called "anarchists" will
have in America as respectable a place as they now occupy in France.
When we are more accustomed to social thought, we shall not regard those
who radically differ from us, as mad dogs or malevolent idiots. We may,
indeed, still look on them as mistaken, but what now seems to us their
insanity or peculiar atrociousness will vanish with our growing
understanding and experience. When we become less crude in civilisation,
they will seem less crude to us. When, with growing culture, we see
things more nearly as they are, the things we see, including the
anarchists, will seem more sympathetic.

This book is not an attempt to justify any person or set of persons. It
is not a political or economic pamphlet. It represents an effort to
throw light on what may be called the temperament of revolt; by
portraying the mental life of an individual, and incidentally of more
than one individual, I have hoped to make more clear the natural
history of the anarchist; to show under what conditions, in connection
with what personal qualities, the anarchistic habit of mind arises, and
to point out, suggestively, rather than explicitly, the nature, the
value, and the tragic limitation of the social rebel.

An Anarchist Woman

CHAPTER I

_School and Factory_

When I first met the heroine of this tale, Marie, she was twenty-three
years old, yet had lived enough for a woman of more than twice her age;
indeed, few women of any age ever acquire the amount of mental
experience possessed by this factory hand and servant girl. She had more
completely translated her life into terms of thought than any other
woman of my acquaintance. She had been deeply helped to do this by a man
of strange character, with whom she lived. She had also been deeply
helped by vice and misery. The intensity of her nature showed in her
anaemic body and her large eyes, dark and glowing, but more than all in
the way she had of making everything her own, no matter from what source
it came. Everything she said, or wrote, or did, all fitted into her
personality, had one note, her note. But perhaps the most intense
quality of all was--and is--this never-failing though gracefully
manifested energy, resulting in unity of character and temperament in
expression. To keep everything in tone is a quality of art; it is also a
sign of great, though not always obvious, energy.

Marie was born in a Chicago slum in 1884. Her mother, half French and
hal