The anarchists; a picture of civilization at the close of the nineteenth century

Front matter

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I EGO .

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Appendix

JOHN HENRY MACKAY • 29°

A large share of whatever of merit this translation may possess is due to Miss /Sarah E. Holmes, who kindly gave me her assistance, which I wish to gratefully acknowledge here. My thanks are also due to Mr. Tucker for

valuable suggestions.

G. S.

INTRODUCTION.

THE work of art must speak for the artist who created it ; the labor of the thoughtful student who stands back of it permits him to say what impelled him to give his thought voice.

The subject of the work just finished requires me to accompany it with a few words.

First of all, this : Let him who does not know me and who would, perhaps, in the following pages, look for such sensational disclosures as we see in those mendacious speculations upon the gullibility of the public from which the latter derives its sole knowledge of the Anarchistic movement, not take the trouble to read beyond the first page.

In no other field of social life does there exist to-day a more lamentable confusion, a more naive superficiality, a more portentous ignorance than in that of Anarchism. The very utterance of the word is like the flourish of a red rag ; in blind wrath the majority dash against it without taking time for calm examination and consideration. They will tear

vii viii Introduction.

into tatters this work, too, without having understood it. Me their blows will not strike.

London and the events of the fall of 1887 have served me as the background for my picture.

When in the beginning of the following year I once more returned to the scene for a few weeks, principally to complete my East End studies, I did not dream that the very section which I had selected for more detailed description would soon thereafter be in everybody's mouth in consequence of the murders of "Jack the Ripper."

I did not finish the chapter on Chicago without first examining the big picture-book for grown-up children by which the police captain, Michael Schaack, has since attempted to justify the infamous murder committed by his government : " Anarchy and Anarchists " (Chicago, 1889). It is nothing more than a — not unimportant — document of stupid brutality as well as inordinate vanity.

The names of living people have been omitted by me in every case with deliberate intent ; nevertheless the initiated will almost always recognize without difficulty the features that have served me as models.

A space of three years has elapsed between the writing of the first chapter and the last. Ever newly rising doubts compelled me again and again, often for a long period, to interrupt the work. Perhaps I began it too soon ; I do not finish it too late.

Not every phase of the question could I treat

Introduction. ix

exhaustively; for the most part I could not offer more than the conclusions of chains of reasoning, often very long. The complete incompatibility of the Anarchistic and the Communistic Weltanschauung,1 the uselessness and harmfulness of a resort to violent tactics, as well as the impossibility of any "solution of the social question" whatsoever by the State, at least I hope to have demonstrated.

The nineteenth century has given birth to the idea of Anarchy. In its fourth decade the boundary line between the old world of slavery and the new world of liberty was drawn. For it was in this decade that P. J. Proudhon began the titanic labor of his life with "Qu'est-ce que la proprie'te' ? " (1840), and that Max Stirner wrote his immortal work : " Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum " (1845).

It was possible for this idea to be buried under the dust of a temporary relapse of civilization. But it is imperishable.

It is even now again awake.

For more than seven years my friend Benj. R. Tucker of Boston has been battling for Anarchy in the new world with the invincible weapon of his "Liberty." Oft in the lonely hours of my struggles have I fixed my gaze upon the brilliant light that thence is beginning to illumine the night.

When three years ago I gave the poems of my

1 \Veltanschauuny : world view.

x Introduction.

"Sturm" to the public, I was hailed by friendly voices as the "first singer of Anarchy."

I am proud of this name.

But I have come to the conviction that what is needed to-day is not so much to arouse enthusiasm for liberty as rather to convince people of the absolute necessity of economic independence, without which it will eternally remain the unsubstantial dream of visionaries.

In these days of the growing reaction, which will culminate in the victory of State Socialism, the call has become imperative upon me to be here also the first champion of the Anarchistic idea. I hope I have not yet broken my last lance for liberty.

JOHN HENRY MACKAY.

ROME, in the spring, 1891.

THE ANARCHISTS.

A PICTURE OF CIVILIZATION AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Chapter I. In The Heaet Of The World-metkopolis

A WET, cold October evening was beginning to lower upon London. It was the October of the same year in which, not five months before, had been inaugurated those ridiculous celebrations which gave the year 1887 the name of the "Jubilee Year," — celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the rule of a woman who allows herself to be called " Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India." On this evening — the last of the week • — a man coming from the direction of Waterloo Station was wending his way to the railroad bridge of Charing Cross through labyrinthine, narrow, and almost deserted streets. When, as if fatigued from an extended walk,- he had slowly ascended the wooden steps that lead to the narrow walk for pedestrians running beside the tracks on the bridge, and had gone about as far as the middle of the river, he stepped into one of the round recesses fronting the water and remained standing there for a short time, while he allowed the crowd behind him to push on. Rather from habit than genuine fatigue, he stopped and looked down the Thames. As he had but seldom been on "the other side of the Thames, " notwithstanding his already three years' sojourn in London, he never failed, on crossing one of the bridges, to enjoy afresh the magnificent view that London affords from them.

It was still just light enough for him to recognize, as far as Waterloo Bridge to his right, the dark masses of warehouses, and on the mirror of the

Thames at his feet, the rows of broad-bellied freight boats and rafts coupled together, though already the lights of the evening were everywhere blazing into the dark, yawning chaos of this immense city. The two rows of lanterns on Waterloo Bridge stretched away like parallel lines, and each of the lanterns cast its sharp, glittering light, deep and long, into the dark, trembling tide, while to the left, in a terraceshaped ascent, the countless little flames which illumine the Embankments, and the Strand with its surroundings, every evening, were beginning to flash. The quiet observer standing there saw yonder on the bridge the fleeting lights of the cabs ; to his rear he heard the trains of the South East road rumbling and roaring while madly rushing in and out of the station of Charing Cross; saw beneath him the lazy waves of the Thames, with almost inaudible splashing, lapping against the dark, black, slimy masses stretching far into the deep ; and as he turned to pass on, the gigantic station of Charing Cross, that centre of a never-ceasing life by night and by day, opened before him, flooded by the white glare of the electric light. . . .

He thought of Paris, his native city, as he slowly passed on. What a difference between the broad, level, and clear embankments of the Seine and these stiff, projecting masses, on which not even the sun could produce a ray of joy !

He longed to be back in the city of his youth. But he had learned to love London with the passionate, jealous love of obstinacy.

For one either loves London or hates it. ...

Again the wanderer stopped. So brightly was the gigantic station illumined that he could plainly see the clock at its end. The hands stood between the seventh and the eighth hours. The bustle on the sidewalk seemed to have increased, as if a human wave was being washed from the one side to the other. It seemed as if the hesitating loiterer could not tear himself away. For a moment he watched the incessant play of the signals at the entrance of the station; then, across the tracks and through the confusion of iron posts and cars, he tried to reach Westminster Abbey with his eye ; but he could not recognize anything except the shimmering dial on the steeple of Parliament House and the dark outlines of gigantic masses of stone that arose beyond. And scattered in every direction the thousands and thousands of lights. . . .

Again he turned to the open place where he had before been standing. Beneath his feet the trains of the Metropolitan Railway were rolling along with a dull rumbling noise; the entire expanse of the Victoria Embankment lay beneath him, half illumined as far as Waterloo Bridge. Stiff and severe, Cleopatra's Needle rose in the air.

From below came to the man's ears the laughing and singing of the young fellows and the girls who nightly monopolize the benches of the Embankments. "Do not forget me — do not forget me," was the refrain. Their voices sounded hard and shrill. " Do not forget me " — one could hear it everywhere in London during the Jubilee Year. It was the song of the day. .

If anybody had observed the features of the man who was just now bending over the edge of the bridge, he would not have failed to catch a strange expression of severity that suddenly possessed them. The pedestrian no longer heard anything of the now suppressed, now subdued noise and the trivial song. Again a thought had seized him at the sight of the mighty quays at his feet; how many human lives might lie crushed beneath these white granite quarries, piled one upon the other so solid and unconquerable? And he thought again of that silent, unrewarded, forgotten toil that had created all the magnificence round about him.

Sweat and blood are washed away, and the indi-

G The Anarchists.

vidual man, on the corpses of millions of unnamed, forgotten ones, rises living and admired. . . .

As if goaded by this thought, Carrard Auban passed on. Leaving behind him the stony arches at the end of the bridge, — the remains of the old Hungerford Suspension Bridge, — he looked down and walked faster. Again as always he lived in the thoughts to which he also had dedicated the youth of his life, and again he was impressed by the boundless grandeur of this movement which the second half of the nineteenth century has named the " social " : to carry the light where darkness still prevails — among the toiling, oppressed masses whose sufferings and slow death give life to "the others." . . .

But when Auban had descended the steps of the bridge and found himself in Villiers Street, that remarkable little street which leads from the Strand down past the city station of Charing Cross, he became again fascinated by the bustling life around him. Incessantly it was surging past him: this one wanted to catch the train which had just discharged those who were hurrying towards the Strand — belated theatre-goers who had perhaps again miscalculated the distances of London; here a prostitute was talking at a gentleman with a silk hat, whom she had enticed hither by a word and a look of her weary eyes, in order to come to an agreement with him concerning the "price"; and there a crowd of hungry street urchins were pushing their dirty faces against the window panes of an Italian waffle-baker, greedily following every movement of the untiring worker. Auban saw everything: he had the same attention of a practised eye for the ten-year-old youngster who was seeking to beg a penny of the passers-by by turning wheels before them on the moist pavement, and for the debased features of the fellow who, when he came to a halt, instantly obtruded himself on him and tried to talk him into buying the latest number of the "Matrimonial News"

— "indispensable for all who wished to marry" but immediately turned to the next man when he found that he got no answer.

Auban passed slowly on. He knew this life too well to be confused and stupefied by it ; and yet it seized and interested him ever anew with all its might. He had devoted hours and days to its study during these years, and always and everywhere he found it new and interesting. And the more he learned to know its currents, its depths, and its shallows, the more he admired this matchless city. For some time this affection, which was more than an attachment and less than love, had been growing into a passionately excited one. London had shown him too much — much more than to the inhabitant and the visitor; and now he wished to see all. And so the restlessness of this wish had driven him in the afternoon of this day to the other side of the Thames, for extended wanderings in Kennington and Lambeth — those quarters of a frightful misery, — to allow him to return fatigued and .at the same time discouraged and embittered, and to show him now in the Strand the reflection as well as the reverse of that life.

He was now standing at the entrance of the dark and desolate tunnel which passes underneath Chaing Cross and leads to Northumberland Avenue. The shrill and vibrant sounds of a banjo struck his ear; a group of passers-by had collected: in their midst a boy in a ragged caricature costume and with blackened face was playing his instrument — who has not seen the bizarre forms of these " negro comedians " executing their noisy song-dances at the street corners of London ? — while a girl "was dancing to the sounds of the same with that mechanical indifference which seems to know no fatigue. Forcing his way along, Auban cast a glance also at the face of this child : indifference and at the same time a certain impatience lay upon it.

" They support their whole family, poor things ! '' he murmured. The next minute the crowd had dispersed, and the little couple forced their way to the next street corner, there to begin anew, play and dance, until the policeman, hated and feared, drove them away.

Auban passed through the tunnel whose stone floor was covered with filth and out of whose corners rose a corrupt atmosphere. It was almost deserted; only now and then some unrecognizable form crept along the walls and past him. But Auban knew that on wet, cold days arid nights, here as well as in hundreds of other passage ways, whole rows of unfortunates were lying about, closely pressed against each other and against the cold walls, and always expecting to be driven away the next moment by the " strong arm of the law": heaps of filth and rags, ruined in hunger and dirt, the " Pariahs of society, " creatures in truth devoid of will. . . . And while he was climbing the steps at the end of the gloomy passage, a scene which he had witnessed on this same spot about a year previous, suddenly rose before him with such terrific clearness that he involuntarily stopped and looked round as if it must repeat itself bodily before his eyes.

It was on a damp, cold evening, towards midnight, the city enveloped by fog and smoke as by an impenetrable veil. He had come hither to give some of the shelterless the few coppers which they need in order to pass the night in a lodging-house, instead of in the icy cold of the open air. When he had descended these steps, — the tunnel was overcrowded by people who, after they had passed through all the stages of misery, had reached the last, — he saw a face rise before him which he had never since forgotten : the features of a woman, frightfully disfigured by leprosy and bloody sores, who, with an infant at her breast, was dragging, rather than leading, a fourteen-year-old girl by the hand, while a third child, a boy, was clinging to her dress.

"Two shillings only, gentleman; two shillings only!"

He stopped to question her.

"Two shillings only; she is still so young, but she will do anything you want," and with that sh'e drew the girl near, who turned away, trembling and crying.

A shudder ran through him. But the beseeching and piteous voice of the woman kept on.

"Pray, do take her along. If you won't do it, we shall have to sleep out doors, — only two shillings, gentleman, only two shillings; just see how pretty she is ! " And again she drew the child to her.

Auban felt a terror creeping over him. Stunned and unable to speak a word, he turned to pass on.

But he had not yet gone a step, when the woman suddenly threw herself shrieking before him on the ground, let go of the girl, and clung to him.

"Don't go away ! Don't go away ! " she screamed in frightful despair. "If you won't do it, we must starve — take her along ! — no one else will come here to-night, and in the Strand we are not allowed — please do it — please do it ! "

But when, without intending to, he looked round, the woman lying before him suddenly sprang up.

"Don't call a policeman! No, don't call a policeman ! " she cried quickly, in fear. Then, when she arose, Auban regained his composure. Without a word he reached into his pocket and gave her a handful of money.

The woman uttered a shout of joy. Again she took the girl by the arm and placed her before him.

" She will go with you, gentleman — she will do anything you want," she added in a whisper. Auban turned away, and hurried as quickly as possible through the rows of the sleeping and the drunken people towards the exit : no one had paid any attention to the scene.

When he reached the Strand, he felt how violently his heart was beating, and how his hands were trembling.

A week later he came evening after evening to search in the tunnel of Charing Cross and its surroundings for the woman and her children, without being able to find them again. There had been something in the eyes of the girl that disquieted him. But the time had been too short for him to discern what this abyss of fear and miseiy concealed.

At last he became so absorbed in thinking of the immense wretchedness that daily presented itself to him that he forgot this one scene, and daily he saw again upon the streets the children of poverty - children of thirteen and fourteen years — offering themselves — and he was unable to help.

Who was more to be pitied, the mother or the children ? How great must be the misery, how frightful the despair, how insane the hunger, that impelled both! But the woman of the bourgeoisie speaks with loathing of the " monster of a mother " and of the "degraded child," — the Pharisee who under the weight of the same misery would travel exactly the same paths.

Pity ! Most miserable of all our lies ! This age knows only injustice. It is to-day the greatest crime to be poor. Very well. The more quickly must the perception come that our only deliverance consists in omitting this crime.

" The insane ones ! " murmured Auban, " the insane ones ! — they do not see whither pity and love have brought us." His eyes were dimmed, as if by the memory of the struggles which this perception had caused him.

How plainly, in passing through the tunnel this evening, did he recall the piteous, despairing voice of the woman and her urgent: "Do it! do it!" And again out of the gloomy darkness emerged the shy, sickly eyes of the child.

He turned round, and again passed through the tunnel. But before starting for the Strand, he turned into one of the side streets that lead down towards the Thames. He knew them all: these streets, these corners, these entrances and alleys: here was the sober-gray rear of a theatre whose front flooded the Strand with light; and yonder narrow three-storied house with the sham windows was one of those notorious resorts whose inner walls nightly witness scenes of depravity such as even the most degraded fancy dare not fully picture to itself. Here misery still lived, and, in yonder quiet street hard by, comfort, — and thus the two alternated as far as the little church of Savoy in the midst of its bare trees — and as far as the aristocratic, exclusive edifices of the Temple with its splendid gardens. . . .

Auban knew all ; even the forever-deserted broad, vaulted passage which leads underneath the streets to the Embankments, and from whose forsaken, mysterious stillness the life of the Strand sounds like the distant dying rush and roar of an ever last and ever first wave upon a desolate, sandy shore. . . .

The cold became more piercing as the hour fled, and trickled down in the foggy dampness of London. Auban was getting tired, and decided to go home. He turned towards the Strand.

The " Strand ! " Connecting the West End and the city, it lay before him, lit up by the countless lights of its shops, filled with the rush of a neverstagnant and never-ceasing human tide ; two separate streams, the one surging up to St. Paul's, the other down to Charing Cross. Between both, the deafening confusion of an uninterrupted traffic of vehicles ; one after another, 'busses, clumsy, covered with gaudy advertisements, filled with people ; one after another, hansoms, light, running along easily on two wheels ; thundering freight wagons ; red, closed mail coaches of the Royal Mail ; strong, broad four-wheelers ; and winding their way through all these, hardly recognizable in the dark mass, swiftly gliding bicycles.

The East End is labor and poverty, chained to-

Ssther by the curse of our time — servitude; the ity is the usurer who sells labor and pockets the profit; the West End is the aristocratic idler who consumes it. The Strand is one of the most swollen arteries through which courses the blood turned into money ; it is the rival of Oxford Street, and struggles against being conquered by it. It is the heart of London. It bears a name which the world knows. It is one of the few streets where you see people from all sections of the city; the poor takes his rags there, and the rich his silk. If you lend your ear, you can hear the languages of the whole world ; the restaurants have Italian proprietors, whose waiters talk French with you ; more than half of the prostitutes are Germans, who either perish here or save enough to return to their fatherland, and become " respectable " there.

Along the Strand are located the immense court buildings, and one is puzzled to know whether these are actors or lunatics whom one sees passing under the lofty archways — the judges in their long cloaks and their powdered wigs with the neatly ridiculous cues — respectable badges of a disreputable farce which every sensible man in his heart scorns and despises, and in which everybody plays a part if he is called; and in its cold Somerset House the Strand gathers a bewildering number of magistrates of whose existence you have never heard in your life until you hear them mentioned; and the Strand has its theatres, more theatres than any other street in the world.

Thus it is the first walk of the stranger who arrives at the station of Charing Cross, and whom its mostly narrow and crowding buildings disappoint; so will it be his last when he leaves London, "the one to which he will give his last hour.

Auban disappeared in the sea of humanity. Now as he was passing the Adelphi, and the electric light — far eclipsing the gas-jets — was filling the street with its clear white radiance, one could see that he limped slightly. It was hardly noticeable when he walked rapidly; but when he sauntered along slowly, he dragged the left foot slightly, and supported himself more on his cane.

At the station of Charing Cross the crowd had become blocked. For a few moments Auban stcod near one of the gates. The gate nearest Villieis Street, which a few minutes ago he had crossed further down, was besieged by flower-girls, some of whom were cowering behind their half-empty baskets, cold and worn out, and some trying to persuade the passers-by to purchase their poor flowers, with their incessant "Penny a bunch!" A policeman pushed one of them brutally back; she had ventured to take a step upon the pavement, and they were not allowed to go an inch beyond the limits of the side street. The shrill cries of the newsboys who wished to get rid of their last special editions, in order to be able to see Charlie Coborn • — the "inimitable" — in his "Two Lovely Black Eyes" in "Gatti's Hungerford Palace," would have been unbearable, had they not been drowned by the hoarse cries of the omnibus conductors and the rumble and clatter of wheels on the stones of the Charing Cross entrance, which the West Ender, accustomed to asphaltum and wooden pavements, has almost forgotten.

With a confidence which only a long familiarity with the street life of a great city can give, Auban improved the first second in which the rows of wagons offered a passage across the street; and while in the next the tides closed behind him, he passed the Church of St. Martin, cast a glance upon Trafalgar- Square reposing in the stillness of the grave, cut through the' narrow and dark Green Street without paying any attention to the " cabby, " who from his box was calling at him in a suppressed voice that he had " something to say " — something about " a young lady" — and found himself three minutes later in the lighted lobbies of the " Alhambra, " from which belated frequenters would not allow themselves to be turned away, as they still hoped to secure standing room in the overcrowded house. Auban passed indifferently on, without glancing at the shining photographs of the voluptuous ballet-dancers — advertising specimens from the new monster ballet "Algeria," to which half of London was flocking.

The garden in the middle of Leicester Square lay shrouded in darkness. From the gratings the statue of Shakspere was no longer recognizable. "There is no darkness but ignorance," was graven there. Who read it?

The north end of the square was the scene of a boisterous life. Auban had to force his way through crowds of French prostitutes, whose loud laughter, screaming, and scolding, drowned everything. Their gaudy and vulgar dresses, their shameless offers, their endless entreaties: "Che'ri, che'ri," with which they approached and followed every passer-by, reminded him of the midnight hours on the outer boulevards of Paris.

Everywhere this age seemed to show him the most disfigured side of its face.

Before him two young English girls were walking along. They Avere scarcely more than sixteen years old. Their dishevelled blond hair, wet from the moisture in the atmosphere, " was hanging far over their shoulders. As they turned round, a look into their pale, weary features told him that they had long been wandering thus — forever the same short distance, evening after evening; at a street corner a German woman with the Cologne dialect and a far-sounding voice — all Germans shout in London — was telling another that she had not eaten anything warm for three days and nothing at all for one : business was growing worse and worse ; at the next a crowd was gathering, into which Auban was pushed, so that he had to witness the scene that took place: an old woman who was selling match-boxes had got into a quarrel with one of the women. They screamed at each other. "There," shrieked the old one, and spat in the face of the other before her, but at the same instant the indignity was returned. For a moment both stood speechless with wrath. The old one, trembling, put the boxes in the bag. Then, amid the wild applause of the spectators, they thrust their finger-nails in each other's eyes and, blackguarding each other, rolled on the ground, until one of the spectators separated them; whereupon they picked up their things, — the one her broken umbrella, the other her rag of a hat, — and the crowd laughingly dispersed in all directions.

Auban passed on, towards the Piccadilly Circus. This scene, one among countless, — what was it other than a new proof that the method of keeping the people in brutality, in order to talk about the "mob " and its degeneracy, was still very successful ?