"Remember, miss, you may not always be in London; you will yet pay me for this!" and with this melodramatic threat he and his comrades departed amidst the jeers of the assembled lodgers.
In the street they were met by deafening shouts of "Vive Deveril! Hurrah for the detective force!" Sylvestre, who had slipped out a few minutes before the arrival of the police, had assembled in the road all the Italian comrades of the Tocsin group, several Frenchmen of his own acquaintance, and four or five organ-grinders, and amidst the ironic cheers of their enemies, the dejected guardians of law and order made their shamefaced exit from the scene.
CHAPTER IX. — SOME ANARCHIST PERSONALITIES
There has been of late years a remarkable, and, on the whole, a very futile tendency among certain men of science to dissect and classify abnormal people and abnormal ideas, to discover that geniuses are mad, and that all manner of well-intentioned fanatics are born criminals.
But there were elements in the Anarchist party which defied the science of the psychological analyst, so strangely and intricately were the most heterogeneous qualities blended in certain of their number—fanaticism, heroism, criminality, and not unfrequently a spicing of genius.
The primary difference between the ordinary normal man and the fanatic—as between the normal man and the madman or the genius—is the totally different standpoint whence each views life. This it is which renders it impossible for the normal man really to understand or judge fanatics. He cannot grasp their motive, their point of view, and is therefore morally incapable of judging them.
Among the Anarchists, who may be said to represent the intellectual rather than the material side of the Socialist movement—there were many fanatics. This fanaticism showed itself in different ways—sometimes in the most admirable self-abnegation, in the sacrifice of wealth, position, and happiness; frequently in abnormal actions of other kinds, and most noticeably in deeds of violence.
Very diverse in nature were the motives which prompted the committal of these acts of violence—these assassinations and dynamite explosions—in different men. With some it was an act of personal revolt, the outcome of personal sufferings and wrongs endured by the rebel himself, by his family or his class. In others violence was rather the offspring of ideas, the logical result of speculation upon the social evil and the causes thereof. These Anarchists referred to their actions as Propaganda by Deed.