There has been of late years a remarkable, and, on the whole, a very futile tendency among certain men of science to dissect and classify abnormal people and abnormal ideas, to discover that geniuses are mad, and that all manner of well-intentioned fanatics are born criminals.

But there were elements in the Anarchist party which defied the science of the psychological analyst, so strangely and intricately were the most heterogeneous qualities blended in certain of their number—fanaticism, heroism, criminality, and not unfrequently a spicing of genius.

The primary difference between the ordinary normal man and the fanatic—as between the normal man and the madman or the genius—is the totally different standpoint whence each views life. This it is which renders it impossible for the normal man really to understand or judge fanatics. He cannot grasp their motive, their point of view, and is therefore morally incapable of judging them.

Among the Anarchists, who may be said to represent the intellectual rather than the material side of the Socialist movement—there were many fanatics. This fanaticism showed itself in different ways—sometimes in the most admirable self-abnegation, in the sacrifice of wealth, position, and happiness; frequently in abnormal actions of other kinds, and most noticeably in deeds of violence.

Very diverse in nature were the motives which prompted the committal of these acts of violence—these assassinations and dynamite explosions—in different men. With some it was an act of personal revolt, the outcome of personal sufferings and wrongs endured by the rebel himself, by his family or his class. In others violence was rather the offspring of ideas, the logical result of speculation upon the social evil and the causes thereof. These Anarchists referred to their actions as Propaganda by Deed.

Émile Henry, the dynamitard of the CafÉ Terminus, belonged to the number of what I may call the theoretical dynamitard. His terrible acts were the outcome of long and earnest thought; they were born of his mental analysis of the social canker. He committed them not in moments of passion, but with all the sang froid of a man governed by reason. His defence when on trial was a masterpiece of logical deduction and eloquent reasoning.

To the average man it is no doubt very difficult to conceive that when he threw his bomb among the crowd in the CafÉ Terminus, maiming and killing indiscriminately, Émile Henry was performing his duty according to his own lights just as much as a soldier when he obeys orders and fires on the enemy, a city man when he embarks on the day's business, or a parson when he preaches a sermon against prevailing vices. It was his sermon—however vigorously preached—against the prevailing vices and injustices of Society, and against the indifference which all classes displayed towards these. He took upon himself to strike a blow against this indifference on behalf of all the weaker and more unfortunate members of society. Being a man of intellect and some culture, he could not, like his more ignorant confrÈres, imagine that one man or one small group of men, was responsible for these. Earnest thought and reflection told him that if any section of society suffered, then society at large was guilty: all the thoughtless, all the indifferent members of society were equally responsible for its abuses. Now this may be true enough theoretically, but no one but a fanatic or a madman would carry the reasoning farther to the point of saying: "Society at large is guilty; society at large must suffer. Society is fairly well represented by the mixed crowd in a cafÉ. I will attack this crowd indiscriminately, and kill as many of their number as I can. I will unreluctantly end my days on the scaffold in order to accomplish this very obvious duty;" and proceed from words to deeds.

There is something terribly, if pervertedly logical in this reasoning, and although nothing could be farther from the attitude of the ordinary delinquent, it is no doubt more dangerous to the peace and continuance of society; and such was the attitude and the reasoning which rendered the Anarchists so formidable, and which led up to many of their most terrible outrages. Émile Henry was in his own way a well-meaning youth; kindly in private life, frugal in his habits; studious, industrious, and free from vice, he lived with his old mother and mixed little with his fellows, and no one who knew him could have suspected that this quiet, studious boy would have developed into the terrible assassin whose act sent a thrill of horror through the world.

To Anarchists of this order, abstract ideas and opinions replaced all the ordinary forces of life. Their every action was prompted by some theory, and they fashioned their lives to fit their peculiar views of what it ought to be. Émile Henry belonged to this number no less than Kosinski, Bonafede, and certain so-called Christian Anarchists. For in some fanatics the Anarchist ideas, instead of leading to violence, led to the absolute negation and rejection of it.

Among the many frequenters of our office and of the weekly discussion meetings held there, was a Christian Anarchist, one of those holding what was known as the "non-resistance to evil" creed. He, too, was a man who fitted his life to his ideas, who lived in ideas, whose whole being centred round his ideas. He was a religious fanatic whose course had deviated into strange paths.

Norbery was a pale, anxious-looking Lancashire man, with weak, restless eyes and a resolute mouth, who did not lack a certain dignity of bearing.

Both the organisationists and the individualists united in abusing and despising the Christian Norbery, but no amount of insults or invective ruffled his temper or aroused his wrath. "When you preach force or use force," he said to his opponents, "you imitate the very methods used by Governments. You will never attain universal peace and brotherhood by such means. As Anarchists we have no right to use other than passive resistance, for by using coercion we are defeating our own ends and justifying the actions of our persecutors."

The more indignant his Anarchist opponents became in the course of debate, the calmer and more complacent grew Norbery. "Abuse me," he would say, "insult me, use violence towards me, if you will; I shall turn the other cheek." Once a hot-headed Italian Anarchist lost patience with him and threw him downstairs. He lay where he fell with a sprained ankle, repeating good words from the Sermon on the Mount, until his adversary, overcome with shame and remorse, picked him up and bandaged his injured limb. Once during certain strike riots in the North of England, Norbery journeyed to the scene of trouble to preach passive measures and the Anarchist principles to the rioters. He was dragged from his platform by the police and badly hustled and knocked about. But Norbery was determined on having his say; he procured a chain and padlock, chained himself to a lamppost, threw away the key, and resumed the interrupted course of his harangue. A large crowd gathered round the persistent orator, attracted partly by his eloquence and partly by the novelty of his situation. The police hurried to the scene and tried to drag him down; his coat and shirt, torn to shreds, remained in their hands, while the semi-naked Anarchist preached away to the constantly increasing crowd. The officers of the law foamed with rage, and threatened and pommelled the enchained and defenceless Norbery. Norbery grew more eloquent and more argumentative under this treatment. Nearly an hour passed before a file could be procured and the chain severed, and by that time Norbery had ample opportunity to finish his discourse, and was conveyed to the police station in a fainting and exhausted condition.

Armitage and I engaged in endless discussions with Norbery on the question of violence, maintaining on our side that violence could only be overcome by violence, and that, however peaceful our ultimate aims might be, force must inevitably be used towards their attainment. We argued and adduced reasons in support of our views, and Norbery argued and adduced counter-reasons in support of his views, but neither the one nor the other of us was ever in the least affected by his opponent's eloquence, and at the end of the discussion we were all, if anything, more staunchly persuaded of the sense and justice of our own case than at the start. So much for the profitableness of debate between confirmed partisans.

Émile Henry was representative of the theoretical dynamitard; Matthieu, like Ravachol, of the dynamitard by passion. A——, who belonged rather to the Ravachol type, and ended by killing one of the crowned heads of Europe, was during a few weeks a frequenter of the Tocsin. He had turned Anarchist in revolt against the society which had cramped his life, starved him in childhood, overworked his body, underfed his mind, where he had found neither place nor welcome. Born into the lowest depths of society, dragged up amid criminals and drunkards, he had spent his early years between the streets and the jail-house, at times working his undeveloped muscles, at other times begging or picking pockets.

"It is all very well," he said to me one day, "for those on the top rungs of the ladder to talk of the unrelenting laws of nature and the survival of the fittest. For my part I have felt very forcibly one great law of nature, the law of self-preservation: the right to live when you have once been born, the right to food and to the pleasures of life, and I determined to survive at all costs. When my stomach is empty and my boots let in water, the mere sight of a replete and well-clothed man makes me feel like murder. It may be true that it is natural for the strongest and the best men to rise above their fellows, but even this is not the case in our society of to-day. The weakest and the worst have somehow got to the top, and giants are bolstering up the impotence of dwarfs. These dwarfs are crushing the life-blood out of us. We must pull them down, exterminate them; we must turn the whole world upside down before we can create a new and better order of things."

His action was not a theoretical protest translated into deeds; it was an act of vengeance, of personal and class revenge.

Giannoli was a type apart. His desires and actions were responsible for his views. They coloured and distorted his opinions and destroyed all sense of proportion. An incident in his private life would stand up giant-like in the way of all the doctrines in the world, dwarfing opinions and creeds. He was a physically active man and his ideas grew out of his life, whereas men like Kosinski might be said to abandon the material life in the pursuit of an ideal.

Giacomo Giannoli was a man of some education, and no ordinary degree of natural refinement and culture, one whom you would pronounce at first sight to be a gentleman. He was the son of a fairly well-to-do builder in a provincial town of Lombardy, and had received a good general education in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been for his mother's small private means; and with his share of the proceeds of the sale he travelled about for some years, leading a roving life, and devoting most of his time and cash to the Anarchist propaganda, constantly getting into troubles and bothers, at times in hiding, at others in prison, always in difficulties, growing harder and harder up as the months went by, and his moderate means slipped through his untenacious fingers.

Two convergent factors had led up to this sudden change in his life. Firstly, an incident of a private nature which revolutionised his notions of individual morality, and secondly, the discovery of the Anarchist doctrines which gave form to his new views. The incident which was primarily responsible for his new views of life, he recounted to me not long after his arrival in London.

"It was a woman," he said, "who completely altered my views of life, and made me see how perverted and unnatural are our ideas of sex and love and morals, and, in short, of everything. She was an ignorant peasant girl who lived in a neighbouring village, but a woman of rare mind and character. I shall never forget her, nor what I owe her. I was a young fellow of some twenty-one years at the time, and I loved this girl with all the passion and faith of a youth of those years. Teresina loved me in return, and for some two years we lived on happily till one day it was brought to my knowledge that she was unfaithful to me. I was beside myself with grief and mortification and jealous fury. For some hours I just raged up and down my room like one demented, crying like a child one minute, cursing and meditating revenge the next. I felt that I must have blood at all costs to appease my passion—Teresina's or her lover's, or somebody's. I was to meet Teresina that evening as usual towards nine o'clock, and I thought the intervening hours would never go by. One hope suddenly suggested itself to me, and I clung desperately to it. 'Perhaps it is false!' I said to myself. 'I will ask Teresina. It is all a lie,' and then 'Proofs, proofs, I must have proofs!' I cried, and once more my thoughts turned back to murder. Thus I went through the long hours, and at last evening came—a beautiful warm May evening, and long before the appointed hour I was at our rendezvous in a deserted podere on the mountain-side, overgrown with flags and other spring flowers, among which the fireflies were flitting noiselessly. I had no eyes for the beauty of the scene, however. I paced up and down waiting for my sweetheart, cursing the treachery of women and the blindness of men. Suddenly she appeared, dark against the clear evening sky, graceful, gay, and unconscious as ever. Without a word of welcome I rushed at her, seized her by the arm, and hurled forth all my accusations and all my reproaches.

"'Tell me it is not true,' I cried at last, 'tell me it is not true, or I will kill you where you stand!'

"I expected the usual routine of tears and protestations of innocence, all the lies and subterfuges with which women are wont to defend themselves against the unreasoning savagery of their mates. I was disappointed. Teresina stood perfectly silent till I had finished speaking; then without flinching, without one instant's hesitation, she answered, 'It is true. Every word of it is true.'

"If the moon and the stars had all dropped simultaneously out of heaven at my feet I should not have been more astonished. The calmness of her answer, the steady earnestness of her gaze as she looked back fearlessly into my eyes, her utter lack of subterfuge, took away my breath. I dropped her arm and stood staring at her, bereft of speech and understanding. At last I blurted out stupidly that I did not understand her, that I must be going mad, and entreated her to explain.

"'I said it was true; that I love Giordano, and have accepted his love,' she answered. Still I did not fully grasp her meaning.

"'But, Teresina, I thought that you loved me; have you lied to me then?' I exclaimed.

"'No, I have not lied,' she answered me. 'I have never lied to you,' and she took my hand in her strong little hand, and led me like one blind or intoxicated to the projecting root of a tree close by, and there sat down by my side.

"'Listen,' she said, still holding my hand in hers, 'I ought to have told you what I have to say before now. I only hesitated because I knew it would cause you acute suffering at first ... until you could understand. Believe me, I do love you as much as ever I did, and I could not bear even the thought of living without you. I love Giordano too, in a different way it is true, but still I love him. He has not got your mind or your heart, or your wonderful knowledge' (she was a very ignorant girl, so far as learning was concerned, and my small knowledge of books appeared to her little short of miraculous, poor child!), 'but then he has some qualities you do not possess. Well, I love him for these, and I enjoy being with him in a quite different way from what I experience with you.'

"I was silent, and she continued after a short pause:—

"'Nothing is more brutish or more selfish than jealousy, my friend. If I thought another woman could give you a moment's happiness, I should say: "Take it, enjoy it!" We do not grudge our friends every moment of enjoyment not enjoyed in our company. We wish them other friendships and other joys. What is there in the love between man and woman which should make us so selfish and so unreasonable? For my part, I must have freedom at all costs, absolutely at all costs. It is dearer to me than anything else in life, and I had sooner sacrifice even love and happiness; indeed, I cannot love or be happy without it. For God's sake grant me this liberty as I grant it to you! Take my love as I can give it to you, but do not ask me to be your slave on its account! Be sure you have my heart, and little of it remains to be squandered in other directions. What does the rest matter? I do not grudge you your loves, your pleasures, your caprices! Do not grudge me mine. Life is necessarily full of sorrows; do not let us embitter it unnecessarily.'

"She ceased speaking. She had risen to her feet and stood in front of me as she spoke, then as she finished she sank down on her knees by my side.

"'Do you understand?' she asked me. 'Can you love me on these terms? liberty—absolute liberty for us both?'

"I answered 'Yes,' nor did I ever regret the answer.

"I think that was the most momentous day in my life, for it wrought the greatest change in me. My eyes were opened by the peasant girl's words, and from that evening forward I regarded life quite differently. For the first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas and prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the falseness of all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing conventions before nature and the detestable character of our dealings with women and of our attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly awakened vision I looked anew on life, and it seemed to me that till then I had never lived. All that which I had before taken for granted I now began to question. I found that instead of thinking out life's problems for myself I had allowed myself to grow into other peoples' ideas, that I had tacitly taken for right what they had pronounced right, and for wrong what they had stigmatised as wrong. My spiritual world now turned, as it were, a complete somersault, and I was re-born a new man—an Anarchist.

"I and Teresina and Giordano lived very happily for some months, much to the scandal of the narrow-minded, bigoted village folk, until I was compelled to absent myself from the country owing to some little disturbances in the neighbourhood in which I had got implicated.

"Teresina followed me into exile, and with little intermission remained with me during all those early years of wanderings and adventure. She cared little about Anarchist doctrines, though herself a born rebel and an innate Anarchist. She did more for me than all the doctrines in the world. Poor child! When at last I got through all my money, and life from day to day grew harder and more precarious, food scantier, clothes raggeder, and surroundings more dangerous, she still remained faithful to me in her own way, but the life was too hard for her. We had spent the summer in Paris, and there I had got seriously implicated in a little Anarchist venture and found it necessary to flee the country with all haste. Teresina followed me into Belgium in the bitter winter weather. She died of consumption in a Brussels hospital shortly after our arrival."

Such, in his own words, were the influences and the circumstances which revolutionised Giannoli's entire life and his outlook on things. He became one of the leaders of the most advanced section of the "Individualist Anarchists," who maintain that not only is government of man by man wrong and objectionable, but that no ties or obligations of any sort bind men together. The ethics of "humanity" and "brotherhood" are unknown to these Anarchists. They recognise no laws, social or moral, no obligations or duties towards their fellows, no organisation or association of any sort. They claim absolute freedom for the individual, freedom to live, die, love, enjoy, think, work, or take—this freedom in each individual only curtailed by others claiming equal rights. And I am bound to admit that the question whether such individual freedom would not tend to individual licence and domination by the stronger and cleverer or more unscrupulous man in the future, met with little consideration.

That it led to such licence in the present among themselves was an indubitable fact. All the individualist Anarchists agreed that, being at war with existing society, which interfered with, coerced, and used violence towards them, they were at liberty to use all means against society in retaliation—force and even fraud if expedient. But the less intelligent and more ignorant men who came in contact with these principles considered themselves not only at liberty to use all means against society, the enemy; but honour or scruples of any sort among themselves were tabooed. A naturally honourable man like Giannoli was, of course, free from the danger of falling victim to such perverted sophistry. But the manner in which these doctrines succeeded in perverting the minds of fairly intelligent and well-meaning men is illustrated by the following incident.

One evening, some months after the advent of Giannoli and his friends, there arrived at the office of the Tocsin a small party of three men and one woman—all of them Spaniards. They requested me to help them to procure lodgings for the night, and, as they knew nothing of the English language, to assist them the following morning in procuring tickets, etc., with a view to their immediate re-departure for the States. Giannoli, who knew the men, having spent some years in Spain, explained to me that the leader of the party, a handsome, well-spoken young man, was an engineer belonging to a good Barcelona family. The second one, a good-natured giant, was his brother and an engineer like himself. The third male member of the party was a lanky, scrofulous journalist, a man of many words and few wits. The lady, a pretty brunette, was their "compagna." She had escaped from her family and eloped with Fernandez, the engineer, but was apparently shared on communistic principles.

I settled the party for the night in a small hotel and procured their tickets for the morrow's journey, after which they proceeded to hand over to Giannoli, with many cautions and precautions, a mysterious linen bag which, it was whispered, contained some twelve thousand lire in bank-notes (about five hundred pounds sterling). Then, having been assured by Giannoli that I was to be trusted, they told me their story.

The two brothers, the engineers, had till quite recently been employed by a large electrical engineering firm in Barcelona, of which an elder brother, some years their senior, was the manager. For some time the two younger men had been engaged, unknown to their family, in Anarchist propaganda, and had fallen in with the section of the individualisti. Fernandez was in love with Adolfa, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and had secretly talked her over to his own ideas. The girl's parents objected to the match on account of the extreme youth of the couple—the girl was not quite eighteen and the young man still considerably under age. Therefore they settled to elope, and Fernandez's brother and Vanni, their journalist friend, expressed a desire to form an addition to the elopement. This Fernandez had at first objected to, but the girl, who had made rapid strides into the Giannolian free-love theories, insisted. Lack of money formed the only obstacle to this scheme, but an unforeseen circumstance enabled them to remove it.

The eldest brother, who had charge of the finances of the establishment, and whose business it was to pay the men their wages, wished to absent himself from the works for a few days, and, without the knowledge of his employers, he broke rules to the extent of handing over to his brother Fernandez, as to one beyond suspicion, the men's wages—the five hundred pounds now contained in the mysterious linen bag.

"Now," argued Fernandez to himself, "I, as an Anarchist, do not recognise private property, nor any set moral laws. The company's money is the result of plunder; they can afford to lose it and have no right to it; I stand desperately in need of it—and it is in my hands.... My brother?... oh, my brother, he is after all nothing but a bourgeois, and I, as an Anarchist, admit of no family ties."

Thus when, two days later, the unfortunate manager returned, he found his brothers gone, the money nowhere to be found, and disgrace and ruin ahead. Driven to despair, and not knowing in what direction to turn for the necessary sum, the wretched man ended his perplexities with a bullet. This was the first news which greeted the runaways on their arrival in the States.

Now the younger brothers who had perpetrated this cruel thing were not hardened criminals. From what little I saw of them, they appeared to be kindly, courteous, and, by nature, fairly honourable men. What they lacked was moral strength. Under ordinarily good influences they would have acted in an ordinarily proper way. They had not the force of character necessary for handling the Anarchist individualist doctrines, which, excellently as they may work with men of character, are fatal to weaker men. The man who recognises no law outside himself must be capable of governing himself.

The office of the Tocsin was the constant scene of debate and dispute between the two rival camps in the Anarchist party—the organisationists and the individualists. Bonafede and Gnecco belonged to the former, while most of the active staff of the Tocsin—myself among others—adhered to the latter section. A curious feature of the matter—and I fancy it is not exclusively characteristic of the Anarchist party—was the amount of invective and hatred, which both factions ought properly to have expended on the common enemy, but which instead they spent most of their time in levelling at one another. A casual witness of these internal strifes might have imagined that the two parties were at the antipodes in their ideas and objects, rather than comrades and participators in a common belief. Their dissensions were alone forgotten in a common hatred of government and existing society. And even in their efforts to upraise the social revolution—the great upheaval to which all Anarchists aspired—I doubt whether there lurked not some secret hope that the detested rival faction might be demolished in the fray. Bonafede and Giannoli were warm friends personally, and held one another in great esteem. Yet I can clearly recollect Giannoli one evening, with tears in his eyes, assuring me that his first duty when the Revolution broke out would be to disembowel his dear friend.

"He is my friend," Giannoli said to me, "and I love him as such, and as a man I admire him. But his doctrines are noxious; in time of Revolution they would prove fatal to our Cause; they would be the undoing of all the work for which we have suffered and fought. Organise a Revolution, indeed! You might as well attempt to organise a tempest and to marshal the elements into order! I know Bonafede to be above personal ambition, but, take my word for it, most of these organisationists hope to organise themselves into comfortable places when their time comes! It is our duty to destroy them."