of London. It was a piece of ethical hair-splitting
to be discussed in after-dinner speeches by the wine-muddled gentlemen
who think themselves most competent to consider such subjects when
their dress-coats are spoiled by the vomit of gluttony and drunkenness.
But when =Emma Goldman= stood in Union Square and said, "If they do
not give you work or bread, take bread," the common people heard her
gladly; and as of old the wandering carpenter of Nazareth addressed
his own class, teaching throughout all Jewry, stirring up the people
against the authorities, so the dressmaker of New York addressing the
unemployed working-people of New York was the menace of the depths
of society, crying in its own tongue. The authorities heard and were
afraid: therefore the triple wall.

It is the old, old story. When Thomas Paine, one hundred years ago,
published the first part of "The Rights of Man," the part in which he
discusses principles only, the edition was a high-priced one, reaching
comparatively few readers. It created only a literary furore. When the
second part appeared, the part in which he treats of the application of
principles, in which he declares that "men should not petition for
rights but take them," it came out in a cheap form, so that one hundred
thousand copies were sold in a few weeks. That brought down the
prosecution of the government. It had reached the people that might act,
and prosecution followed prosecution till Botany Bay was full of the
best men of England. Thus were the limitations of speech and press
declared, and thus will they ever be declared so long as there are
antagonistic interests in human society.

Understand me clearly. I believe that the term "constitutional right of
free speech" is a meaningless phrase, for this reason: the Constitution
of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence, and
particularly the latter, were, in their day, progressive expressions of
progressive ideals. But they are, throughout, characterized by the
metaphysical philosophy which dominated the thought of the last century.
They speak of "inherent rights," "inalienable rights," "natural rights,"
etc. They declare that men are equal because of a supposed metaphysical
something-or-other, called equality, existing in some mysterious way
apart from material conditions, just as the philosophers of the
eighteenth century accounted for water being wet by alleging a
metaphysical wetness, existing somehow apart from matter. I do not say
this to disparage those grand men who dared to put themselves against
the authorities of the monarchy, and to conceive a better ideal of
society, one which they certainly thought would secure equal rights to
men; because I realize fully that no one can live very far in advance of
the time-spirit, and I am positive in my own mind that, unless some
cataclysm destroys the human race before the end of the twentieth
century, the experience of the next hundred years will explode many of
our own theories. But the experience of this age has proven that
metaphysical quantities do not exist apart from materials, and hence
humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the
material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to
pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I
mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself), unless, I
say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or
action, is equally a mockery.

I once read that one million angels could dance at the same time on the
point of a needle; possibly one million angels might be able to get a
decent night's lodging by virtue of their constitutional rights; one
single tramp couldn't. And whenever the tongues of the non-possessing
class threaten the possessors, whenever the disinherited menace the
privileged, that moment you will find that the Constitution isn't made
for you. Therefore I think Anarchists make a mistake when they contend
for their constitutional rights. As a prominent lawyer, Mr. Thomas Earle
White, of Philadelphia, himself an Anarchist, said to me not long
since: "What are you going to do about it? Go into the courts, and fight
for your legal rights? Anarchists haven't got any." "Well," says the
governmentalist, "you can't consistently claim any. You don't believe in
constitutions and laws." Exactly so; and if any one will right my
constitutional wrongs, I will willingly make him a present of my
constitutional rights. At the same time I am perfectly sure no one will
ever make this exchange; nor will any help ever come to the wronged
class from the outside. Salvation on the vicarious plan isn't worth
despising. Redress of wrongs will not come by petitioning "the powers
that be." "He has rights who dare maintain them." "The Lord helps them
who help themselves." (And when one is able to help himself, I don't
think he is apt to trouble the Lord much for his assistance.) As long as
the working people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give
them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the
streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers
they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman
bid them "move on"; so long as they go from factory to factory, begging
for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and
foremen, getting the old "No," the old shake of the head, in these
factories which they build, whose machines they wrought; so long as they
consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more
and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized,
cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing
through plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made but cannot
buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so
long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power
outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer,
or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be
delayed. When they conceive the possibility of a complete international
federation of labor, whose constituent groups shall take possession of
land, mines, factories, all the instruments of production, issue their
own certificates of exchange, and, in short, conduct their own industry
without regulative interference from law-makers or employers, then we
may hope for the only help which counts for aught--self-help; the only
condition which can guarantee free speech (and no paper guarantee
needed).

But meanwhile, while we are waiting, for there is yet much grist of the
middle class to be ground between the upper and nether millstones of
economic evolution; while we await the formation of the international
labor trust; while we watch for the day when there are enough of people
with nothing in their stomachs and desperation in their heads, to go
about the work of expropriation; what shall those do who are starving
now?

That is the question which =Emma Goldman= had to face; and she answered
it by saying: "Ask, and if you do not receive, take--take bread."

I do not give you that advice. Not because I do not think the bread
belongs to you; not because I do not think you would be morally right in
taking it; not that I am not more shocked and horrified and embittered
by the report of one human being starving in the heart of plenty, than
by all the Pittsburgs, and Chicagos, and Homesteads, and Tennessees, and
Coeur d'Alenes, and Buffalos, and Barcelonas, and Parises; not that I
do not think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all the
property rights in New York city; not that I do not think the world will
ever be saved by the sheep's virtue of going patiently to the shambles;
not that I do not believe the expropriation of the possessing classes is
inevitable, and that that expropriation will begin by just such acts as
=Emma Goldman= advised, viz.: the taking possession of wealth already
produced; not that I think you owe any consideration to the conspirators
of Wall Street, or those who profit by their operations, as such, nor
ever will till they are reduced to the level of human beings having
equal chances with you to earn their share of social wealth, and no
more.

I have said that I do not give you the advice given by =Emma Goldman=,
not that I would have you forget the consideration the expropriators
have shown to you; that they have advised lead for strikers, strychnine
for tramps, bread and water as good enough for working people; not
that I cannot hear yet in my ears the words of one who said to me of
the Studebaker Wagon Works' strikers, "If I had my way I'd mow them
down with Gatling guns", not that I would have you forget the electric
wire of Fort Frick, nor the Pinkertons, nor the militia, nor the
prosecutions for murder and treason; not that I would have you forget
the 4th of May, when your constitutional right of free speech was
vindicated, nor the 11th of November when it was assassinated; not that
I would have you forget the single dinner at Delmonico's which Ward
McAllister tells us cost ten thousand dollars! Would I have you forget
that the wine in the glasses was your children's blood? It must be a
rare drink--children's blood! I have read of the wonderful sparkle on
costly champagne--I have never seen it. If I did I think it would look
to me like mothers' tears over the little, white, wasted forms of dead
babies--dead because there was no milk in their breasts! Yes, I want
you to remember that these rich are blood-drinkers, tearers of human
flesh, gnawers of human bones! Yes, if I had the power I would burn
your wrongs upon your hearts in characters that should glow like coals
in the night!

I have not a tongue of fire as =Emma Goldman= has; I cannot "stir the
people"; I must speak in my own cold, calculated way. (Perhaps that is
the reason I am allowed to speak at all.) But if I had the power, my
will is good enough. You know how Shakespeare's Marc Antony addressed
the populace at Rome:

    "I am no orator, as Brutus is,
    But as you know me well, a plain blunt man
    That love my friend. And that they know full well
    That gave me public leave to speak of him.
    For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
    Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
    To stir men's blood. I only speak right on.
    I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
    Show you sweet Cæsar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,
    And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus
    And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
    Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue
    In every wound of Cæsar's, that should move
    The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny."

If, therefore, I do not give you the advice which =Emma Goldman= gave,
let not the authorities suppose it is because I have any more respect
for their constitution and their law than she has, or that I regard
them as having any rights in the matter.

No! My reasons for not giving that advice are two. First, if I were
giving advice at all, I would say: "My friends, that bread belongs to
you. It is you who toiled and sweat in the sun to sow and reap the
wheat; it is you who stood by the thresher, and breathed the
chaff-filled atmosphere in the mills, while it was ground to flour; it
is you who went into the eternal night of the mine and risked drowning,
fire damp, explosion, and cave-in, to get the fuel for the fire that
baked it; it is you who stood in the hell-like heat, and struck the
blows that forged the iron for the ovens wherein it is baked; it is you
who stand all night in the terrible cellar shops, and tend the machines
that knead the flour into dough; it is you, you, you, farmer, miner,
mechanic, who make the bread; but you haven't the power to take it. At
every transformation wrought by toil, some one who didn't toil has taken
part from you; and now he has it all, and you haven't the power to take
it back! You are told you have the power because you have the numbers.
Never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in
numbers. One good, level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten
excited, unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power
equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City.
Do you know I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give you an
illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain
capitalist, and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of
gold from the muscle of man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his
workmen, (not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen
hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brick-bats, red-hot pokers,
and other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects, went up to his
house for the purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly to
do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who
attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone, one man, met them on the
steps of his porch, and for two mortal hours, by threats, promises,
cajoleries held those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they
went away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his
head. Now that was power; and you can't help but admire it, no matter if
it was your enemy who displayed it; and you must admit that so long as
numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity, power does not reside
in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving advice, I would not say, "take
bread," but take counsel with yourselves how to get the power to take
bread.

There is no doubt but that power is latently in you; there is no doubt
it can be developed; there is no doubt the authorities know this,
and fear it, and are ready to exert as much force as is necessary to
repress any signs of its development. And this is the explanation of
=Emma Goldman='s imprisonment. The authorities do not fear you as you
are; they only fear what you may become. The dangerous thing was "the
voice crying in the wilderness", foretelling the power which was to
come after it. You should have seen how they feared it in Philadelphia.
They got out a whole platoon of police and detectives, and executed a
military manoeuvre to catch the woman who had been running around under
their noses for three days. And when she walked up to them, then they
surrounded and captured her, and guarded the city hall where they kept
her over night, and put a detective in the next cell to make notes. Why
so much fear? Did they shrink from the stab of the dressmaker's needle?
Or did they dread some stronger weapon?

Ah! the accusation before the New York Pontius Pilate was: "She stirreth
up the people." And Pilate sentenced her to the full limit of the law,
because, he said, "You are more than ordinarily intelligent." Why is
intelligence dealt thus harshly with? Because it is the beginning of
power. Strive, then, for power.

My second reason for not repeating =Emma Goldman='s words is, that
I, as an Anarchist, have no right to advise another to do anything
involving a risk to himself; nor would I give a fillip for an action
done by the advice of some one else, unless it is accompanied by
a well-argued, well settled conviction on the part of the person
acting, that it really is the best thing to do. Anarchism, to me,
means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but
a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development
of the individual, as well as the assertion of the individual. It
means self-responsibility, and not leader-worship. I say it is your
business to decide whether you will starve and freeze in sight of food
and clothing, outside of jail, or commit some overt act against the
institution of property and take your place beside =Timmermann= and
=Goldman=. And in saying this I mean to cast no reflection whatever
upon =Miss Goldman= for doing otherwise. She and I hold many different
views on both Economy and Morals; and that she is honest in hers
she has proved better than I have proved mine. =Miss Goldman= is a
Communist; I am an Individualist. She wishes to destroy the right
of property; I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and
authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that
which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes
that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that
competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is
highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both
of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure: _the spirit which animates
Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his
slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny--the spirit which is willing to
dare and suffer_.

That which dwells in the frail body in the prison-room to-night is not
the New York dressmaker alone. Transport yourselves there in thought a
moment; look steadily into those fair, blue eyes, upon the sun-brown
hair, the sea-shell face, the restless hands, the woman's figure; look
steadily till in place of the person, the individual of time and place,
you see that which transcends time and place, and flits from house to
house of life, mocking at death. Swinburne in his magnificent "Before a
Crucifix," says:

    "With iron for thy linen bands,
    And unclean cloths for winding-sheet,
    They bind the people's nail-pierced hands,
    They hide the people's nail-pierced feet:
    And what man, or what angel known
    Shall roll back the sepulchral stone?"

Perhaps in the presence of this untrammeled spirit we shall feel that
something has rolled back the sepulchral stone; and up from the cold
wind of the grave is borne the breath that animated =Anaxagoras=,
=Socrates=, =Christ=, =Hypatia=, =John Huss=, =Bruno=, =Robert Emmet=,
=John Brown=, =Sophia Perovskaya=, =Parsons=, =Fischer=, =Engel=,
=Spies=, =Lingg=, =Berkman=, =Pallas=; and all those, known and unknown,
who have died by tree, and axe, and fagot, or dragged out forgotten
lives in dungeons, derided, hated, tortured by men. Perhaps we shall
know ourselves face to face with that which leaps from the throat of the
strangled when the rope chokes, which smokes up from the blood of the
murdered when the axe falls; that which has been forever hunted,
fettered, imprisoned, exiled, executed, and never conquered. Lo, from
its many incarnations it comes forth again, the immortal Race-Christ of
the Ages! The gloomy walls are glorified thereby, the prisoner is
transfigured, and we say, reverently we say:

    "O sacred Head, O desecrate,
    O labor-wounded feet and hands,
    O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
    Of nameless lives in divers lands!
    O slain, and spent, and sacrificed
    People! The grey-grown, speechless Christ."

Direct Action

From the standpoint of one who thinks himself capable of discerning an
undeviating route for human progress to pursue, if it is to be progress
at all, who, having such a route on his mind's map, has endeavored to
point it out to others; to make them see it as he sees it; who in so
doing has chosen what appeared to him clear and simple expressions to
convey his thoughts to others,--to such a one it appears matter for
regret and confusion of spirit that the phrase "Direct Action" has
suddenly acquired in the general mind a circumscribed meaning, not at
all implied in the words themselves, and certainly never attached to it
by himself or his co-thinkers.

However, this is one of the common jests which Progress plays on those
who think themselves able to set metes and bounds for it. Over and over
again, names, phrases, mottoes, watchwords, have been turned inside out,
and upside down, and hindside before, and sideways, by occurrences out
of the control of those who used the expressions in their proper sense;
and still, those who sturdily held their ground, and insisted on being
heard, have in the end found that the period of misunderstanding and
prejudice has been but the prelude to wider inquiry and understanding.

I rather think this will be the case with the present misconception of
the term Direct Action, which through the misapprehension, or else the
deliberate misrepresentation, of certain journalists in Los Angeles, at
the time the McNamaras pleaded guilty, suddenly acquired in the popular
mind the interpretation, "Forcible Attacks on Life and Property." This
was either very ignorant or very dishonest of the journalists; but it
has had the effect of making a good many people curious to know all
about Direct Action.

As a matter of fact, those who are so lustily and so inordinately
condemning it, will find on examination that they themselves have on
many occasions practised direct action, and will do so again.

Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly
and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his
convictions, was a direct actionist. Some thirty years ago I recall that
the Salvation Army was vigorously practising direct action in the
maintenance of the freedom of its members to speak, assemble, and pray.
Over and over they were arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept
right on singing, praying, and marching, till they finally compelled
their persecutors to let them alone. The Industrial Workers are now
conducting the same fight, and have, in a number of cases, compelled the
officials to let them alone by the same direct tactics.

Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or
who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it
with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing
for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are
essentially direct action.

Every person who ever in his life had a difference with any one to
settle, and went straight to the other persons involved to settle it,
either by a peaceable plan or otherwise, was a direct actionist.
Examples of such action are strikes and boycotts; many persons will
recall the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted the
butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at the present moment a butter
boycott seems looming up, as a direct reply to the price-makers for
butter.

These actions are generally not due to any one's reasoning overmuch on
the respective merits of directness or indirectness, but are the
spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppressed by a situation. In other
words, all people are, most of the time, believers in the principle of
direct action, and practisers of it. However, most people are also
indirect or political actionists. And they are both these things at the
same time, without making much of an analysis of either. There are only
a limited number of persons who eschew political action under any and
all circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at all, who has ever been
so "impossible" as to eschew direct action altogether.

The majority of thinking people are really opportunists, leaning, some,
perhaps, more to directness, some more to indirectness, as a general
thing, but ready to use either means when opportunity calls for it. That
is to say, there are those who hold that balloting governors into power
is essentially a wrong and foolish thing; but who, nevertheless, under
stress of special circumstance, might consider it the wisest thing to
do, to vote some individual into office at that particular time. Or
there are those who believe that, in general, the wisest way for people
to get what they want is by the indirect method of voting into power
some one who will make what they want legal; yet who, all the same, will
occasionally, under exceptional conditions, advise a strike; and a
strike, as I have said, is direct action.

Or they may do as the Socialist Party agitators, who are mostly
declaiming now against direct action, did last summer, when the police
were holding up their meetings. They went in force to the
meeting-places, prepared to speak whether-or-no; and they made the
police back down. And while that was not logical on their part, thus to
oppose the legal executors of the majority's will, it was a fine,
successful piece of direct action.

Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct
Action only are--just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who
do not believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of
inferring that I say direct action means non-resistance; not by any
means. Direct action may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as
peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Siloa that go softly. What I say
is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only,
never in political action. For the basis of all political action is
coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a
club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.

Now every school child in the United States has had the direct action of
certain non-resistants brought to his notice by his school history. The
case which every one instantly recalls is that of the early Quakers who
came to Massachusetts. The Puritans had accused the Quakers of
"troubling the world by preaching peace to it." They refused to pay
church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear
allegiance to any government. (In so doing, they were direct actionists;
what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being
political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine,
to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers
just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history
records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of
Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, "the
Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries"; that "Quaker
persistence and Quaker non-resistance had won the day."

Another example of direct action in early colonial history, but this
time by no means of the peaceable sort, was the affair known as Bacon's
Rebellion. All our historians certainly defend the action of the rebels
in that matter, as reason is, for they were right. And yet it was a case
of violent direct action against lawfully constituted authority. For the
benefit of those who have forgotten the details, let me briefly remind
them that the Virginia planters were in fear of a general attack by the
Indians; with reason. Being political actionists, they asked, or Bacon
as their leader asked, that the governor grant him a commission to raise
volunteers in their own defense. The governor feared that such a company
of armed men would be a threat to him; also with reason. He refused the
commission. Whereupon the planters resorted to direct action. They
raised the volunteers without the commission, and successfully fought
off the Indians. Bacon was pronounced a traitor by the governor; but the
people being with him, the governor was afraid to proceed against him.
In the end, however, it came so far that the rebels burned Jamestown;
and but for the untimely death of Bacon, much more might have been done.
Of course the reaction was very dreadful, as it usually is where a
rebellion collapses, or is crushed. Yet even during the brief period of
success, it had corrected a good many abuses. I am quite sure that the
political-action-at-all-costs advocates of those times, after the
reaction came back into power, must have said: "See to what evils
direct action brings us! Behold, the progress of the colony has been set
back twenty-five years"; forgetting that if the colonists had not
resorted to direct action, their scalps would have been taken by the
Indians a year sooner, instead of a number of them being hanged by the
governor a year later.

In the period of agitation and excitement preceding the revolution,
there were all sorts and kinds of direct action from the most peaceable
to the most violent; and I believe that almost everybody who studies
United States history finds the account of these performances the most
interesting part of the story, the part which dents into his memory most
easily.

Among the peaceable moves made, were the non-importation agreements, the
leagues for wearing homespun clothing and the "committees of
correspondence." As the inevitable growth of hostility progressed,
violent direct action developed; e. g., in the matter of destroying the
revenue stamps, or the action concerning the tea-ships, either by not
permitting the tea to be landed, or by putting it in damp storage, or by
throwing it into the harbor, as in Boston, or by compelling a tea-ship
owner to set fire to his own ship, as at Annapolis. These are all
actions which our commonest text-books record, certainly not in a
condemnatory way, not even in an apologetic one, though they are all
cases of direct action against legally constituted authority and
property rights. If I draw attention to them, and others of like nature,
it is to prove to unreflecting repeaters of words that _direct action
has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people
now reprobating it_.

George Washington is said to have been the leader of the Virginia
planters' non-importation league: he would now be "enjoined," probably,
by a court, from forming any such league; and if he persisted, he would
be fined for contempt.

When the great quarrel between the North and the South was waxing hot
and hotter, it was again direct action which preceded and precipitated
political action. And I may remark here that political action is never
taken, nor even contemplated, until slumbering minds have first been
aroused by direct acts of protest against existing conditions.

The history of the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War is one of
the greatest of paradoxes, although history is a chain of paradoxes.
Politically speaking, it was the slave-holding States that stood for
greater political freedom, for the autonomy of the single State against
the interference of the United States; politically speaking, it was
the non-slave-holding States that stood for a strong centralized
government, which, Secessionists said, and said truly, was bound
progressively to develop into more and more tyrannical forms. Which
happened. From the close of the Civil War on, there has been continuous
encroachment of the federal power upon what was formerly the concern of
the States individually. The wage-slaves, in their struggles of to-day,
are continually thrown into conflict with that centralized power,
against which the slave-holder protested (with liberty on his lips but
tyranny in his heart). Ethically speaking, it was the non-slave-holding
States that, in a general way, stood for greater human liberty, while
the Secessionists stood for race-slavery. In a general way only;
that is, the majority of northerners, not being accustomed to the
actual presence of negro slavery about them, thought it was probably
a mistake; yet they were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it
abolished. The Abolitionists only, and they were relatively few,
were the genuine ethicals, to whom slavery itself--not secession or
union--was the main question. In fact, so paramount was it with them,
that a considerable number of them were themselves for the dissolution
of the union, advocating that the North take the initiative in the
matter of dissolving, in order that the northern people might shake off
the blame of holding negroes in chains.

Of course, there were all sorts of people with all sorts of temperaments
among those who advocated the abolition of slavery. There were Quakers
like Whittier (indeed it was the peace-at-all-costs Quakers who had
advocated abolition even in early colonial days); there were moderate
political actionists, who were for buying off the slaves, as the
cheapest way; and there were extremely violent people, who believed and
did all sorts of violent things.

As to what the politicians did, it is one long record of
"how-not-to-do-it," a record of thirty years of compromising, and
dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to
both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be
pretended to be done. But "the stars in their courses fought against
Sisera"; the system was breaking down from within, and the direct
actionists from without, as well, were widening the cracks
remorselessly.

Among the various expressions of direct rebellion was the organization
of the "underground railroad." Most of the people who belonged to it
believed in both sorts of action; but however much they theoretically
subscribed to the right of the majority to enact and enforce laws, they
didn't believe in it on that point. My grandfather was a member of the
"underground"; many a fugitive slave he helped on his way to Canada. He
was a very patient, law-abiding man, in most respects, though I have
often thought he probably respected it because he didn't have much to do
with it; always leading a pioneer life, law was generally far from him,
and direct action imperative. Be that as it may, and law-respecting as
he was, he had no respect whatever for slave laws, no matter if made by
ten times of a majority; and he conscientiously broke every one that
came in his way to be broken.

There were times when in the operation of the "underground", violence
was required, and was used. I recollect one old friend relating to me
how she and her mother kept watch all night at the door, while a slave
for whom a posse was searching hid in the cellar; and though they were
of Quaker descent and sympathies, there was a shot-gun on the table.
Fortunately it did not have to be used that night.

When the fugitive slave law was passed, with the help of the political
actionists of the North who wanted to offer a new sop to the
slave-holders, the direct actionists took to rescuing recaptured
fugitives. There was the "rescue of Shadrach," and the "rescue of
Jerry," the latter rescuers being led by the famous Gerrit Smith; and a
good many more successful and unsuccessful attempts. Still the
politicals kept on pottering and trying to smooth things over, and the
Abolitionists were denounced and decried by the ultra-law-abiding
pacificators, pretty much as Wm. D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are being
denounced by their own party now.

The other day I read a communication in the Chicago _Daily Socialist_
from the secretary of the Louisville local, Socialist Party, to
the national secretary, requesting that some safe and sane speaker
be substituted for Bohn, who had been announced to speak there. In
explaining why, Mr. Dobbs, secretary, makes this quotation from Bohn's
lecture: "Had the McNamaras been successful in defending the interests
of the working class, they would have been right, just as John Brown
would have been right, had he been successful in freeing the slaves.
Ignorance was the only crime of John Brown, and ignorance was the only
crime of the McNamaras."

Upon this Mr. Dobbs comments as follows: "We dispute emphatically the
statements here made. The attempt to draw a parallel between the
open--if mistaken--revolt of John Brown on the one hand, and the secret
and murderous methods of the McNamaras on the other, is not only
indicative of shallow reasoning, but highly mischievous in the logical
conclusions which may be drawn from such statements."

Evidently Mr. Dobbs is very ignorant of the life and work of John Brown.
John Brown was a man of violence; he would have scorned anybody's
attempt to make him out anything else. And when once a person is a
believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most
effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a
knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal. John Brown did not
shrink at all from conspiratical methods. Those who have read the
autobiography of Frederick Douglas and the Reminiscences of Lucy Colman,
will recall that one of the plans laid by John Brown was to organize a
chain of armed camps in the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina,
and Tennessee, send secret emissaries among the slaves inciting them to
flee to these camps, and there concert such measures as times and
conditions made possible for further arousing revolt among the negroes.
That this plan failed was due to the weakness of the desire for liberty
among the slaves themselves, more than anything else.

Later on, when the politicians in their infinite deviousness contrived a
fresh proposition of how-not-to-do-it, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act,
which left the question of slavery to be determined by the settlers, the
direct actionists on both sides sent bogus settlers into the territory,
who proceeded to fight it out. The pro-slavery men, who got in first,
made a constitution recognizing slavery, and a law punishing with death
any one who aided a slave to escape; but the Free Soilers, who were a
little longer in arriving, since they came from more distant States,
made a second constitution, and refused to recognize the other party's
laws at all. And John Brown was there, mixing in all the violence,
conspiratical or open; he was "a horse-thief and a murderer," in the
eyes of decent, peaceable, political actionists. And there is no doubt
that he stole horses, sending no notice in advance of his intention to
steal them, and that he killed pro-slavery men. He struck and got away a
good many times before his final attempt on Harper's Ferry. If he did
not use dynamite, it was because dynamite had not yet appeared as a
practical weapon. He made a great many more intentional attacks on life
than the two brothers Secretary Dobbs condemns for their "murderous
methods." And yet, history has not failed to understand John Brown.
Mankind knows that though he was a violent man, with human blood upon
his hands, who was guilty of high treason and hanged for it, yet his
soul was a great, strong, unselfish soul, unable to bear the frightful
crime which kept 4,000,000 people like dumb beasts, and thought that
making war against it was a sacred, a God-called duty, (for John Brown
was a very religious man--a Presbyterian).

It is by and because of the direct acts of the fore-runners of social
change, whether they be of peaceful or warlike nature, that the Human
Conscience, the conscience of the mass, becomes aroused to the need for
change. It would be very stupid to say that no good results are ever
brought about by political action; sometimes good things do come about
that way. But never until individual rebellion, followed by mass
rebellion, has forced it. Direct action is always the clamorer, the
initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists become aware
that oppression is getting intolerable.

We have now an oppression in the land,--and not only in this land, but
throughout all those parts of the world which enjoy the very mixed
blessings of Civilization. And just as in the question of chattel
slavery, so this form of slavery has been begetting both direct action
and political action. A certain per cent. of our population (probably a
much smaller per cent. than politicians are in the habit of assigning at
mass meetings) is producing the material wealth upon which all the rest
of us live; just as it was the 4,000,000 chattel blacks who supported
all the crowd of parasites above them. These are the _land workers_ and
the _industrial workers_.

Through the unprophesied and unprophesiable operation of institutions
which no individual of us created, but found in existence when he came
here, these workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole
social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe,
or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear,
and to be housed withal--to say nothing of their share of the other
social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as
education and artistic gratifications.

These workers have, in one form or another, mutually joined their forces
to see what betterment of their condition they could get; primarily by
direct action, secondarily through political action. We have had the
Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, Co-operative Associations, Colonization
Experiments, Knights of Labor, Trade Unions, and Industrial Workers of
the World. All of them have been organized for the purpose of wringing
from the masters in the economic field a little better price, a little
better conditions, a little shorter hours; or on the other hand, to
resist a reduction in price, worse conditions, or longer hours. None of
them has attempted a final solution of the social war. None of them,
except the Industrial Workers, has recognized that there is a social
war, inevitable so long as present legal-social conditions endure. They
accepted property institutions as they found them. They were made up of
average men, with average desires, and they undertook to do what
appeared to them possible and very reasonable things. They were not
committed to any particular political policy when they were organized,
but were associated for direct action of their own initiation, either
positive or defensive.

Undoubtedly there were, and are, among all these organizations, members
who looked beyond immediate demands; who did see that the continuous
development of forces now in operation was bound to bring about
conditions to which it is impossible that life continue to submit, and
against which, therefore, it will protest, and violently protest; that
it will have no choice but to do so; that it must do so, or tamely die;
and since it is not the nature of life to surrender without struggle, it
will not tamely die. Twenty-two years ago I met Farmers' Alliance people
who said so, Knights of Labor who said so, Trade Unionists who said so.
They wanted larger aims than those to which their organizations were
looking; but they had to accept their fellow members as they were, and
try to stir them to work for such things as it was possible to make them
see. And what they could see was better prices, better wages, less
dangerous or tyrannical conditions, shorter hours. At the stage of
development when these movements were initiated, the land workers could
not see that their struggle had anything to do with the struggle of
those engaged in the manufacturing or transporting service; nor could
these latter see that theirs had anything to do with the movement of the
farmers. For that matter very few of them see it yet. They have yet to
learn that there is one common struggle against those who have
appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

Unfortunately the great organization of the farmers frittered itself
away in a stupid chase after political power. It was quite successful in
getting the power in certain States; but the courts pronounced its laws
unconstitutional, and there was the burial hole of all its political
conquests. Its original program was to build its own elevators, and
store the products therein, holding these from the market till they
could escape the speculator. Also, to organize labor exchanges, issuing
credit notes upon products deposited for exchange. Had it adhered to
this program of direct mutual aid, it would, to some extent, for a time
at least, have afforded an illustration of how mankind may free itself
from the parasitism of the bankers and the middlemen. Of course, it
would have been overthrown in the end, unless it had so revolutionized
men's minds by the example as to force the overthrow of the legal
monopoly of land and money; but at least it would have served a great
educational purpose. As it was, it "went after the red herring," and
disintegrated merely from its futility.

The Knights of Labor subsided into comparative insignificance, not
because of failure to use direct action, nor because of its tampering