rtook with one bomb to destroy them. Henry, feeling that
it was not the lawmakers who were responsible, but the rich, careless,
and sensual, who in their mastery over labor caused poverty, misery, and
all suffering, sought with his bomb to destroy them. Utterly blind to
the sentiments which moved these men, the President of the Republic
allowed them to be guillotined, and Caserio, stirred to his very depths
by what he considered to be the sublime acts of his comrades, stabbed to
death the President.

It is hard to pass judgment on lives such as these. One stands
bewildered and aghast before men capable of such deeds; and, if they
defy frivolous judgment, even to explain them seems beyond the power of
one who, in the presence of the same wrongs that so deeply moved them,
can still remain inert. Yet is there any escape to the conclusion that
all this was utter waste of life and devotion? Far from awakening in
their opponents the slightest thought of social wrong, these men, at the
expense of their lives, awakened only a spirit of revenge. "An eye for
an eye" was now the sentiment of the militants on both sides. All reason
and sympathy disappeared, and, instead, every brutal passion had play.
Politically and socially, the reactionaries were put in the saddle.
Every progressive in France was placed on the defensive. Anyone who
hinted of social wrong was ostracized. Caesarism ruled France, and,
through _les lois scelerates_, every bush was beaten, every hiding-place
uncovered, until every anarchist was driven out. The acts of Vaillant
and Henry, like the acts of the Chicago anarchists, not only failed
utterly as propaganda, they even closed the ear and the heart of the
world to everything and anything that was associated, or that could in
any manner be connected, with anarchism. They served only one
purpose--every malign influence and reactionary element took the acts of
these misguided prodigies as a pretext to fasten upon the people still
more firmly both social and political injustice. To no one were they so
useful as to their enemy.

For three years after this tragic period little noteworthy occurred in
the history of terrorism. In Barcelona, Spain, a bomb was thrown, and
immediately three hundred men and women were arrested. They were all
thrown into prison and subjected to torture. Some were killed, others
driven insane, although after a time some were released upon appeals
made by the press and by many notables of ot