to a "bourgeois" philosophy. Almost all of the anarchists I have
known lost their philosophy and enthusiasm with middle age, and
experience with the actual constitution of things, combined with
disillusion regarding the ideal. Most of them had been hurt or broken by
their attempt, but they all retained a certain something, a certain
remaining dignity of having struggled against the inevitable, and had
acquired insight into some of the deeper things in life, though having
lost some of the childlike simplicity which is a characteristic of the
social rebel.

I saw a great deal of an old Frenchman, who had known Bakunin, and had
been astute in the dangerous work of the "International" in England and
Germany. An associate of William Morris and the other English anarchists
who at that time called themselves socialists, my friend came in contact
with much that was distinguished in mind and energy; he afterward
carried the propaganda of revolutionary socialism to Germany, where he
was arrested and imprisoned for five years. He is now a handsome,
white-haired, well-preserved old man, with fine simple manners and joy
in simple things, love of children and of long conversations with
friends, good will and peace. He has retained a certain mild contempt
for the "bourgeois," for people who prefer an easy time in this world to
an attempt, even a foolish one, for radical improvement. But he knows
the world now, and I fancy many of his illusions are gone.

Another of my radical friends is now only thirty-six years old; but
already he is tired and discouraged, socially speaking. He is a
Frenchman, too, with all the easy mental grace and intellectual culture
of his race. Soon after his student days at the Sorbonne, the social
fever of our day, which burns in the blood of all who are sensitive,
took possession of him. Like Terry, he was drawn emotionally to an
interest in the social outcast; like Terry, a girl in that class
interested him, and he took up the cause of the girls, and led an attack
against the _policiers des moeurs_, the special police who attempt to
regulate prostitution in Paris. He spent all the money he had in the
attempt, lost his respectable friends, and, after several years of
fruitless effort, hope left him. When I met him he was living quietly,
in bohemian fashion, drawing a very small salary and devoting himself to
abstract philosophy, to science, and to pessimistic memories of the days
of his social enthusiasm, or