The island of anarchy: A fragment of history in the 20th century

by Elizabeth Waterhouse

This was one great power for good. The other was the fact that so many owners of land had devoted large portions of it to sites for Industrial Villages, and even those who had no sympathy for the poor or enthusiasm for the good of their country, partly for fashion’s sake, and partly because these schemes proved not only useful to the poor but beneficial to the landowner, joined to aid the great work of withdrawing the population from the towns into the country.

The gradual disuse of steam, with all its dismal accompaniments of blackened skies and unlovely chimneys, allowed of almost all manufactures being carried on under healthy and cheerful conditions. On every hill, rows of windmills gathered the force which produced electricity and stored it for the use of the village below; while by every stream, and on every shore visited by tides, the forces of water were in the same way brought into a service which, being no longer intermittent, was of permanent and continuous value.

Thus the real misery of the honest poor in England was becoming a thing of the past, and the large class of people whose stock-in-trade was the discontent of others became at once more reckless and more dangerous when, flinging away all disguise and separated from those whose wrongs had lent colour to their schemes, they appeared under their true flag as the enemies of all law and duty, industry and religion.

The young Cabinet saw at once the way to meet them. Those who would not obey the laws of one country must seek a home in another. Banishment seemed at once the mildest and the most reasonable punishment (if indeed it can be so called),—not transportation to some special spot, but simply exile from England and from all British dominions and colonies—the Great Federation being absolutely united in this important matter—under penalty of death if the banished returned.

On conviction the Anarchist was marked, by an indelible brand in a painless manner, with a red O in sign of outlawry, and received his sentence of banishment—and in this way some thousands of the disaffected and idle were at once removed from our shores.

Some of them were of the lowest and most violent class, who are naturally rude and lawless because bound by no inner law themselves (though, as has been shown, those leading an actually criminal life were dealt with in other ways); and associated with them, indignant at the new law, and therefore enthusiastically determined to share the fate of the exiled, were men and women of a far higher type, mistaken, yet nobly in the wrong. Some few were poets, historians, religious visionaries, women whose dreams of a millennium were based on a false notion of the origin and essence of law. All these last gave themselves up at once, and stretched out the right hand that had held the pen, or blessed the chalice, or soothed the dying forehead, for the circle in which they gloried as a sign of their fellowship with the oppressed.

At first the result was, of course, that in other countries the Anarchists found hearers for their doctrines and ready adherents to their destructive schemes, the false notion that lawlessness is liberty being one readily welcomed by the unthinking. But one by one the countries to which they had fled followed the precedent of England, and banished from their shores also the men and women of the red right hand. In those days the States of Europe were already bound in a sort of confederation, with an International Court in which matters of common interest were discussed, and it was agreed that a place must be found for the growing nation of outlaws, who else might justly plead for a home in a law-obeying state as a mere necessity of humanity.

In the terrible era of volcanic action which began about the year 1885 and lasted nearly half a century, many coasts and islands had been submerged, with great loss of human life and of the results of human industry. Among others the beautiful Island of Meliora in the South Pacific had been the scene of the sudden formation of a volcano and of a fearful eruption. It seemed as if the whole heart of the Island were poured for many days and nights into the sultry sky, and then sank into the sea and was seen no more.

After a period of several years, the captain of a merchant vessel, looking with his corrected chart for the circle of coral reef which marked the place of the lost Island, saw with wonder Meliora re-arisen from the sea, crowned by the wide crater of its fatal mountain and already clothed with brilliant vegetation. It would seem strange that its re-appearance had not been noticed by other vessels, as the trees upon it showed that it must have been some years above water, but this will not appear remarkable when it is known that no ordinary course for vessels carried them within sight of the Island, and that the new reefs which had been raised around it by the action of the volcano were so dangerous that captains who entered those seas avoided their neighbourhood. The line of coral reef which encircled the Island had not sunk more than a few feet, hence the thick growth of Coco-palms that covered it had not been submerged, and no doubt directly Meliora arose from the waves seeds from these would at once begin to take root and make rapid growth in that wonderful soil and climate.

When the captain of the “Ville d’Is,” driven out of his way by adverse winds, saw the wonder of the restored land, it was at the moment of perplexity of which I have spoken as to where the outlawed nation should find a home.