t attention. The large majority
accepted the proposition I tried to expound, that no question could be
settled by the disputants merely killing each other off; but there were
present about half a dozen members of the International World Workers,
slouch-hatted, unshaven, and exactly true to type as seen at meetings in
East London, Liverpool or Glasgow. These were not workmen employed on
the railway; one kept a barber's shop, one was a teacher, one a Russian
doctor, and one a Russian solicitor; but they were the officials of the
only form of union that exists in Russian Siberia, a revolutionary
circle composed of the very worst elements in the towns, bound together
by one common purpose, the spoliation and assassination of every decent
man, whether bourgeois or workman, who refuses to support a policy of
anarchy. These five or six determined ruffians formed a kind of Blood
Brotherhood, and behind a veil of anonymity issued mandates to, and in
the name of, the Russian workmen, which, backed up by a system of
murderous terrorism, the workmen were powerless to resist. It was quite
a usual thing to find each morning dead men of all classes in the
streets who had been murdered during the night by members of these
circles. There was no system of law or police; every vestige of justice
was uprooted, and these crimes went unpunished. The irony of it was that
these acts were avowedly done in the interest of progress and reform and
in the sacred name of Labour!

The Irkutsk Circle asked questions which were not calculated to elicit a
single fact connected with labour, either in Russia or England, but were
just the usual clap-trap monkey business, such as:

"Why should we be satisfied with half, when we have the bourgeoisie down
and can take all?"

"Why should we allow law to be re-established, which was always used by
the few to rob the many?"

"Surely it is less unjust to allow the many to continue to rob the few?"

"In destroying the landlord and capitalist are not the Russian
proletariat merely taking back its own property?"

"Is it not a fact that the more systematically and effectively we
annihilate the bourgeois and landlord class, and all the institutions
belonging to them, the easier it will be to erect the new order?"

These are all very subtle and difficult to answer briefly at a meeting
of Russian workmen, not one of whom can read or write. It was wonderful
foresight which placed Madame Frank, the editress of the