"Teresina followed me into exile, and with little intermission remained with me during all those early years of wanderings and adventure. She cared little about Anarchist doctrines, though herself a born rebel and an innate Anarchist. She did more for me than all the doctrines in the world. Poor child! When at last I got through all my money, and life from day to day grew harder and more precarious, food scantier, clothes raggeder, and surroundings more dangerous, she still remained faithful to me in her own way, but the life was too hard for her. We had spent the summer in Paris, and there I had got seriously implicated in a little Anarchist venture and found it necessary to flee the country with all haste. Teresina followed me into Belgium in the bitter winter weather. She died of consumption in a Brussels hospital shortly after our arrival."
Such, in his own words, were the influences and the circumstances which revolutionised Giannoli's entire life and his outlook on things. He became one of the leaders of the most advanced section of the "Individualist Anarchists," who maintain that not only is government of man by man wrong and objectionable, but that no ties or obligations of any sort bind men together. The ethics of "humanity" and "brotherhood" are unknown to these Anarchists. They recognise no laws, social or moral, no obligations or duties towards their fellows, no organisation or association of any sort. They claim absolute freedom for the individual, freedom to live, die, love, enjoy, think, work, or take—this freedom in each individual only curtailed by others claiming equal rights. And I am bound to admit that the question whether such individual freedom would not tend to individual licence and domination by the stronger and cleverer or more unscrupulous man in the future, met with little consideration.
That it led to such licence in the present among themselves was an indubitable fact. All the individualist Anarchists agreed that, being at war with existing society, which interfered with, coerced, and used violence towards them, they were at liberty to use all means against society in retaliation—force and even fraud if expedient. But the less intelligent and more ignorant men who came in contact with these principles considered themselves not only at liberty to use all means against society, the enemy; but honour or scruples of any sort among themselves were tabooed. A naturally honourable man like Giannoli was, of course, free from the danger of falling victim to such perverted sophistry. But the manner in which these doctrines succeeded in perverting the minds of fairly intelligent and well-meaning men is illustrated by the following incident.
One evening, some months after the advent of Giannoli and his friends, there arrived at the office of the Tocsin a small party of three men and one woman—all of them Spaniards. They requested me to help them to procure lodgings for the night, and, as they knew nothing of the English language, to assist them the following morning in procuring tickets, etc., with a view to their immediate re-departure for the States. Giannoli, who knew the men, having spent some years in Spain, explained to me that the leader of the party, a handsome, well-spoken young man, was an engineer belonging to a good Barcelona family. The second one, a good-natured giant, was his brother and an engineer like himself. The third male member of the party was a lanky, scrofulous journalist, a man of many words and few wits. The lady, a pretty brunette, was their "compagna." She had escaped from her family and eloped with Fernandez, the engineer, but was apparently shared on communistic principles.
I settled the party for the night in a small hotel and procured their tickets for the morrow's journey, after which they proceeded to hand over to Giannoli, with many cautions and precautions, a mysterious linen bag which, it was whispered, contained some twelve thousand lire in bank-notes (about five hundred pounds sterling). Then, having been assured by Giannoli that I was to be trusted, they told me their story.
The two brothers, the engineers, had till quite recently been employed by a large electrical engineering firm in Barcelona, of which an elder brother, some years their senior, was the manager. For some time the two younger men had been engaged, unknown to their family, in Anarchist propaganda, and had fallen in with the section of the individualisti. Fernandez was in love with Adolfa, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and had secretly talked her over to his own ideas. The girl's parents objected to the match on account of the extreme youth of the couple—the girl was not quite eighteen and the young man still considerably under age. Therefore they settled to elope, and Fernandez's brother and Vanni, their journalist friend, expressed a desire to form an addition to the elopement. This Fernandez had at first objected to, but the girl, who had made rapid strides into the Giannolian free-love theories, insisted. Lack of money formed the only obstacle to this scheme, but an unforeseen circumstance enabled them to remove it.
The eldest brother, who had charge of the finances of the establishment, and whose business it was to pay the men their wages, wished to absent himself from the works for a few days, and, without the knowledge of his employers, he broke rules to the extent of handing over to his brother Fernandez, as to one beyond suspicion, the men's wages—the five hundred pounds now contained in the mysterious linen bag.
"Now," argued Fernandez to himself, "I, as an Anarchist, do not recognise private property, nor any set moral laws. The company's money is the result of plunder; they can afford to lose it and have no right to it; I stand desperately in need of it—and it is in my hands.... My brother?... oh, my brother, he is after all nothing but a bourgeois, and I, as an Anarchist, admit of no family ties."
Thus when, two days later, the unfortunate manager returned, he found his brothers gone, the money nowhere to be found, and disgrace and ruin ahead. Driven to despair, and not knowing in what direction to turn for the necessary sum, the wretched man ended his perplexities with a bullet. This was the first news which greeted the runaways on their arrival in the States.
Now the younger brothers who had perpetrated this cruel thing were not hardened criminals. From what little I saw of them, they appeared to be kindly, courteous, and, by nature, fairly honourable men. What they lacked was moral strength. Under ordinarily good influences they would have acted in an ordinarily proper way. They had not the force of character necessary for handling the Anarchist individualist doctrines, which, excellently as they may work with men of character, are fatal to weaker men. The man who recognises no law outside himself must be capable of governing himself.