I would fain go on quoting, showing you the wit of this man, gentle, and on occasion barbed and stinging: his humor, kindly, of the soil; his great jollity and high good spirits. I would indeed like to introduce you to “Clara,” the hussy, who is fat and motherly and with a heart and mind unbounded. I would like to take you to “Arthur’s,” the midnight coffee-stall where you would meet with street-walkers and soldiers, scavengers and tramps and hear from the lips of a gutter snipe one of the most perfect and touching love tales ever told.
Oh, but you must read them all yourself. Will you, if I give you the names of the various volumes? Here they are, then: Arthur’s, Sixpenny Pieces, Cottage Pie, Clara, Simple Simon, Moby Lane.
John Lane, he of the Bodley Head Publishing Company, who gave the world The Yellow Book, the works of Anatole France and Stephen Leacock, is the publisher.
I wait expectantly your showers of gratitude!
—Allan Ross Macdougall.
The Reader Critic
ANARCHY
Alice Groff, Philadelphia:
Anarchy is scientifically a reductio ad absurdum and those who claim to be anarchists are self-deceivers,—minds that cannot complete a circuit of reason. There is no place in reason for anarchy, hence there is not and cannot be an anarchist on a basis of reason. All who call themselves so are either archists of the most rabid sort or helpless flies in the sticky syrup of laissez faire. The only professed anarchists that make any impression upon the world are of three kinds: either they are spirits of revolt of the most bitterly, materialistically tyrannical sort; or they are those who suffer with the oppressed and strive individually to set them free, even to the point of self-martyrdom; or they are sentimentalists who maunder maudlinly on about love and justice and yet do absolutely nothing to bring about the love of justice or the justice of love, either in their preaching or their practice. But none of these are really anarchists, they are only varieties of archists who wish to impose their own social ideals upon the social order in place of those that already prevail.
The whole story of social evolution in a nutshell is as follows: every phase of the social order at any stage of social evolution is maintained by a social ego or group sufficiently powerful to dominate the rest of the surrounding social body,—and this phase can be changed only by revolution—bloodless or otherwise,—on the part of a new social ego desiring this change and developing power to establish and maintain it.