“But if the landowners, the manufacturers, the heads of the state, the priests, and the law are our enemies, we are also theirs, and we boldly oppose them. We intend to reconquer the land and the factory from the landowner and the manufacturer; we mean to annihilate the state under whatever name it may be concealed; and we mean to get our freedom back again in spite of priest or law.
“According to our strength we will work for the humiliation of all legal institutions, and are in accord with every one who defies the law by a revolutionary act. We despise all legal means because they are the negation of our rights; we do not want so-called universal suffrage since we cannot get away from our own personal sovereignty and cannot make ourselves accomplices in the crimes committed by our so-called representatives.
“Between us anarchists and all political parties, whether conservatives or moderates, whether they fight for freedom or recognize it by their admissions, a deep gulf is fixed. We wish to remain our own masters, and he among us who strives to become a chief or leader is a traitor to our cause. Of course we know that individual freedom cannot exist without a union with other free associates. We all live by the support of one another; that is the social life which has created us; that it is the work of all which gives to each the consciousness of his rights and the power to defend them. Every social product is the work of the whole community, to which all have a claim in equal manner.
“For we are all communists. It is ours to conquer and defend common property and to overthrow governments by whatever name they may be called.”
Johann Most followed Kropotkin, and in pamphlets and papers urged death to rulers and leaders of the people. He published explicit directions for making bombs, placing them in public places; a dictionary of poisons and the means of getting them into the food of Ministers and other government officials. “Extirpate the miserable brood,” he said, “extirpate the wretches.”
All these leaders and many other theorists, German philosophers, Englishmen and Americans as well, have published books showing why they believe anarchy to be the ideal condition of the human race. None of them believes it possible. It is only the less brilliant followers who attempt to carry out their teachings and thus bring bloodshed. How this is done the psychologists, the students of criminology explain.
“Anarchism is a pathological phenomenon,” says Cæsar Lombroso, the Italian criminologist. “Unhealthy and criminal persons adopt anarchism. In every city, in nearly every factory, there are men with active minds but little education. These men stand, day after day, before a machine handling a tool, doing some mechanical action. Their minds must work. They have little to work upon. They are starved for proper food and air and for the mental food which is necessary to a proper understanding of society and of the duties of men. Into the hands of these fall the writings of the anarchists with subtly-worded arguments. Conditions which are apparent everywhere are shown forth, the evils of the city and of industrial conditions are set forth plainly, so that the reader gets an idea that the writer is truthful and impartial. Then the writer sets forth how anarchism can remedy these things. Later on comes the suggestion of violence. Then ‘strike down the rulers.’
“The workman may not be moved in the least by the first perusal. He may even be amused. But later, little by little, as he stands at his work, they come back to him, and he broods over them again and again until they become part of his mind and his belief, and sooner or later he becomes a violent anarchist. For such men Johann Most and his followers form little groups which can hold secret meetings, and through them deeds of violence are plotted and accomplished.”
In connection with the philosophy of anarchy, it may be interesting to examine the causes which various leaders in the movement have given for espousing the doctrine. August Spies, one of the men executed in Chicago for complicity in the Haymarket conspiracy, replied, when asked what made him an anarchist:
“I became an anarchist on that very day that a policeman seized me by the collar and flung me from a sidewalk into the gutter.”