The word People ran like a refrain through all these remarks, and it puzzled me. The People, it would seem, had been injured, and their wrongs were to be set right. But who were the People, and who had harmed them?
We pronounced ourselves ready to waive all differences between ourselves and the People. Who had suggested the differences? Surely not the People. Even now the voice of a clergyman was in my ears, adjuring us all, indiscriminately, to get nearer the People. I, who was conscious that I belonged to the People and had never gone away, was puzzled, feeling a certain lack of programme in the suggestion.
At last the Anarchist arose. I had heard of him before, but had not seen him. His quoted opinions had made my blood run cold. Now I gazed at him in surprise, for he did not at all resemble the picture of him that my fancy had made. Standing with his large old hands folded, and his long gray beard rippling over his bosom, he looked like an aged apostle who was near the beatific vision.
“Friends,” he said, and his voice was like the sound of a benediction, “I’ve heerd all you’ve said about injestice and wrong. You hain’t said half enough. Nobody could say half enough about how bad things be. But you ain’t got the right remedy. Talkin’ won’t do it. We’ve got to act. Friends, we’re workin’ towards peace, but we may hev to walk to it through blood.”
There was a look of benevolence in his large, mild eyes as he said this.
“None of you goes down far enough,” he continued. “It’s gover’ment that is the root of all evil, and gover’ment has got to be wiped out.”
We sat motionless around our broad table, as if held to our chairs by a spell, forgetting even to drink our coffee, which grew cold as we listened. There was an awful fascination about the Anarchist as he went on to describe the millennium of anarchy, where there should be no government, but where each man, standing as a law to himself, should seek his own good in the good of his neighbour. The oration was long and full of rambling eloquence, whose mixed metaphors suggested confusion of thought.
But the Anarchist stopped. “I hev spoke the truth,” he said solemnly, “but ’twont hev no effect. ’Twill be like the morning dew, in at one ear and out at other.”
There was a pause. Then we all drank cold water to the success of our respective causes, and shortly after came away.
All the way home my thoughts and my feet kept pace with those lines concerning two reformers who strolled one day by the sea:—