It is perfectly fair that the State should proceed against criminal propaganda by legal measures, and that Anarchist criminals should suffer for their action, the punishment which a country inflicts even if it be the death penalty. There is no difference of opinion[62] as regards this view except among Anarchists themselves, who arrogate to themselves the right to kill, but deny it to the State. There remain only two points that we might add.
First of all, exceptional legislation should be avoided. It is in no way justified. Just as the motive of Anarchism to any offence affords no extenuating circumstances, so, too, it should not make matters worse. Secondly, we should not indulge in the vain hope that Anarchism itself, or the criminal results of it, can be combated by mere condemnation of Anarchist criminals, however just or unjust the sentence may be. Punishment appears to fanatics who long for the martyr's crown, no longer a deterrent but an atonement. In France in less than two years, Ravachol, Henry, and Vaillant were guillotined; but that did not deter Caserio in the least from his mad act.
Numerous Anarchist crimes are to be regarded merely as means to indirect suicide, a method by which those who commit them may end lives that are a burden to them, while they lack the courage to commit suicide directly. Lombroso, Krafft, Ebbing, and others cite a long list of political criminals who must certainly be regarded as such indirect suicides.
We will not enter the controversial province of criminal pathology, although it seems certain that in the criminal deeds of the Anarchism of action a large share is taken by persons pathologically diseased or mentally affected. For these also punishment loses its deterrent effect. Taken all in all, one cannot expect any other result from the punishment of Anarchist criminals, except the moral one of having defended the rights of society. On the other hand, the Anarchists regard the justification of one of their own party as the strongest means of propaganda, and it cannot be denied that the Ravachol cult resulting from the execution of that common criminal, Ravachol, caused a considerable accession of strength to Communist Anarchism. The State cannot, of course, allow itself to look on at Anarchist crimes and "to shorten its arm"; but it must not delude itself that it will remove such crime or stop the Anarchist movement by means of the guillotine.
Does this mean that society is helpless in face of Anarchism? It is, if it possesses only force to suppress and not the power to convince; if society is only held together by compulsion, as the present State partly is, and the Socialist State would be still more, and threatens to fall to pieces if the apparatus of compulsion were given up; if the State, instead of trying to redress the unfortunately unalterable natural inequality of its members, only intensifies them by legalising all kinds of new inequalities, and if it regards its institutions, and especially the law, as instruments for the unalterable conservation of all present forms of society with all their imperfections and injustices. If right is done, and right is uttered arbitrarily, in a partisan and protectionist method; if equality before the law is disregarded by those who are called to defend the law; if belief in the reliability of the indispensable institutions of authority is lightly shaken by these very institutions themselves, then it is no wonder if men despair of the capability of the State to practice or to maintain right; and if the masses, always ready to generalise, deny right, law, State, and authority together. We have already pointed out repeatedly that Anarchism cannot be explained by pauperism alone. Pauperism justifies Socialism; but this movement against authority, which certainly does not bear in all cases the name of Anarchism, but which is to-day more widely spread than is often imagined, can only be explained by a confused mass of injustice and wrongdoing, of which the bourgeois State is daily and hourly guilty towards the weak.
The average man does not much mind his rich fellow-man riding in his carriage while he himself cannot even pay his tram fare; but that he should be abandoned by society to every chance official of justice, as a prey that has no rights, while justice often falters anxiously before those who are shielded by coats of arms and titles,—that makes his blood boil, and causes him to seek the origin of this injustice in the institution itself instead of in the way it works. How many Anarchists have become so merely because they were treated as common criminals when they happened to have the misfortune to be suspected of Anarchism? How many became Anarchists because they were outlawed by society on account of free and liberal views?
Anarchism may be defined etiologically as disbelief in the suitability of constituted society. With such views there would be only one way in which we could cut the ground from under the Anarchists' feet. Society must anxiously watch that no one should have reason to doubt its intention of letting justice have free sway, but must raise up the despairing, and by all means in its power lead them back to their lost faith in society. A movement like Anarchism cannot be conquered by force and injustice, but only by justice and freedom.