“He rose at five, and read until the work hour. His shop associates, knowing him sincere, generous, incapable of platitude, did not detest him in spite of his unsociable ways.”—J.-H. Rosny, in Le Bilatéral.
“Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”—Thomas Carlyle.
“J’ai regardé le juge en face. Certain d’abord d’être pendu, Je ne me suis pas défendu. A quoi bon mendier sa grâce! Le cuir est fait pour le tanner; Le code est fait pour condamner. J’ai regardé le juge en face.” Maurice Boukay, in Chansons Rouges.
THE first anarchist I ever knew in any country was a dear, grandfatherly American workingman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who conducted me, the Sunday following our chance meeting, to an ethical culture society in Dorchester on purpose to show me how children should be taught to be good.
The second was a young doctor of philosophy, dreaded by reputable Boston for his well-documented sans-gêne, who chanced to be rusticating on a farm where I spent ten days with a gang of a dozen city street boys. I found him infinitely gentle and kind; and it was he of all the farm household who came to relieve me one night while I was keeping an anxious bedside vigil beside one of the boys, who had received an accidental injury to the head that threatened to prove dangerous.
These my first two experiences with anarchist types were scarcely of a nature to dismay me, nor have I ever found anything dismaying in the private characters of the anarchists I have since known in the Old World.
In an every way remarkable study of the anarchist temperament, based on a thorough investigation of anarchists of many professions and all stations in life, A. Hamon, author of La France Sociale et Politique and Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:—
“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of anarchist whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: a man perceptibly affected by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic, or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity,—a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, an alert logical faculty, and pronounced combative tendencies.