The Anarchists are not, then, the only ones to find that things are bad, and to desire a change. These complaints, these aspirations, are expressed by the very persons who believe themselves defenders of the capitalistic order. Still more, men begin to feel that they ought not to confine themselves to sterile desires, but should work for the realization of what they demand. They begin to understand and proclaim action, propaganda by deed; that is to say, that having made the comparison between the pleasure which the satisfaction of acting as one thinks is bound to bring, and the annoyances which one must endure for the violation of a social law, they try, more and more, to conform their life to their manner of conceiving things, according to the degree of resistance which the particular temperament may offer to the harassments of social prosecution.
That Anarchistic ideas have been able to develop with this energy and rapidity, is because, while running counter to accepted opinions and established prejudices, while frightening, at the first exposition, those to whom they were addressed, they were answers, on the other hand, to their secret sentiments, their undefined aspirations. They offered to humanity, in a concrete form, that ideal of well-being and liberty which it had scarcely dared to outline in its hopeful dreams. At first they frightened their opponents, because they preached hatred or contempt of a number of institutions believed to be necessary to the life of society; because they demonstrated, contrary to received ideas, that these institutions are bad in the very essence, and not because entrusted to the hands of weak or wicked individuals. They taught the people that not only must the latter not be contented with changing the persons in power, with partially modifying the institutions which govern them, but that, before all, the people must destroy that which makes men bad, which makes it possible for a minority to make use of social forces to oppress the majority; they taught that what until now has been taken for the cause of the evils from which humanity suffers, is but the effect of a still more profound evil, that it is the very basis of society which must be attacked. Now, we have observed in the beginning that the basis of society is private property. Authority has but one excuse for existence: the defense of capital. Bureaucracy, the family, the army, the magistracy, flow directly from private property. The work of the Anarchists, then, has been to demonstrate the iniquity of the monopoly of the soil and of the fruits of the labor of past generations, by an idle minority; to sap authority by showing it to be detrimental to human development, by exposing it in its role of protector to the privileged, by proving the emptiness of the principles under cover of which it justifies its institutions.
That which contributed to alienate the ambitious and intriguing from Anarchistic teachings was just that which led the thinker to study them, to question himself as to their message, viz., that they offered no place to personal preoccupations or paltry ambitions, and could in no way serve as a stepping-stone to those who see, in the demands of the workers, nothing but a means of carving themselves a position among the exploiters. The butterflies of politics have nothing to do in the ranks of the Anarchists. Little or no chance for petty personal vanities, no procession of candidatures opening a career to all kinds of hopes, and all sorts of recantations. In the political and authoritarian Socialist parties an ambitious person can bring about his “conversion” by insensible degrees; no one perceives that he has changed till long after the conversion is accomplished. Among the Anarchists this is impossible, because he who would consent to accept any office whatever in the present society, after having demonstrated that all those who are in office cannot remain there except on condition that they become defenders of the existing system, would at the same moment incur the epithet of renegade, for he could have no semblance of a reason to justify “evolution.” Thus that which provoked the hatred of intriguers at the same time awakened the spirit of investigation in honest men; and this explains the rapid progress of the Anarchistic idea.
What reply, indeed, can be made to those who prove to you that if you want a thing well done you must do it yourself, and delegate it to nobody? With what can you reproach those who make you see that if you wish to be free, you must commission no one to “direct” you? What answer is there to those who show you the causes of the ills from which you suffer, indicate the remedy to you, but do not make themselves the dispensers of it—on the contrary, taking care to make people understand that the individual alone is able to comprehend his own needs, is the judge of what he should avoid?
Ideas strong enough to inspire men with a conviction which makes them fight and suffer for the propagation thereof, without expecting anything directly from those ideas, were, in the eyes of sincere men, worth being studied; and that is what has happened. Hence without heeding the clamors of some, the rancor of others, the attempts of governments, the idea grows and progresses without cessation, proving to the bourgeoisie that the truth can neither be suppressed nor silenced. Sooner or later it will be reckoned with.
Anarchy has its victims—its dead, its imprisoned, its exiled; but it remains alive and strong, the number of its propagandists constantly increasing;—propagandists conscious of their acts, because they have understood all the beauty of the
