Fielden has a wild physiognomy, not without sensuality. Parsons resembles Bodio, the great Italian statistician, and in the upper part of the face, Stanley.
When I say that the anarchists of Turin and of Chicago are frequently of the criminal type, I do not mean that political criminals, even the most violent anarchists, are true criminals; but that they possess the degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane, being anomalies and possessing these traits by heredity; as a fact, the father of Booth was called Junius Brutus, and gave to his son the name of a revolutionist, Wilkes. The fathers of Guiteau and of Nobiling, and the mother of Staps were religious lunatics; and Staps also, like Ravaillac, Clement, Brutus, had hallucinations. In the autobiographies of the Vorbote I find that Parsons had a very religious Methodist mother and a father who had much to do with the movement of the Temperance League. Indeed, the Parsons since 1600 had as a family taken part in all revolutionary movements. A Tompkin, a relation of his mother, had taken part in the battles of Brandywine and of Monmouth; a General Parsons was an officer in the Revolution of 1776, and a captain Parsons engaged in the battle of Bunker Hill.
Spies was born in a chateau celebrated for feudal robberies—called on that account the "Raubschloss."
The father of Louis Lingg suffered through his labor as a workman a concussion of the brain—according to the Vorbote.
The father of Fielden, an orator of power notwithstanding his occupation as a workman, was one of the agitators of the question of agricultural lands for workingmen in England; he was one of the founders of the "Consumers' Co-operative Society" and a prime mover in the society of "Odd Fellows." For those who will object that in many of these relations they see only geniuses, I have only to cite my work "L'Homme de Génie," where I have proved how often genius is nervous epilepsy, and how almost all the sons of men of genius are lunatics, idiots, or criminals.
This hereditary influence is seen also in the great number of brothers charged together, the two Spies, the two Djeneks, the two Fieldens, and the two Lehms. According to their autobiographies also their fathers or their mothers died early; from which we may presume that they were old or diseased.
The morbid impressibility of Engel has been admitted by himself. "I cannot," he said to his wife, "hold within me what I feel. I must explode. The enthusiasm takes possession of me; it is a disease." Lingg could not remain quiet an instant; in his room he always had some dynamite in store. Bodendick was a thief and a mattoid; full of cunning, mischief and mad tricks, even according to the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He was always dreaming of new explosives. Though insane he was a genius as appears from his poetry, which is published by Schick and is in the style of the celebrated "Song of the Shirt." The suicide of Lingg with dynamite shows his moral insensibility, as do the words of Parsons addressed to the society of anarchists: "Strangle the spies and throw them out of the window." In Lingg we see a truly ungovernable epileptoid idea driving him to political action. "I cannot control myself;" he said, "it is stronger than I."
I repeat that among the anarchists there are no true criminals; even Schaack, the police historian, can name but two criminals, and certainly he would not have spared them if he could have stigmatised them.
Their heroic-like deaths, with their ideal on their lips, proves that they were not common criminals. Nevertheless the psychology of the leaders of the Commune shows in them a true moral insensibility, an innate cruelty, which found a pretext and a scope in politics; and which accords too well with their criminal physiognomies. Marat demands two hundred and ten thousand heads; Vallés speaks of his family with a true hatred; Carrier wrote, "We will make a cemetery of France"; Ferré smiled while by his orders they killed Veisset; and Rigault said in slang to his pistol, "Il faut peter sur le chipau." The last words of Spies before the court express a ferocious hatred towards the rich; and the project of the anarchists of Chicago (if it is true) to blow up a part of the city with bombs attests an absence of the moral sense. We know that many anarchists regard brigands and thieves, such as Pini, Kammerer, and Gasparoni, as their brothers in arms. Booth had for accomplice Payne, a true murderer by profession. See also the journal published at Geneva L'Explosion, and the Como journal Le Poignard.
But it is necessary to note that hereditary anomaly, if it provokes an anomaly in the moral sense, also suppresses misoneism, the horror of novelty which is almost the general rule of humanity; it thus makes of them innovators, apostles of progress, though the education is too rude: and the fight with relative misery of which all the anarchists of Chicago except Neebe have been the victims, not affording material for useful novelties made of them only failures and rebels, hindering them from comprehending that humanity as a part of nature, which it is, cannot progress at a gallop, non facit saltus. Spies on his last day discovered that humanity is misoneic, the slave of custom, and said, quoting the lines in German, "I now understand the poet's words,