Confessions of an anarchist

Association with Anarchists is not calculated to inspire one with feelings of love for such people. Rather the contrary. Lamartine, the historian, in a fit of disgust on witnessing some extra revolting spectacle of “man’s inhumanity to man,” is said to have exclaimed: “The more I see of my fellow-creatures the more I respect my dog.” Substitute “Anarchists” for “fellow-creatures,” and the phrase admirably sums up my sentiments regarding the preachers and promoters of Anarchy.

Happening, some years back, to become possessed of some of the writings of Prince Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus, and other Anarchist idealists, and being at the time of a somewhat utopian turn of mind, I became enamoured with the Anarchist idea of “emancipating” humanity from the “tyranny” of Parliaments, county councils and school boards, and replacing these “useless and effete institutions” with a spanking brand new set of arrangements, under which it was confidently expected everything would work out the very pink of perfection. I became a full-blown Anarchist, joined the “party,” and in course of time became secretary, first of one Anarchist “group,” and later of another. Like other devotees of the cult, I somehow managed to convince myself that every evil under the sun had its source in “Government;” and, having thus, in the Supreme Court of Anarchy, found the culprit guilty, I, like other Anarchists, straightway pronounced sentence of death on this “monster of iniquity,” confident in the belief that with its abolition would disappear—hey, presto! like—all the ills to which human flesh is heir, and life on this “vale of tears” at once become a veritable Eden minus the Tempter. Disillusion followed shortly on making closer acquaintance with the “companions.” Far from being the “perfect beings”—“laws unto themselves”—I had pictured them in my mind before joining the party, I found them quite the reverse. I left them ultimately in utter disgust, they themselves having convinced me of the folly (not to say criminality) of the whole Anarchist scheme. And here, lest it should be said I am misrepresenting, I hasten to confess my acquaintance with many calling themselves Anarchists whose lives prove them to have reached as near the pinnacle of perfection as is humanly possible. But these are merely fancied Anarchists, and not such in reality: their whole creed and life proclaiming them to be altogether out of touch with logical Anarchist formulæ. Defining their particular “Anarchism” as the “right of the individual to do as he pleases, provided that in so doing he does not infringe the like liberty of others,” they have nothing in common with that of the real Anarchist—who believes in the absolute and unrestricted liberty of the individual, and the total abolition of government and authority in all its forms—and are in reality the actual opposite of Anarchists, for they admit, by their definition, the necessity of authority and laws to enforce the will of society on its refractory members.

It will be said, no doubt, that to condemn an idea because of the anti-social and criminal characteristics of its professors is both unfair and misleading. That this would be so as regards most principles I readily admit. But this of Anarchism is an exception, inasmuch as, being an immoral and anti-social doctrine in itself (as I shall prove), it follows as a natural and consequential result that, in course of time, its practical followers must become demoralised also. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Before entering into detail, let me endeavour to substantiate my case. Anarchism being the doctrine which affirms the sacred, sovereign, and absolute right of the individual to do as he likes under all circumstances, at once shuts out of court, as incompatible with its “principles,” all governance, all organisation, all system, all ideas of society, all order, all restraint on the evilly-disposed, all ideas of morality—all institutions and principles, in short, which contradistinguish civilisation from barbarism, and denote the upward progress of man from savagedom, through slavedom and serfdom, to present-day commercial civilisation. This is not mere assertion—the statement carries its own proof.

Bearing in mind the foregoing, who then will be surprised to learn that the Anarchist affirms the total irresponsibility of man; that the individual is not accountable for his or her actions; that, to put it in plain language, the world is a huge lunatic asylum, and all its inmates more or less “touched”? Self-confessedly “up the pole” (to use a vulgarism) the Anarchist, of course, pictures everyone else in the same elevated position. George Etiévant, a prominent French Anarchist, stole dynamite cartridges, and, on his trial, pleaded that he was not responsible. Instead of consigning him to a lunatic asylum, the administrators of the law sentenced him to five years’ penal servitude. On his release, he gave further proof, if proof were needed, of the futility of the law’s attempt to cure mental disease with imprisonment, by stabbing two policemen whom he had never seen before, and firing into a police-station.

Now a consequence of a belief in the non-responsibility of man is the rejection of the idea of good and evil; of right and wrong. “There is no justice;” writes one Anarchist, “right nor wrong; no truth; no good, no evil.... You have no ‘rights’ except the rights you win by might.... Take what you can, and all you can; and take it while you may.”

Talk to the average Anarchist of morality and he will laugh in your face. And this reminds me. Some time back a number of Anarchists who had been expelled from Ticino and Northern Italy arrived in London. One of these was fond of telling how the “comrades” in Italy procured the wherewithal to carry on the “propaganda.” A large audience would be drawn together by means of placards to listen to an eloquent orator of the party discourse on the deliberately chosen subject of “Anarchist Morality,” the while others of the “comrades” scattered themselves among the spell-bound listeners, and quietly eased them of their watches and purses!

But to return. I have said that a logical Anarchist despises morality. Try to reason with him, and he will argue somewhat in this strain: “Every action of the individual, whether viewed from the orthodox moral standpoint as good, bad, or indifferent, is really performed because the individual cannot help performing it; ergo, there are no such acts as good and bad acts—all actions are indifferent.” So that, as was candidly admitted by a speaker at the Paris Anarchist Congress of September, 1889, and reported in the London Anarchist Journal Freedom, “Anarchy is a negation of both morals and principles.”