FOOTNOTE:
[1] The bishop draws this conclusion from the principle that God has directed all men to nature to obtain from it the satisfaction of their necessary wants, and that this original right of the needy cannot be superseded by the subsequent institution of private property. No doubt, he admits, that institution is also of God. It is the appointed way by which man's dominion over nature is to be realized, because it is the way in which nature is best utilized for the higher civilization of man. But this purpose is secondary and subordinate to the other. And, therefore, concludes the bishop, "firmly as theology upholds the right of private property, it asserts at the same time that the higher right by which all men are directed to nature's supplies dare not be infringed, and that, consequently, any one who finds himself in extreme need is justified, when other means fail, in satisfying this extreme need where and how he may (wo und wie er es vermag)."—Die Arbeiter-frage und das Christenthum (p. 78).
CHAPTER VIII. ANARCHISM.
The latest offspring of revolutionary opinion—and the most misshapen—is anarchism. Seven or eight years ago the word was scarcely known; but then, as if on a sudden, rumours of the anarchists and their horrid "propaganda of deed" echoed in, one upon another, from almost every country in the old world and the new. To-day they were haranguing mobs of unemployed in Lyons and Brussels under a black flag—the black flag of hunger, which, they explained, knows no law. To-morrow they were goading the peasants of Lombardy or Naples to attack the country houses of the gentry, and lay the vineyards waste. Presently they were found attempting to assassinate the German Emperor at Niederwald, or laying dynamite against the Federal Palace at Bern; or a troop of them had set off over Europe on a quixotic expedition of miscellaneous revenge on powers that be, and were reported successively as having killed a gendarme in Strasburg, a policeman in Vienna, and a head of the constabulary in Frankfort. Before these reports had time to die in our ears, fresh tales would arrive of anarchists pillaging the bakers' shops in Paris, or exulting over the murder of a mining manager at Decazeville, or flinging bombs among the police of Chicago; and it seemed as if a new party of disorder had broke loose upon the world, busier and more barbarous than any that went before it.
It is no new party, however; it is merely the extremer element in the modern socialist movement. Mr. Hyndman and other socialists would fain disclaim the anarchists altogether, and are fond of declaring that they are the very opposite of socialists—that they are individualists of the boldest stamp. But this contention will not stand. There are individualist anarchists, no doubt. The anarchists of Boston, in America, are individualists; one of the two groups of English anarchists in London is individualist; but these individualist anarchists are very few in number anywhere, and the mass of the party whose deeds made a stir on both sides of the Atlantic is undoubtedly more socialist than the socialists themselves. I have said in a previous chapter that the socialism of the present day may be correctly described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy, and in every one of these three characteristics the anarchists go beyond other socialists, instead of falling short of them. They are really more socialist, more democratic, and more revolutionary than the rest of their comrades. They are more socialist, because they are disposed to want not only common property and common production, but common enjoyment of products as well. They are more democratic, because they will have no government of any kind over the people except the people themselves—no king or committee, no representative institutions, either imperial or local, but merely every little industrial group of people managing its public affairs as it will manage its industrial work. And they are more revolutionary, for they have no faith, even temporarily, in constitutional procedure, and think making a little trouble is always the best way of bringing on a big revolution. Other socialists prepare the way for revolution by a propaganda of word; but the anarchists believe they can hasten the day best by the propaganda of deed. Like the violent sections of all other parties, they injure and discredit the party they belong to, and they often attack the more moderate section with greater bitterness than their common enemy; but they certainly belong to socialism, both in origin and in principle. There were anarchists among the Young Hegelian socialists of Germany fifty years ago. The Anti-socialist Laws bred a swarm of anarchists among the German socialists in 1880, who left under Most and Hasselmann, and carried to America the seed which led to the outrages of Chicago. The Russian nihilists were anarchists from the beginning; they broke up the International with their anarchism twenty years ago, and they are among the chief disseminators of anarchism in England and France to-day, because to the Russians anarchism is only the socialism and the democracy of the rural communes in which they were born. Socialists themselves are often obliged to admit the embarrassing affinity. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling complain, in their "Labour Movement in America," that while "the Chicago capitalist wanted us to be hanged after we had landed, Herr Most's paper, Die Freiheit, was for shooting us at sight"; that "anarchism ruined the International movement, threw back the Spanish, Italian, and French movements for many years, has proved a hindrance in America, and so much or so little of it as exists in England is found by the revolutionary socialist party a decided nuisance"; but they admit that "well nigh every word spoken by the chief defendants at the Chicago trial could be endorsed by socialists, for they then preached not anarchism, but socialism. Indeed," they add, "he that will compare the fine speech by Parsons in 1886 with that of Liebknecht at the high treason trial at Leipzig will find the two practically identical."
So far, then, as their socialism goes, there is admittedly no real difference between Parsons, the Chicago anarchist, and Liebknecht, the leader of the German socialists. Indeed, as I have said, the anarchists seem to show a tendency even to outbid the socialists in their socialism. Socialists generally say that, while committing all production to the public authority, they have no idea of interfering with liberty of consumption. Their opponents argue, in reply, that they would find an interference with consumption to be an inevitable result of their systematic regulation of production; but they themselves always repudiate that conclusion. They would make all the instruments of production common property, but leave all the materials of enjoyment individual property still. Ground rents, for example, would belong to the public; but every man would own his own house and furniture, at least for life, if he had built it by his own labour, or bought it from his own savings, because a dwelling house is not an instrument of production, but an article of enjoyment or consumption. But some of the more representative spokesmen of the anarchists would not leave this last remnant of private property standing, and strongly contend for the old primitive plan, still in use among savage tribes, of giving those who are in want of anything a claim—a right—to share the enjoyment of it with those who happen to have it. They would municipalize the houses as well as the ground rents, and no one should be allowed a right to a spare bed or a disengaged sofa so long as one of the least of his brethren huddled on straw in a garret in the slums, or slept out on a bench in Trafalgar Square. In a recent number of Freedom, for example, Prince Krapotkin announces that "the first task of the Revolution will be to arrange things so as to share the accommodation of available houses according to the needs of the inhabitants of the city, to clear out the slums and fully occupy the villas and mansions." Anarchist opinions are no doubt capricious and variable. There are as many anarchisms as there are anarchists, it has been said. But this tendency to go further than other socialists, in superseding individual by common property, has repeatedly appeared in some of their most representative utterances.
The Jurassian Federation of the International adopted a resolution at their Congress in 1880, in which they say: "We desire collectivism, with all its logical consequences, not only in the sense of the collective appropriation of instruments of production, but also of the collective enjoyment and consumption of products. Anarchist communism will in this way be the necessary and inevitable consequence of the social revolution, and the expression of the new civilization which that revolution will inaugurate."
Their principal difference with the other branch of the socialists, however,—and that from which they derive their name—is upon the government of the socialistic society. Anarchy as a principle of political philosophy was first advocated by Proudhon, and he meant by it, not of course a state of chaos or disorder, but merely a state without separate political or civil institutions,—"a state of order without a set government." "The expression, anarchic government," he says, "implies a sort of contradiction. The thing seems impossible, and the idea absurd; but there is really nothing at fault here but the language. The idea of anarchy in politics is quite as rational and positive as any other. It consists in this,—that the political function be re-absorbed in the industrial, and in that case social order would ensue spontaneously out of the simple operation of transactions and exchanges. Every man might then be justly called autocrat of himself, which is the extreme reverse of monarchical absolutism" ("Die Princip Federatif," p. 29). He distinguishes anarchy from democracy and from communistic government, though his distinctions are not easy to apprehend exactly. Communism, he says, is the government of all by all; democracy, the government of all by each; and anarchy, the government of each by each. Anarchy is, in his opinion, the only real form of self-government. People would manage their own public affairs together like partners in a business, and no one would be subject to the authority of another. Government is considered a mere detail of industrial management; and the industrial management is considered to be in the hands of all who co-operate in the industry. The specific preference of anarchism, therefore, seems to be for some form of direct government by the people, in place of any form of central, superior, or representative government; and naturally its political communities must be small in size, though they may be left to league together, if they choose, in free and somewhat loose federations. The anarchists are accordingly more democratic in their political theory than the socialists more strictly so called, inasmuch as they would give the people more hand in the work of government, though of course they preposterously underrate the need and difficulty of that work.