, I ordered from Chicago M. J.
Schaack's book, _Anarchy and Anarchists, a History of the Red Terror
and the Social Revolution in America and Europe: Communism, Socialism,
and Nihilism, in Doctrine and in Deed_. After waiting four months, and
repeatedly urging things on, I at last received it, and soon perceived
that I had merely bought a pretty picture book for my library for my
five dollars. The book contains, in spite of its grandiloquent title,
its six hundred and ninety-eight large octavo pages, and its "numerous
illustrations from authentic photographs and from original drawings,"
not a single word about the doctrine of Anarchism in general, or
American Anarchism in particular. The author, a police official, takes
up a standpoint which is certainly quite explicable in one of his
position, but which is hardly suitable for a social historian. To him
"all Socialists are Anarchists as a first step, although all
Anarchists are not precisely Socialists" (see page 22),--which is
certainly praiseworthy moderation in a police officer. He calls
Ferdinand Lassalle "the father of German Anarchism as it exists
to-day" (page 23); on the other hand he has no knowledge of Tucker (of
Boston), the most prominent exponent of theoretical Anarchism in
America. This, then, was the literature which was at my disposal.

As regards the standpoint which I have taken in this book upon
questions of fact, it is strictly the coldly observant and critical
attitude of science and no other. I was not concerned to write either
for or against Anarchism, but only to tell the great mass of the
people that concerns itself with public occurrences for the first time
what Anarchism really is, and what it wishes to do, and whether
Anarchist views are capable of discussion like other opinions. The
condemnation of Anarchism, which becomes necessary in doing this,
proceeds exclusively from the exercise of scientific criticism, and
has nothing to do with any partisan judgment, be it what it may. It
would be a contradiction to adopt a partisan attitude at the very time
when one is trying to remind public opinion of a duty which has been
forgotten in the heat of party conflict.

But I do not for a moment allow myself to be deluded into thinking
that, with all my endeavours to be just to all, I have succeeded in
doing justice to all. Elisee Reclus wrote to me, when I informed him
of my intention to write the present book, and of my opinion of
Anarchism, that he