The latest offspring of revolutionary opinion—and the most misshapen—is anarchism. Seven or eight years ago the word was scarcely known; but then, as if on a sudden, rumours of the anarchists and their horrid "propaganda of deed" echoed in, one upon another, from almost every country in the old world and the new. To-day they were haranguing mobs of unemployed in Lyons and Brussels under a black flag—the black flag of hunger, which, they explained, knows no law. To-morrow they were goading the peasants of Lombardy or Naples to attack the country houses of the gentry, and lay the vineyards waste. Presently they were found attempting to assassinate the German Emperor at Niederwald, or laying dynamite against the Federal Palace at Bern; or a troop of them had set off over Europe on a quixotic expedition of miscellaneous revenge on powers that be, and were reported successively as having killed a gendarme in Strasburg, a policeman in Vienna, and a head of the constabulary in Frankfort. Before these reports had time to die in our ears, fresh tales would arrive of anarchists pillaging the bakers' shops in Paris, or exulting over the murder of a mining manager at Decazeville, or flinging bombs among the police of Chicago; and it seemed as if a new party of disorder had broke loose upon the world, busier and more barbarous than any that went before it.

It is no new party, however; it is merely the extremer element in the modern socialist movement. Mr. Hyndman and other socialists would fain disclaim the anarchists altogether, and are fond of declaring that they are the very opposite of socialists—that they are individualists of the boldest stamp. But this contention will not stand. There are individualist anarchists, no doubt. The anarchists of Boston, in America, are individualists; one of the two groups of English anarchists in London is individualist; but these individualist anarchists are very few in number anywhere, and the mass of the party whose deeds made a stir on both sides of the Atlantic is undoubtedly more socialist than the socialists themselves. I have said in a previous chapter that the socialism of the present day may be correctly described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy, and in every one of these three characteristics the anarchists go beyond other socialists, instead of falling short of them. They are really more socialist, more democratic, and more revolutionary than the rest of their comrades. They are more socialist, because they are disposed to want not only common property and common production, but common enjoyment of products as well. They are more democratic, because they will have no government of any kind over the people except the people themselves—no king or committee, no representative institutions, either imperial or local, but merely every little industrial group of people managing its public affairs as it will manage its industrial work. And they are more revolutionary, for they have no faith, even temporarily, in constitutional procedure, and think making a little trouble is always the best way of bringing on a big revolution. Other socialists prepare the way for revolution by a propaganda of word; but the anarchists believe they can hasten the day best by the propaganda of deed. Like the violent sections of all other parties, they injure and discredit the party they belong to, and they often attack the more moderate section with greater bitterness than their common enemy; but they certainly belong to socialism, both in origin and in principle. There were anarchists among the Young Hegelian socialists of Germany fifty years ago. The Anti-socialist Laws bred a swarm of anarchists among the German socialists in 1880, who left under Most and Hasselmann, and carried to America the seed which led to the outrages of Chicago. The Russian nihilists were anarchists from the beginning; they broke up the International with their anarchism twenty years ago, and they are among the chief disseminators of anarchism in England and France to-day, because to the Russians anarchism is only the socialism and the democracy of the rural communes in which they were born. Socialists themselves are often obliged to admit the embarrassing affinity. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling complain, in their "Labour Movement in America," that while "the Chicago capitalist wanted us to be hanged after we had landed, Herr Most's paper, Die Freiheit, was for shooting us at sight"; that "anarchism ruined the International movement, threw back the Spanish, Italian, and French movements for many years, has proved a hindrance in America, and so much or so little of it as exists in England is found by the revolutionary socialist party a decided nuisance"; but they admit that "well nigh every word spoken by the chief defendants at the Chicago trial could be endorsed by socialists, for they then preached not anarchism, but socialism. Indeed," they add, "he that will compare the fine speech by Parsons in 1886 with that of Liebknecht at the high treason trial at Leipzig will find the two practically identical."

So far, then, as their socialism goes, there is admittedly no real difference between Parsons, the Chicago anarchist, and Liebknecht, the leader of the German socialists. Indeed, as I have said, the anarchists seem to show a tendency even to outbid the socialists in their socialism. Socialists generally say that, while committing all production to the public authority, they have no idea of interfering with liberty of consumption. Their opponents argue, in reply, that they would find an interference with consumption to be an inevitable result of their systematic regulation of production; but they themselves always repudiate that conclusion. They would make all the instruments of production common property, but leave all the materials of enjoyment individual property still. Ground rents, for example, would belong to the public; but every man would own his own house and furniture, at least for life, if he had built it by his own labour, or bought it from his own savings, because a dwelling house is not an instrument of production, but an article of enjoyment or consumption. But some of the more representative spokesmen of the anarchists would not leave this last remnant of private property standing, and strongly contend for the old primitive plan, still in use among savage tribes, of giving those who are in want of anything a claim—a right—to share the enjoyment of it with those who happen to have it. They would municipalize the houses as well as the ground rents, and no one should be allowed a right to a spare bed or a disengaged sofa so long as one of the least of his brethren huddled on straw in a garret in the slums, or slept out on a bench in Trafalgar Square. In a recent number of Freedom, for example, Prince Krapotkin announces that "the first task of the Revolution will be to arrange things so as to share the accommodation of available houses according to the needs of the inhabitants of the city, to clear out the slums and fully occupy the villas and mansions." Anarchist opinions are no doubt capricious and variable. There are as many anarchisms as there are anarchists, it has been said. But this tendency to go further than other socialists, in superseding individual by common property, has repeatedly appeared in some of their most representative utterances.

The Jurassian Federation of the International adopted a resolution at their Congress in 1880, in which they say: "We desire collectivism, with all its logical consequences, not only in the sense of the collective appropriation of instruments of production, but also of the collective enjoyment and consumption of products. Anarchist communism will in this way be the necessary and inevitable consequence of the social revolution, and the expression of the new civilization which that revolution will inaugurate."

Their principal difference with the other branch of the socialists, however,—and that from which they derive their name—is upon the government of the socialistic society. Anarchy as a principle of political philosophy was first advocated by Proudhon, and he meant by it, not of course a state of chaos or disorder, but merely a state without separate political or civil institutions,—"a state of order without a set government." "The expression, anarchic government," he says, "implies a sort of contradiction. The thing seems impossible, and the idea absurd; but there is really nothing at fault here but the language. The idea of anarchy in politics is quite as rational and positive as any other. It consists in this,—that the political function be re-absorbed in the industrial, and in that case social order would ensue spontaneously out of the simple operation of transactions and exchanges. Every man might then be justly called autocrat of himself, which is the extreme reverse of monarchical absolutism" ("Die Princip Federatif," p. 29). He distinguishes anarchy from democracy and from communistic government, though his distinctions are not easy to apprehend exactly. Communism, he says, is the government of all by all; democracy, the government of all by each; and anarchy, the government of each by each. Anarchy is, in his opinion, the only real form of self-government. People would manage their own public affairs together like partners in a business, and no one would be subject to the authority of another. Government is considered a mere detail of industrial management; and the industrial management is considered to be in the hands of all who co-operate in the industry. The specific preference of anarchism, therefore, seems to be for some form of direct government by the people, in place of any form of central, superior, or representative government; and naturally its political communities must be small in size, though they may be left to league together, if they choose, in free and somewhat loose federations. The anarchists are accordingly more democratic in their political theory than the socialists more strictly so called, inasmuch as they would give the people more hand in the work of government, though of course they preposterously underrate the need and difficulty of that work.

On some minor points they contradict one another, and quite as often contradict themselves. Proudhon, for example, would still, even in anarchist society, retain the local policeman and magistrate; but anarchists of a stricter doctrine would either have every man carry his own pistol and provide for his own security, or, as the Boston anarchists prefer, apparently, would have public security supplied like any other commodity by an ordinary mercantile association—in Proudhon's words, "by the simple operation of transactions and exchanges." Emerson said the day was coming when the world would do without the paraphernalia of courts and parliaments, and a man who liked the profession would merely put a sign over his door, "John Smith, King." This is too much division of function however for anarchists generally, and they would have every industrial group do its government as it did its business by general co-operation. Just as in Russia every rural commune has its own trade, and the inhabitants of one are all shoemakers, while the inhabitants of another are all tailors, so in anarchist society, according to the more advanced doctrine, every separate group would have its own separate industry, because, in fact, the separate industry makes it a separate group. And it would be managed by all its members together, not by anything in the nature of a board, for it is important to recollect that anarchists of the purest water entertain as much objection to the domination of a vestry or a town council as to that of a king or a cabinet. Some who side with them, especially old supporters of the French Revolutionary Commune, have still a certain belief in a municipal council; but the Russian anarchists, at any rate, look upon this as a piece of faithless accommodation. Prince Krapotkin, I have already mentioned, thinks the first business of the contemplated revolution must be to redistribute the dwelling houses, so as to thin the slums and quarter their surplus population in the incompletely occupied villas or mansions of the West End. That is a very large task, which it will seem, to an ordinary mind, obviously impossible for the vast population of a great city like London to execute in their own proper persons at an enormous town meeting; yet, if I understand Prince Krapotkin, it is this preposterous proposal he is actually offering as a serious contribution to a more perfect system of government. "For," says he, "sixty elected persons sitting round a table and calling themselves a Municipal Council cannot arrange the matter on paper. It must be arranged by the people themselves, freely uniting to settle the question for each block of houses, each street, and proceeding by agreement from the single to the compound, from the parts to the whole; all having their voice in the arrangements, and putting in their claims with those of their fellow-citizens; just as the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands." And how do the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands? Stepniak gives us a very interesting description of a meeting of a Russian mir in his "Russia Under the Tsars" (vol. i. p. 2).

"The meetings of the village communes, like those of the Landesgemeinde of the primitive Swiss cantons, are held under the vault of heaven, before the Starosta's house, before a tavern, or at any other convenient place. The thing that most strikes a person who is present for the first time at one of these meetings is the utter confusion which seems to characterize its proceedings. Chairman there is none. The debates are scenes of the wildest disorder. After the convener has explained his reasons for calling the meeting, everybody rushes in to express his opinion, and for a while the debate resembles a free fight of pugilists. The right of speaking belongs to him who can command attention. If an orator pleases his audience, interrupters are promptly silenced; but if he says nothing worth hearing, nobody heeds him, and he is shut up. When the question is somewhat of a burning one, and the meeting begins to grow warm, all speak at once, and none listen. On these occasions the assembly breaks up into groups, each of which discusses the subject on its own account. Everybody shouts his arguments at the top of his voice. Charges and objurgations, words of contumely and derision, are heard on every hand, and a wild uproar goes on from which it does not seem possible that any good can result.

"But this apparent confusion is of no moment. It is a necessary means to a certain end. In our village assemblies voting is unknown. Controversies are never decided by a majority of voices; every question must be settled unanimously. Hence the general debate, as well as private discussions, must be continued until a proposal is brought forward which conciliates all interests, and wins the suffrage of the entire mir. It is, moreover, evident that to reach this consummation the debates must be thorough and the subject well threshed out; and in order to overcome isolated opposition, it is essential for the advocates of conflicting views to be brought face to face, and compelled to fight out their differences in single combat."

But beneath all this tough and apparently acrimonious strife a singular spirit of forbearance reigns. The majority will not force on a premature decision. Debate may rage fast and furious day after day, but at last the din dies. A common understanding is somehow attained, and the mir pronounces its deliverance, which is accepted, in the rude belief of the peasants, as the decree of God Himself. In this way tens of thousands of Russian villages have been, no doubt, managing their own petty business with reasonable amity and success for centuries, and the political philosophy of Russian writers like Bakunin and Prince Krapotkin, who have propagated anarchism in the west of Europe, is merely the naÏve suggestion that the form of government which answers not intolerably for the few trivial concerns of a primitive Russian village would answer best for the whole complex business of a great developed modern society.

The anarchists carry their dislike to authority into other fields besides the political and industrial. They will have no invisible master or ruler any more than visible. They renounce both God and the devil, and generally with an energy beyond all other revolutionists. Some of the older socialists were believers; St. Simon, Fourier, Leroux and Louis Blanc were all theists; but it is rare to find one among the socialists of the present generation, and with the anarchists an aggressive atheism seems an essential part of their way of thinking. They will own no superior power or authority of any kind—employer, ruler, deity, or law. The Anarchist Congress of Geneva in 1882 issued a manifesto, which began thus:—

"Our enemy, it is our master. Anarchists—that is to say, men without chiefs—we fight against all who are invested or wish to invest themselves with any kind of power whatsoever. Our enemy is the landlord who owns the soil and makes the peasant drudge for his profit. Our enemy is the employer who owns the workshop, and has filled it with wage-serfs. Our enemy is the State, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic, working class, with its functionaries and its services of officers, magistrates, and police. Our enemy is every abstract authority, whether called Devil or Good God, in the name of which priests have so long governed good souls. Our enemy is the law, always made for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and for the justification and consecration of crime."

Among other restraints, they entertain often a speculative opposition to the restraint of the legal family, and sometimes advocate a return to aboriginal promiscuity and relationship by mothers; but this is only an occasional element in their agitation. It is plain, however, that when law is believed to be oppression, crime and lawlessness come to be humanity.

I have now shown that the anarchists, so far from representing an opposite movement to revolutionary social democracy, are really ultra-socialist and ultra-democratic, and it seems hardly necessary to show that they are ultra-revolutionary. All social democrats contemplate an eventual revolution, but some see no objection meanwhile to take part in current politics; while others, a more witnessing generation, practise an ostentatious abstention, and call themselves political abstentionists. Some, again, think and desire that the revolution will come by peaceful and lawful means; others trust to violence alone. The anarchists outrun all. They refuse to have anything to do with any politics but revolution, and with any revolution but a violent one, and they think the one means of producing revolution now or at any future time is simply to keep exciting disorder and class hatred, assassinating State officers, setting fire to buildings, and paralyzing the bourgeoisie with fear. All anarchists are not of this sanguinary mind, and it is interesting to remember that Proudhon himself wrote Karl Marx in 1846, warning him against "making a St. Bartholomew of the proprietors," and opposed resort to revolutionary action of any kind as a means of promoting social reform. "Perhaps," he says, "we think no reform is possible without a coup de main, without what used to be called a revolution, and which is only a shake. I understand that decision and excuse it, for I held it for a long time myself, but I confess my latest studies have completely taken it away from me. I believe we have no need of any such thing in order to succeed, and that consequently we ought not to postulate revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means is nothing more nor less than an appeal to force, to arbitrary power, and is therefore a contradiction. I state the problem thus: to restore to society, by an economic combination, the wealth which has been taken from society by another economic combination." ("Proudhon's Correspondence," ii. 198.)

But whatever individual anarchists may hold or renounce, the general view of the party is as I have stated. A meeting of 600 anarchists—chiefly Germans and Austrians, but including also some Russians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen—was held at Paris on the 20th April, 1884, and passed a resolution urgently recommending the extirpation of princes, capitalists, and parsons, by means of "the propaganda of deed."[2] The Congress held at London in 1881, which sought to re-establish the International on purely anarchist lines, adopted a declaration of principles, containing, among other things, the following: "It is matter of strict necessity to make all possible efforts to propagate by deeds the revolutionary idea and the spirit of revolt among that great section of the mass of the people which as yet takes no part in the movement, and entertains illusions about the morality and efficacy of legal means. In quitting the legal ground on which we have generally remained hitherto, in order to carry our action into the domain of illegality which is the only way leading to revolution, it is necessary to have recourse to means which are in conformity with that end.... The Congress recommends organizations and individuals constituting part of the International Working Men's Association to give great weight to the study of the technical and chemical sciences as a means of defence and attack."[3] In the first French revolution Lavoisier and other seven and twenty chemists were put to the guillotine together, on the express pretence, "We have no need of savants"; but now "Technology" is a standing heading in the anarchist journals; a revolutionary organization has its chemical department as well as its press department; and anarchist tracts often end with the standing exhortation, "Learn the use of dynamite," as socialist tracts end with the old admonition of 1848, "Proletarians of all nations, unite."

The object of this policy of violence is partly, as we see from the above quotations, to inflame the spirit of revolt and disorder in the working classes; and it is partly to terrorize the bourgeoisie, so that they may yield in pure panic all they possess. But for its expressly violent policy, anarchism would be the least formidable or offensive manifestation of contemporary socialism. For, in the first place, its specific doctrine is one which it is really difficult to get the most ordinary common sense puzzled into accepting. Men in their better mind may be ready enough to listen to specious, or even not very specious, schemes of reform that hold out a promise of extirpating misery, and in their worse mind they may be quite as prone to think that if everybody had his own, there would be fewer rich; but they are not likely to believe we can get on without law or government of any sort. Even the vainest will feel that however superfluous these institutions may be for themselves, they are still unhappily indispensable for some of their neighbours. Then in the next place this doctrine of the anarchists is as great a stumbling-block to themselves as it is to other people, for they carry their objection to government into their own movement, and can consequently never acquire that concentration and unity of organization which is necessary for any effectual conspiracy. They are always found constituted in very small groups very loosely held together, and small as the several groups may be, they are always much more likely to subdivide than to consolidate. Even the few anarchist refugees in London who might be expected to be knit into indissoluble friendship by their common adversity have broken into separate clubs, and the "Autonomic" and the "Morgenrothe"—though they have hardly more than a hundred members between them, and all belong to the same socialist variety of anarchist doctrine—remain as the Jews and the Samaritans. It is said to be a subject of speculative discussion among anarchists whether two members are sufficient to constitute an anarchist club. This laxity of organization is a natural result of the dislike to authority which the anarchists cultivate as a cardinal principle. Subjection to an executive committee is as offensive to their feelings and as contrary to their principles as subjection to a monarch. The dread of subjection keeps them disunited and weak. As Machiavelli says, the many ruin a revolutionary society, and the few are not enough. A small group may concoct an isolated crime, but it can do little towards the social revolution.

The anarchist policy—the propaganda of deed—consists, however, exactly in this concoction of isolated crimes and outrages. Some of the continental powers are conferring at this moment on the propriety of taking international efforts against the anarchists, and the question may at least be reasonably raised before our own Government, whether a policy of promiscuous outrage like this should continue to be included among political offences, securing protection against extradition, and whether the propaganda of deed and the use of dynamite should not rather be declared outside the limits of fair and legitimate revolution, as, by the Geneva Convention, explosive bullets are put outside the limits of fair or legitimate war.