brigandage like Southern Italians, are as easy to govern The
murderer used, it would appear, bombs loaded with as any people in the world, are singularly faithful to some kind of dynamite, and Anarchist literature was governors they approve, and are as industrious and plac- found in his lodgings. In Vienna, a number of Anarchists able as Hindoos. The Mexicans have got on excallently have been arrested who had apparently made every pre- under two successive dictators, one an Indian of pure blood, paration for similar feats, their lodgings being full of and one a half-caste. The Brazilians, though they have the bombs ready to be filled, picrite, and the like ; and one of misfortune of much mixed blood, did verywell for a hundred their coats being fitted with hooks inside, evidently for years before the Monarchy fell, emancipated their slaves the secret conveyance of bombs to any desired spot. An without a civil war as easily as we did, and made them- American and his wife, too, have been blown up at selves by their cultivation and mining enterprises richer Pittsburg, the American Birmingham, because the lady than almost any people of their numbers. As to Chili, it knew too much of Anarchist designs, and had therefore to is always excepted by name from the general condemna- be " removed " as a measure of precaution. All that, it is tion. The Spaniards performed one of the greatest feats said, indicates an International Society acting in obedience in history in the conquest of South America ; they have to some central body, using always the same means, and. spread their ideas and their creed. throughout the con- prosecuting some secret but definite design, through the Client ; and they have, through all revolutions, succeeded old device of agents bound by oath to obedience, and liable in keeping at the top. In Mexico, they guide the Indians ; to death if they disobey. It may, of course, indicate in Chili, they have made a Government as successful and precisely that ; but we should think it much more pro. energetic as the one in Madrid ; and in Argentina, they bable that it does not, and that there are a considerable have so impressed the immense Italian immigration, that number of Anarchists everywhere, as there are a consider- the immigrants adopt their language. often assume their able number of despairing men, and that an epidemic of names, and, in fact, turn Spaniards. That they have plenty active anarchy breaks out, like an epidemic of suicide, from of faults nobody would deny ; but much of their failure is some cause which it is beyond the wit of man to trace. We due to the over-vastness of their territory,and the consequent all know that crime against individuals occasionally breaks adoption of the Federal principle as the only available out in this way ; and so may crime against the community. principle of government. They cannot, with their feeble That all Anarchists are connected after a fashion, just as strength, work a system which hardly works anywhere, all members of the same creed are, say, for instance, and which is peculiarly unsuited to lands where the the Theosophists, is doubtless true, and it is probable, nations are much divided by colour-differences, and where also, that they have leaders whose ideas they accept and they have no traditions leading them to insist that, if respect, just as all the Churches have ; but there is a wide every subordinate State perish one by one, the nation step from that to the existence of a secret International itself, the unified body, shall be preserved. This Federal Society with a powerful organisation and a definite aim. principle facilitates disintegration, and it is towards dis- If so, what is the aim, and why does the society act so integration that they perpetually tend, as Ireland will spasmodically and with such apparently confused motives ? under like circumstances. The object of the Nihilists is definite enough,—it is the Is there any remedy ? It is quite possible that there execution of the Emperor of Russia, or his chief instru- ments of internal government, and from that, so far as is y tinue in Spanish and Portuguese America for fifty more known, the have never swerved. They have not blown h up the rie or threatened traders. The Anarchists, on selves pressed for room, decide to take South America the other hand, seem to have no object. They strike now into their own hands, and terminate anarchy and free- at a capitalist, now at a prominent person, now at the dom both together. It would not cost them a greater police; ; but they do not attack a class, or an institution, or a system. It is almost inconceivable, if a true effort than that which terminated the Civil War. All Secret Society were at the head of such a movement, and could obtain agents prepared to risk their lives, or America far better than Europeans can pretend. to do. But give their lives, that it would not direct them more wisely it is possible also that the Spanish and Portuguese States to its end, which is presumably to create the largest a may struggle through their difficulties towards the system amount of social confusion and dismay obtainable for the to which those difficulties incline them, and which is neither means employed. Most of the people threatened or more nor less than elective Monarchy under other names. attacked are, after all, nobodies, and. even when eminent persons are struck at, they are persons who can be replaced. They are like the Celtic Irish who, when their dissensions became too inconvenient, got rid of them by appointing an What is the use, for instance, to any Secret Society of "uncrowned King," who was not of their blood or creed, and killing General Martinez Campos, who has twenty rivals, whom they did not quite like, but who gave them the one or scattering death wholesale among his Staff, who can be thing they wanted,—the power of cohesion. It is towards replaced from a whole Army ? The theonlysproasnsiibshle Arersmulyt whole Spanish Army, but to suppose that an attack on him was specially ordered from abroad or was part of a large international plan, is to suppose that a governing cannot be long avoided. The Anarchists must be treated, treats Thugs,—that is, arrested for life and incessantly interrogated until from collated evidence some clear idea of never helped investigation in the ages during which Judges relied upon its aid, and with men like the An- archists it would only arouse, as it has done among the Nihilists, a more savage determination ; while the ex- pediency of death is doubtful. It is perfectly just to put an Anarchist to death when he has committed murder, his object being in no way an excuse for his crime ; but we are not certain of the expediency of so doing. There is not much difference between the guillotine or the hang- man's rope, and suicide ; and we suspect that very few of the active Anarchists would hesitate at suicide for five minutes. They must be just the men to commit it, and just in the right mood, that is, filled with angry hatred of the order of things around them, and hopelessness that it will ever be any different. They are not optimist dreamers like the Socialists, but men filled, and as it were suffocated, with a rage so deep, that it becomes to itself its own reason, and hardly knows clearly against what it is directed. The class capable of that rage cannot be large, and it is far more important to know its members and their objects, than to slaughter out a few men who, as experience shows, are readily replaced.
We are not, of course, in any way extenuating the crimes of Anarchists. If they murder, they deserve death ; and if they declare war on society, society has a right to accept the challenge, and put them to an end by any means which soldiers would be justified in employing. But we suspect that it will be wiser, for the present at all events, for each country to deal with its own Anarchists in its own way, to treat their offences as criminal offences simply, and to prosecute their literature as we prosecute any other literature injurious to • morality. We do not quite know yet what the effect of terror applied by a State is upon the semi-lunatic class from among whom the active Anarchists must be chiefly recruited. It may only render them more desperate, and those among them who are honest more convinced that the only hope for the world is the slaughter of its present guides and the overthrow of its present institutions. The evidence certainly tends a little that way. The Anarchists are least formidable here, where, on the whole, they have been treated with a certain lenity born of the absence of panic ; and are most formidable in Spain, where they are the proscribed enemies of the human race, and get nothing but the shortest shrift ; and in Chicago, where, if they organise a procession, the police turn out with clubs in their hands and Gatling guns behind them. Certainly, our treatment helps to secure information for our police, who watch the Anarchists with unremitting vigilance, and have hitherto prevented the success of any of their projects. After all, they are only human beings, and as regards the majority, we doubt exceedingly if they like being hanged. Some of them are specially wicked, no doubt ; but so is each individual murderer, and we find that the hest way to deal with individual murderers is through fair trial, and execution only after complete proof. We may have to go further, no doubt, if the active devotees of the eyil doctrine become more numerous, or if our cities are endangered by their plans ; but as yet, there is no evidence of either of these contingencies. We see no reason to believe that there is anything in Anarchists, any more than in brigands or smugglers, which can resist the strong and equitable pressure of law, especially backed as it is here by the sympathy of the whole people, who, as a body, even when bitten with the Socialist craze, regard Anarchists as wild beasts and, but for the protection of the law, would make an end of all their societies upon any given juries This is not a country in which we need dis- trust with Anarchists before them.
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