“We must arm the camarades, we must never rest from arming the camarades, with stronger and stronger arguments. We must enrich their memories and imaginations with fresh facts which prove more clearly the necessity of the social revolution.”—Pierre Lavroff.
ANARCHIST propaganda is of four sorts, viz.: I. Oral. II. Written. III. By example (propagande par l’exemple). IV. By the overt act of violence (propagande par le fait).
With the anarchistic as with other creeds the simplest, most natural form of oral propaganda is, of course, that which consists in telling one’s faith to one’s neighbour.
The proselyting zeal that prompts a man to take his gospel with him wherever he goes,—to his workshop, to his café, to his restaurant, to the street corner, to “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,”—and to couple with exhortation the
“Little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love”
that make up neighbourly service, is a force not the less real and potent because its operations are unseen and the measure of them cannot be taken. It is a factor to be reckoned with, the
“presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense”;
but it is essentially an affair of the soul not to be declared save by the novelist or poet, and it is of the same substance in all cases of genuine conviction, whatever the basis of the conviction may be.