Another influential Socialist writer exclaims: "What is freedom but the unfettered use of all the powers which God for use has given?"[1081]—a sentiment which is heartily endorsed by all Anarchists. However, the unfettered use of all powers means that the will of the individual, not the will of society, is the supreme law. It means the denial of the supremacy of society, the State, government. Similar sentiments are expressed with greater energy and greater fulness by many Socialist writers. Mr. Davidson, for instance, says: "In the new order every man (woman, of course, included) will be his own legislator. In the state of ultimate and universal freedom to which we aspire, when the greatest of all tyrants, poverty, is slain and plenty sits on the throne which the lean monster has so long usurped—it may well be that there shall be no necessity for any law except that which the purified conscience of every individual man and woman will readily supply. Then will have come the true Golden Age, the millennium of Christian Anarchism."[1082]
The claims, programme, and aims of Socialism and Anarchism are curiously alike. Prince Kropotkin, the leading exponent of Anarchism, writes: "Anarchy appears as a constituent part of the new philosophy, and that is why Anarchists come in contact on so many points with the greatest thinkers and poets of the present day. In fact, it is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs, and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in Which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities. A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labour of preceding generations, organises itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constitutes itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. Acknowledging as a fact the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognises a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association."[1083]
There is little difference between the Anarchism of Proudhon, Bakounin, and Kropotkin, and the Socialism of many British Socialists. The economic doctrines of Socialism and Anarchism are practically identical. Socialism has taken the most important doctrines from Proudhon,[1084] and, owing to the similarity of their views and aims, Socialists and Anarchists are commingling and fraternising. Anarchists see in Socialists a wing of the great Anarchist army of destruction, and Socialists see in Anarchists associates and friends and partners in the revolution and general pillage which both movements equally strongly desire to bring about. Therefore a leading Fabian Socialist tells us: "Kropotkin is really an advocate of free Democracy, and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as 'the tyranny of the majority' and 'the coming slavery.'"[1085] If Kropotkin is a "Democrat," then Ravachol, Vaillant, Henry, Pallas, and Bresci were also merely Democrats.
British Anarchists are closely watching the British Socialist Labour movement, which they wish to lead into Anarchist channels. Thus we learn from an Anarchist monthly: "The question of the position to be taken in relation to the labour movement is certainly one of the greatest importance to Anarchists. It does not suffice for us to form groups for propaganda and for revolutionary action. We must convert as far as possible the mass of the workers, because without them we can neither overthrow the existing society nor reconstitute a new one. And since to rise from the submissive state in which the great majority of the proletarians now vegetate to a conception of Anarchism and a desire for its realisation, is required an evolution which generally is not passed through under the sole influence of the propaganda; since the lessons derived from the facts of daily life are more efficacious than all doctrinaire preaching, it is for us to take an active part in the life of the masses and to use all the means which circumstances permit to gradually awaken the spirit of revolt, and to show by these facts the path which leads to emancipation. Amongst these means the Labour movement stands first, and we should be wrong to neglect it. In this movement we find numbers of workers who struggle for the amelioration of their conditions. They may be mistaken as to the aim they have in view and as to the means of attaining it, and in our view they generally are. But at least they no longer resign themselves to oppression nor regard it as just—they hope and they struggle. We can more easily arouse in them that feeling of solidarity towards their exploited fellow-workers and of hatred against exploitation, which must lead to a definitive struggle for the abolition of all domination of man over man."[1086] Anarchists therefore constantly try to influence the British Socialist Labour movement. When, for instance, in the autumn of 1907 the possibility of a railway strike was being discussed, Anarchists did their best to bring about a revolutionary struggle: "The railway crisis must have shown very clearly that if the men had but the will, they have the power to bring about at any time a revolutionary situation in the struggle of labour against capital. Some day they will have to do this, for the conditions of the conflict will leave them no choice. They will perhaps learn also that the glorification of a man like Bell—whose fooling of their cause is his method of advertisement—means putting powers into one man's hands that no man ought to possess. Nothing could be more absurd than the prolongation of this 'crisis' which has been done so that one man might have the centre of the stage, while hundreds of thousands of men toil on in suspense. Bell is everything: the workers are mere cyphers. Yet this man is mistrusted by many; and everyone knows how on occasion he can join the feast of the directors and be one of them. And if generalship were needed, what an ass this would be to attempt to lead the men to victory! Successful strikes are never made by the farcical tactics of a Bell. Recognition, forsooth! They'll recognise you when you strike. Workers, watch your leaders!"[1087]
In view of the connection existing between British Socialism and Anarchism, it is but natural that Socialists have become the apologists of Anarchism. "The vulgar notion that Anarchism is a synonym for disorder is as nearly as possible the reverse of the truth. It is Governments and Laws that do all the mischief. They produce the very evils they pretend to remedy."[1088] "Verily the State is the evil. Back to the land. Back to the simple life. Away with Governments, palavers, Dumas, and Courts of Law. Long live the Commune."[1089]
Anarchists contend that the "Social Revolution" for which most Socialists strive will become an Anarchist revolution: "If the workers succeed by revolt in destroying the mutual insurance society of landlords, bankers, priests, judges, and soldiers; if the people become masters of their destiny for a few months, and lay hands on the riches they have created and which belong to them by right—will they really begin to reconstitute that blood-sucker, the State[1090]?" "On the day when ancient institutions splinter into fragments before the axe of the proletariat, voices will be heard shouting: Bread for all! Lodging for all! Right for all to the comforts of life! And these voices will be heeded. The people will say to themselves: Let us begin by satisfying our thirst for the life, the joy, the liberty we have never known. And when all have tasted happiness we will set to work; the work of demolishing the last vestiges of middle-class rule, with its account-book morality, its philosophy of debit and credit, its institutions of mine and thine. 'While we throw down we shall be building' as Proudhon said, 'we shall build in the name of Communism and of Anarchy."[1091] Anarchists are authorities on revolutions. Very likely Prince Kropotkin's view is right.
There are two kinds of Anarchists: Philosophic Anarchists who propagate their views by speech and pen, and Anarchists of action who propagate their views by dynamite and dagger, and the former are responsible for the crimes of the latter. Many British Socialists defend not only philosophic Anarchism, but also that form of Anarchism which finds its expression in murder.
Leading British Socialists refer, for instance, to the four Anarchists, Spies, Fischer, Engel, and Parsons, the heroes of the Chicago bomb outrage, who were responsible for the death of six policemen and for the wounding of about sixty, and who were hanged in November 1886 in Chicago, as "martyrs,"[1092] and British Socialists are urged to follow the glorious footsteps of the Chicago Anarchists:
Then on to revolution, boys! Keep Freedom's highway broad.
The path where Spies and Parsons fell—as fearlessly they trod;
And though we fall as they fell—millions follow on the road,
To carry the Red Flag to victory.[1093]
The sympathy which British Socialists feel for the Chicago Anarchists arises from the similarity of their aims. The programme of the American Anarchists was, according to the Pittsburg proclamation, as follows: