. As a
rule, the socialist stands almost alone in combating this ideological
interpretation of history and of social evolution.

There is something in the nature of poetic irony in the fact that the
anarchist should take the very ethics of capitalism and reduce them to
an absurdity. It is something in the nature of a satire, sordid and
terrible, which the realism of things has here written. The very most
cherished ethical ideals of our society are used by the bitterest
enemies of that society to arouse the wronged to individual acts of
revenge. Quite a number of notable anarchists have been the product of
misery and oppression. Their souls were warped, and their minds
distorted in childhood by hunger and brutality. They were wronged
terribly by the world, and anarchism came to them as a welcome spirit,
breathing revenge. It taught that the world was wrong, that injustice
rode over it like a nightmare, that misery flourished in the midst of
abundance, that multitudes labored with bent backs to produce luxuries
for the few. Their eyes were opened to the wrong of hunger, poverty,
unemployment, of woman and child labor, and of all the miseries that
press heavily upon human souls. And in their revolt they saw kings,
judges, police officials, legislators, captains of industry, who were
said to be directly responsible for these social ills. It was not
society or a system or even a class that was to blame; it was McKinley,
or Carnot, or Frick. And those whom some worshiped as heroes, these men
loathed as tyrants.

The powerful have thought to deprive the poor of souls. They have liked
to think that they would forever bear their cross in peace. Yet when
anarchism comes and touches the souls of the poor it finds not dead
blocks of wood or mere senseless cogs in an industrial machine; it finds
the living, who can pray and weep, love and hate. No matter how scared
their souls become, there is yet a possibility that their whole beings
may revolt under wrong. When the anarchist deifies even the veriest
wreck of society--this individual, "this god, though in the germ"--when
he inflames it with dignity and with pride, when he fills its whole
being with a thirst for awful and incredible vengeance, you have Duval,
Lingg, Ravachol, Luccheni, and Bonnot. Add to their desire for revenge
the philosophy of anarchism and of our schoolbooks, that individuals are
the makers of history, and the result is terrorism.

Other students of terrorism