Fire, dynamite, and assassination are approved of by at least a large number of the party. They are brave men, and fight for their faith with the devotion of martyrs. Imprisonment and death are counted but as rewards.
Their press is comparatively insignificant. Their principal newspaper appears to be the Révolté, a small paper published at Geneva since 1879. A paper was, a few years ago, published in their interests at Verviers, Belgium, with the characteristic title, The Cry of the People (Le Cri du Peuple). It lasted only a little over a year, its final number appearing on the 21st of June, 1879, and containing this sentence, among many similar: “Yes, we applaud all the executions made by the Russian nihilists, and wish that their propaganda might extend itself over the whole earth.”
Forty-seven anarchists signed a declaration of principles, which was read by one of their number at their trial at Lyons. It was substantially as follows:
“The anarchists are citizens who, in an age when one preaches everywhere the liberty of opinions, have believed it their duty to recommend unlimited liberty.
“Our only merit consists in speaking out openly what the masses are thinking. We are several millions of laborers, who wish absolute liberty, and nothing but liberty.
“We wish liberty—that is to say, we demand for every human being the right and the means of doing that which pleases him, and of doing only that which pleases him; to satisfy integrally all his wants, without any other limits than natural impossibilities and the wants of neighbors equally respectable.
“We wish liberty, and we believe its existence incompatible with the existence of any power whatsoever, whatever its origin and form—whether it be elected or imposed, monarchical or republican—whether inspired by divine right or by popular right, by anointment or universal suffrage.
“The best governments are the worst.
“The evil, in other terms, in the eyes of the anarchists, does not reside in one form of government more than in another; it is in the idea of government itself, in the principle of authority.
“The substitution, in a word, in human relations, of free contract, perpetually revisable and dissoluble, is our ideal.