“To say to the workers, ‘Do this, burn that, hang that one,’ is child’s play, since the reader may demand with reason why he who preaches so glibly does not do himself what he urges others to do.”
The American labour leaders are wont to assure us, while reserving to themselves in all cases the right to criticism and opposition, that there never has been, using terms broadly, and never can be, an unsuccessful strike, since the strike that is the least necessary and most immediately disastrous serves the large purpose of focussing public attention on the strained relations between capital and labour, of revealing by a sort of cathode-ray efficacy the hidden ills of the body politic, and so of bringing just that much the nearer the final cure.
Similarly, the anarchist leaders assert that in anarchy no forces are lost, and that the manifestations which are, in appearance, the most foolhardy and shocking may have, equally with those which are, in appearance, the most reasonable, the saving merit of compelling the thoughtless world to think. “And perhaps,” says one of these leaders, “it will occur to the hide-bound bourgeoisie to find society defective when they shall have discovered that there is some danger in perpetuating its errors.”
“The anarchist had been told,” wrote Zo d’Axa in L’Endehors, apropos of the dynamite exploits of an unknown, who turned out to be Ravachol, “that the idea for which he was willing to brave every danger did not exist. He had had it dinned into his ears that, in other times, the precursors talked less and acted more. His theory had been laughed at. His hope had been mocked. When, upon the highway as an apostle, he had attempted to convert the people, no one of these laughers and mockers had been willing to tarry and listen an instant.
“Now, behold him!
“Like the street vender drawing crude charcoal pictures on the sidewalk to attract the cockney crowd to which he means to offer an article de Paris a little later, a primitive propagandist of anarchy has decided to force attention by the brutality of an act.
“Back of this act is the faith, so much tabooed, to which he has at last drawn fruitful discussion.
“It was an Idea the dynamiter displayed.
“And no one can deny it,—at the moment when, by favour of the excitement, the journals are giving their readers the very ‘articles de Paris’ which the terrible unknown dreamed of showing. Side by side with their invectives the Figaro, the Eclair, other sheets, print and expound theories which had not had the freedom of their columns before. These journals have become, in spite of their reserves, the propagators of the accursed Idea.
“Is it a result?