an
exuberance not found in any other contemporary periodical. Its several
thousand readers were devoted to it and supported it with their limited
means until the postal censor put an end to the monthly shortly after
the declaration of war in 1917.

_Mother Earth_ was not Emma Goldman's sole publishing activity. A firm
believer in the efficacy of educational propaganda, she printed and sold
a long list of inexpensive tracts. Her table of literature became a
prominent feature at all her meetings. When no commercial publisher
would accept Berkman's _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, she collected
funds and issued the book herself. The volume has since become a classic
in its field, and stands to this day as a living reminder of the
dominance of a keen and determined mind over all physical obstacles.
Emma also brought out her own collection of lectures, _Anarchism and
Other Essays_. She was able, however, to find a publisher for her
impressive volume of lectures on _The Social Significance of the Modern
Drama_, which deals incisively with the European plays that dissect the
common failures and fallacies of bourgeois society.

* * * * *

Face to face with an audience, Emma Goldman was a forceful and witty
propagandist. Frequently she lifted her rapt hearers to heights from
which they envisioned a world wholly free and completely delightful. In
cold print, however, her lectures reveal little of her dynamic appeal.
They are primarily the work of a forceful agitator: clear, pointed,
spirited, but without originality or intellectual rigor.

The faithful disciple of Bakunin and Kropotkin, Emma perceived
civilization as "a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of
individuals against the State and even against 'society,' that is,
against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State
worship." This conflict, she argued, was bound to last as long as the
state itself, since it was of the very nature of government to be
"conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it," while
the instinct of the individual was to resent restriction, combat
authority, and seek the benefits of innovation.

Her definition of anarchism first appeared on the masthead of _Mother
Earth_ in the issue of April 1910: "The philosophy of a new social order
based on liberty unrestrained by man-made law; the theory that all forms
of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harm