© 2009, The Trustees of Indiana University. Indiana University makes a claim of copyright only to original contributions made by the Victorian Women Writers Project participants and other members of the university community. Indiana University makes no claim of copyright to the original text. Permission is granted to download, transmit or otherwise reproduce, distribute or display the contributions to this work claimed by Indiana University for non-profit educational purposes, provided that this header is included in its entirety. For inquiries about commercial uses, please contact:
All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.
All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as ’.
Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.
The publisher’s advertisement following p. 10 has been omitted.
Library of Congress Subject Headings originate from the source MARC record for the monograph when available.
The MLA Bibliography staff has created a thesaurus of over 50,000 terms and 200,000 names to ensure consistency in the terms and names assigned during indexing. The VWWP project will utilize a subset of the MLA Thesaurus to assign genre headings to the VWWP texts.
What? bomb‐throwing—killing—violence, useful? What sort of Anarchists are those who say that? Where is their Anarchism, their belief in freedom, and the right of every living man to his own life and liberty? Anarchism is not bomb throwing, violence, incendiarism, destruction. Odd that anything so self evident should need saying. Odder still that one set of Anarchists should be obliged to turn round in the thick of battle against the common foe to say it to another set. Real Anarchists too, not hybrids, with one eye on freedom and the other on property. Of course the capitalist press has naturally found it convenient to identify Anarchists with bombs, and equally of course, some of our “social” democratic friends have said within themselves, “There, there! so would we have it.” All the same, Anarchism not only is not, but in the nature of the case cannot be, bomb throwing. An “ism” is an abiding body of principles and opinions—a belief with a theory behind it. The throwing of bombs is a mechanical act of warfare,—of rebellion, if you like;—an act likely to be resorted to by any and every sort of “believer” when the whole of his environment stands forearmed against the practical application of his creed. The two cannot anyhow be identical; the question of the hour is—Is one of them ever a rational outcome of the other? Can anyone professing this particular “ism” resort to this kind of act, without forfeiting his consistency? Can a real Anarchist—a man whose creed is Anarchism—be at the same time a person who deliberately injures, or tries to injure, persons or property. I, for one, have no hesitation in saying that, if destitute because of monopoly, he can.
I go even further. It seems to me that under certain
The extraordinarily rapid spread of our Ideal during the past few years seems to
me to have been
For what is Anarchism? Belief in Anarchy as the ultimate solution of all social
and economic difficulties. A belief, that is, that Anarchy (or freedom from laws
made and fixed by man for man,) is the ideal state in which alone complete
harmony and a self adjusting equilibrium between our individual interests and
our social instincts can be secured and maintained. A belief that nearly all
human depravity on one hand, and nearly all human wretchedness on the other,
have been brought about through men’s bondage to the coercive regulations
imposed by fallible, purblind humans on one another, in the interests, not of
general progress and universal friendship, but of this or that imposing class.
Anarchy, which claims the full release of the majority from the dictation of the
minority, and likewise the full release of the minority from the dictation of
the majority, means, further, the removal of all the enervating restrictions and
excuses which have hitherto hindered the individual from developing his
self‐controlling tendencies in spontaneous obedience to the inevitably social
and peaceful instincts of his own humanity, as a creature who from time
immemorial has been
Despite its supreme advantages, our faculty of language has immensely complicated and confused our development as social beings, since it has decoyed us by means of dangerous and misleading abstractions from the surely and safely educational paths of actual experience, causing a long and painful digression from the natural high road of our progress as a species.
Language!—hence, on one hand, the abstractions, “property”, money, credit, law,
subjection, crime; and on the other, those sad resulting concretes,—poverty,
parasitism, degeneration, despair, and the wholesale tormenting of man by man.
Nature shows us that among wild creatures, destitute of true language, and so
safe against abstractions and prejudices, it is precisely the most social which
have become the most intelligent. We human beings cannot
For, surely, the world’s wealth should be at least as freely accessible to every human creature as it is to every other creature. Surely the natural human being should be as free to use his whole set of faculties from the first, and so to be a joy to himself and a welcome “fellow” to his fellows, as is the mere bee or beaver. It would be possible enough if once we could explode that property superstition which involves, and ever must involve government—or the coercive regulation of everybody’s life and chances so as to suit those who can obtain prohibitive custody of the natural and produced capital of the race.
But now—what is there about Anarchism which should
Were the conditions in which we live our present lives a condition of freedom from all laws that fall short of, or are in conflict with the natural and salutary laws of life—then indeed would violence find no place in our conduct towards our fellow mortals.
But we live in a world where property‐getting is made virtually compulsory, under
penalty of one kind or another; and to us also who abominate property‐seeking
and property‐wielding as the poisonous root of every misery and turpitude. We
who are full of the spirit of what shall be, and who ceaselessly and hungrily
press towards its realisation, cannot—dare not—be frankly and fully ourselves in
our dealings with our fellows, because some of these fellows have decreed that
neither industry nor good citizenship shall be the passport to food and freedom,
but solely and simply—money, or its phantom “credit”. But, so long as Government
exists, we cannot, even as an experiment, establish Anarchy
Meanwhile, the Anarchist is not a mere claimant for intellectual liberty of thought and speech respecting these things. Even these lesser boons are not fully granted by those in power, for the idea of freedom is as attractive as it is sound; nature takes care to award a specially intense kind of happiness to the consciously attained correspondence of logical Idea with vital and ineradicable instinct; and Anarchism strikes home, and takes deep root in precisely most discriminating minds where‐ever it gets a chance of propagation. The State, like its sinister coadjutor, the Church, fears full daylight, and is perfectly consistent in discouraging plain‐speaking—diplomatically.
But the Anarchist, as I said, claims more than the right to hold and expound his
creed; he feels no rest, and he will give us no rest, until way be made for its
natural expansion, and
So we see that the Anarchist is in a unique position. Of all would‐be
experimenters, benefactors, or deliverers, he alone is a person who by virtue of
the principles he holds must be a
Similarly, you cannot blame Capitalism for developing after its kind. The Property‐Tyrant may cease to call himself a ruler and law‐maker. A sect of Mammonites, which would be a pestiferous sect if it could, is now in the world, declaiming against the government, not of man by man, but of the propertyist by the politician, and sometimes assuming the name of Anarchist—but demanding, under all disguises, Absolute rule by the Property‐holder.
Another sect declaims futilely against private property while proposing the
official direction of all property holding in the common interest. These two
things, Individualism here, Democratic Communism there, seem at first glance
opposed in principle. They are not. The evolution of the idea of domination has
developed two branches from a parent stem; there are ideas nowadays of how the
governing is to be done. One is plutocratic, and says—“Leave me my purse, and
leave me
The enemies of our cause are exceedingly anxious that no moral distinctions be drawn on this burning question of Anarchist violence. The big, indiscriminating, morally inert public are encouraged in their prejudices by the capitalist press, which is at once their sycophant and their deceiver. For the blind and their leaders all violence is held to be vile, except legalised and privileged violence on an enormous scale. Cordite, manufactured wholesale by poor hired hands for the express purpose of “indiscriminate massacre of the innocent” in the noble cause of markets and of territory, is regarded with stupid equanimity by the very same public who are taught by their pastors and masters to cry “Dastard!” when a private individual, at his own risk, fights a cordite‐manufacturing clique of privileged rogues with their own weapons.
Of course we know that among those who call themselves Anarchists there are a minority of unbalanced enthusiasts who look upon every illegal and sensational act of violence as a matter for hysterical jubilation. Very useful to the police and the press, unsteady in intellect and of weak moral principle, they have repeatedly show themselves accessible to venal considerations. They, and their violence, and their professed Anarchism are purchaseable, and in the last resort they are welcome and efficient partisans of the bourgeoisie in its remorseless war against the deliverers of the people.
But let us stick to our text—“Bomb‐throwing is not Anarchism”; and whenever violent action is unintelligent and merely rancorous, it is as foolish and inexpedient as it is base.
Killing and injuring are intrinsically hideous between man and man. No sophistry
can make “poison” a synonym of “food”, nor make “war” spell “peace”. But there
are cases
Meanwhile let us leave undiscriminating killing and injuring to the Government—to its Statesmen, its Stockbrokers, its Officers, and its Law.