THE MARTYRS OF HELL

By LOLA RIDGE.

Not your martyers anointed of heaven
The ages are red where they trod;
But the hunted—the world's bitter leaven,
Who smote at your imbecile God:
A being to pander and fawn to;
To propitiate, flatter, and dread
As a thing that your souls are in pawn to,
A dealer that barters the dead;
Who gloats with a vengeance unsated,
And sells the lost souls in His snares
Who were trapped in the lusts He created—
For incense and masses and prayers.
They are crushed in the coils of your halters:
'Twere well, by the creeds ye have nursed,
To send up a cry from your altars,
A mass for the martyers accursed.
Just a passionate prayer for reprieval.
For the Brotherhood not understood—
For the heroes who died for the evil.
Believing the evil was good.
Here's a toast that has never been given;
Listen, thralls of the Book and the Bell:
To the souls of the martyrs unshriven,
The bondmen who dared to rebel —
To the Breakers, the Bold, the Despoilers,
Who dreamed of a world overthrown;
They who died for the millions of toilers,
Few — fronting the nations alone;
To the Outlawed of men and the Branded,
Whether hated or hating they fell,
I pledge the devoted, red-handed,
Unfaltering heroes of hell!

OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS

IT is fashionable among a certain element of the intellectual base to insist that, after all, progress is but a fiction. We are today no nearer the solution of Life's problems—so runs their legend — than were the ancients. The Greek philosophers were no less profound than their modern colleagues; we think the same thoughts, live essentially the same lives, and just as ineffectively question the ever mute Sphinx.

'Tis a fallacy of the poor in faith, the weak in sight and hope. We have not, indeed, solved all the problems that have vexed mankind since the dawn of civilization. But life is a tangled skein whose threads must be unwound laboriously, one by one.

Aeons have rolled into the ocean of eternity ere man first struck the mental flint that discovered to him the very presence of Life's Sphinx. The scales of superstition and ignorance fell one by one from his sight, till at last he dimly beheld the tangled skein. And as the light grew, and the waters of time clarified man's vision, his unsteady hand groped among the threads, tugging here and there, seeking the beginning or end, ever seeking in darkness. In vain he pleaded for aid, divine or human; in vain he implored. Yet not all in vain: his cries strengthened his voice, and his tears purified his sight. The agony of suffering was slowly piercing the tangle, and the enigma was imperceptibly dissolving in the tears of his great need. And lo! suddenly he beheld a beautiful maiden, and in her hand he saw firmly grasped the loose end of life's woof.

Nor could the liberating Ariadne altogether unravel the tangled skein. But the modern Theseus is following her through the winding paths of the labyrinth, out into the open road of final solution.

And the maiden's name was Mechanical Invention.

***

THE smug and self-satisfied are but too apt to forget that they live in houses built on sand. They follow the usual course of their lives, make profits out of the widows and orphans, and proclaim with pious unction that we live in the best of all worlds.

But once in a while something happens, a link in the social chain is broken, and the whole rotten fabric begins to totter and threatens to fall. Then the good people wake up and wonder what has disturbed the even tenor of their lives. One after another they miss their customary pleasures, and grow angry at the deprivation. Soon they realize their very existence imperiled, and consternation reigns in the camp of respectable stupidity.

What happened? Tis the slave becoming unruly. The greedy workingman again making impertinent demands. Only the workingman. But the whole elaborate structure is trembling and its very foundations seem to be sinking. The recent strike of the French postal and telegraph employees has shaken respectable society to its very core. It is, indeed, terrible to realize that our leisure and comforts, nay, our very necessaries, depend upon the good will of mere labor. Why, if labor were so minded it could suddenly stop all the wheels of civilization; not a stroke of work could be done; we might even be degraded to the pangs of vulgar hunger.

Why, it is terrible.

***

IT is probably the first time in the history of modern labor that the tremendous power of solidaric effort has been so conclusively demonstrated. Never before have we witnessed such a convincing object lesson as to the efficacy of direct action and the invincible strength of co-operation. The General Strike of the workmen of but one department of industry was sufficient to put a great country absolutely at the mercy of the strikers. What, then, would happen if the producers of several or of all industrial departments were to assert their rights to life, backing such assertion by a general national and international strike?

Mighty Labor, the world is yours, if you but will it.

***

IT is to be hoped that the organized labor of this country will soon grow out of its diapers and attain manhood.

If the United Mine Workers intend to follow the usual ridiculous tactics of "preparing" for a strike by protracted dilly-dallying with the operators, it were the part of wisdom to capitulate at once. Much time, energy, and suffering would thus be obviated. But if the miners really want to make their demands heard and respected, they cannot afford to waste time in baby-acting, conferring and carrying on long palavers with the mine owners. The latter merely want to prepare themselves—with scabs and millions of tons of mined coal.

The Achilles of capitalism has but one vulnerable spot: the pocket. To force the exploiters to make concessions, the producers must use drastic methods, acting quickly, energetically, effectively. Instead of preparing the enemy by interminable and profitless discussions and parleys, he should be treated as an enemy. Nor should the interests of labor be entrusted to weak, incompetent, or treacherous leaders. Direct action is the motto. Solidaric cooperation of rank and file, the means. If you strike, strike hard. The method of sudden and complete cessation of work, a determined stand, and no compromise, will alone ensure speedy victory.

***

WE learn from recent statistics that crime in New York keeps ahead of the city's growth. The same holds true of the county and State. While population has increased four per cent., the rise in crime has grown ten per cent. The overcrowded condition of penitentiaries and prisons in New York State is not peculiar to the later. Information from many other States indicates that similar conditions also prevail there. The prison officials, almost without exception, attribute the increase of crime to "two circumstances: the hard times and the influx of aliens."

The two circumstances are, in reality, but different aspects of one and the same cause. For, indeed, the influx of aliens is but an indication of the hard times prevalent in European countries. Hard times in America and increased immigration from abroad merely mean that the masses everywhere, in all countries, are suffering want and poverty. Yet these masses work and produce. Why are they in want? What becomes of the products they create in such abundance?

The answer to this question will at the same time explain the prevalence of crime. Monopoly and privilege, aided by government, have divorced the producers from the machinery of production. Helpless without the latter, labor is forced to sell its power for whatever pittance the lords of the land and the captains of industry are willing to give. Deprived of the full equivalent of their work, the masses cannot buy back their products. Hence "overproduction," in the midst of nameless misery, hard times, and "superfluous" labor power.

What is the jobless man to do ? Unemployment has become the chief problem of our civilization. It fills our prisons, builds new ones and overcrowds them, and still crime is on the increase, and hard times grow harder. And all the while the masters of life wax more insolent and reckless, turning the earth into a furnace of misery and suffering, and the State continues to torture and murder the children of its own iniquity.

But the hour of atonement is approaching. The ghost will not down.

***

IT would seem that in our Christian civilization the difference between right and wrong is one of terminology only. Thus the hungry man who takes a loaf of bread is a thief; but he who steals four-fifths of your product is called a manufacturer. To appropriate a dollar that does not belong to you is robbery; to grab a million acres is business. If you kill in sudden passion, it is murder. If you electrocute your enemy with deliberate preparation, it is justice.

When a wrong is right is decided, in all orderly communities, by the government. That is a body composed of the most learned, incorruptible, and unselfish social elements. The decisions of government are based on a book of classified right and wrong. This sacred book is called the Law. The Law is steadily enlarged by the addition of new laws, abolishing former laws. Laws may contradict and nullify each other, but the Law is unchangeable. Laws come and go, but the Law remains intact. The Law is always the Right. It cannot err. It knows no distinction of sex or color. It kills alike male and female, white and black. It knows neither pity nor mercy. Only Duty: the duty of upholding the Existing, the Accepted Fact, the Law and its Makers.

Great is the Law. It transcends right and wrong. Tis the Law.

ANARCHISM AND MALTHUS
By C. L. JAMES.

JOHN STUART MILL, who knew little about the difference between Anarchism and Socialism, but sympathized with both, as far as he understood them, has left on record the sentiment that the Malthusian theory, long considered the fatal objection to Socialism, might prove the strongest argument in its favor. Being much of that opinion myself, I have long desired Malthus, a writer of whom everybody talks and whom nobody reads, to be more generally understood. His life and character strike me as very irrelevant to his reasonings; but since prejudice always insists on getting them in, and generally tells lies about them, here is the truth. Daniel Malthus was the friend and executor of Rousseau. It need not be said, he was a radical. He was also an author to whom some literary merit is attributed; but he always wrote anonymously. His social grade was that of an English "gentleman," living on an income derived from some sort of stock. That he was pretty rich, and that he met with financial reverses, may be inferred from the facts that he passed through the University of Cambridge as a student in the most expensive class; but his son, Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist, was sent there on a cheaper plan; at which time we also find that the family, though increased, had moved into a smaller house than that where he was born. Here, during the winter of 1797, the father and son had some arguments about the merits of Political Justice, a book recently published by William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollestonecraft, and father-in-law of Percy Bysche Shelley). Godwin was an Anarchist of that early unscientific type which preceded Marx and Proudhon. Like his French contemporary, Condorcet, he vaguely entertained those ideas to which Saint Simon, about twenty-four years later, gave precision. That prodigious increase of wealth-producing arts which marked the last quarter of the eighteenth century was transforming military into industrial organization. The trades of the soldier, the legislator, the judge, the jailer, the sovereign, and the hangman, would soon be discarded as useless by a generation whom commerce was bringing to understand human solidarity. Commerce itself, by its effect in cheapening the means of life, would be obliged to make way for Communism. The Golden Age, the Paradisiacal State, was not only before, instead of behind us—it was at the door. The courageous optimism, which could think so when the greatest of popular revolutions was, after fearful bloodshed, in the act of transformation into a conquering military despotism, does credit to Godwin's heart, and his imagination; and the elder Malthus was delighted. But the younger pointed out difficulties. In Godwin's Utopia, life was to be maintained so easily that the "struggle for existence" (a phrase used by Malthus) would have ceased and population, naturally, would increase fast. For things had by no means come to that in the United States, where the settlers were still killing Indians and working negro slaves; where they had fought seven years against a tax, and were in the act of domestic rebellion for cheap whiskey. Yet even in the United States living was so easy, that population, aside from immigration, doubled every twenty-five years. No such rate of increase could possibly continue. As this is a point on which ignorant critics of Malthus continually blunder, we will try to get it clear. The ignorant critics speak about destructive effects of this increase as if it were equally remote with the earth's falling into the sun, or the extinction of the sun itself. But anyone who can use a table of logarithms may convince himself in five minutes that the progeny of one Adam and Eve, doubling every twenty-five years, would pack like oranges in a box, not after geologic aeons, but in a few centuries. Of course no such result is possible. Yet it would evidently happen but that something hinders. What does? Increase of the death rate. This comes in various forms, all horrible to contemplate. Densely peopled countries, India, China, Egypt, Ireland, are mostly very liable to famine. Those happier in this respect have had dire experience that crowding and pestilence go together. Even where these destroying angels spare to smite for the sins of the people, the mortality of cities, notwithstanding all their opulence and knowledge, is invariably higher than that of the poorer, ruder country. But above all other things, war has been not only a check on overpopulation, but a proof that even very ignorant people know a check is needed. That they may not starve, cannibals fight and cut each other. Shepherds, indeed, cannot starve while their flocks are fed; for the flocks increase faster than the men.* But the flocks must have food as well as the men; and, because they increase faster, they reach the limit beyond which they cannot be supported, sooner. Then the shepherd-peoples also resort to war. They sweep across three continents under the black banner of Mahomet, or, perhaps, they are defeated, and almost annihilated, in a battle like that of Aqua Sextiae, by the richer and more civilized neighbors whose territories they have invaded. Either way, the problem of over-population is solved for some time, so far as they are concerned with it. In agricultural countries, war is less popular. But when a government able to suppress it through a wide region arises, famine takes its place, unless the birth-rate be reduced at the same time. A great object-lesson of the kind had recently been seen in India. The first of her recorded famines on a large scale occurred under Anrungzebe,— the first sovereign who really ruled all India. And observe, this could be attributed to nothing but cessation of war, which, when famine threatened, had previously offered a more hopeful way of dying; for, except cessation of war, there had been no important change in the customs of India to account for so terrible a change in the results. The alternative of war or famine is likewise so generally understood that, though backward agricultural peoples are less pugnacious than the cattle-breeders, war was everywhere, always, the principal fact in their history, till it ended, as war normally does, in extensive conquests like those of the Great Moguls. In the highest state of civilization, where there are important manufactures and extensive commerce, there is less war than anywhere else. But even so typically modern a country as England had been at war fifty years in the preceding hundred, and if we clear our minds of cant about "rights," "international law," "the balance of power," and other diplomatic flim-flam, we shall find that the true object of a modern war is a commercial advantage; that nations get ready to fight for a commercial advantage when the pressure of increasing population makes the advantage sufficiently necessary. That increase of the population is the fundamental cause of war,—"teterrina causa belli"—as it always was. Now, Mr. Godwin is witness that war is the cause of government, slavery, serfdom, laws, punishments, un-equal distribution of wealth. If, therefore, his Utopia, which is to banish all such things, were established, it could not last; and we should soon have them all back unless a way be found of checking propagation. But, in truth, too much is conceded in supposing his Utopia established at all. Since men were cannibals, some slow approaches to it have, indeed, been made. The tortoise of industry may be tiring out the hares of lust and plunder; but Mr. Godwin himself shows us that they are a long way ahead of her still; and to imagine them laid asleep by his Arcadian rhetoric is to show ignorance of human nature. All which led Malthus Jr. to another series of reflections. What he called Positive Checks on population—those which increase the death-rate—are inevitable, if propagation goes on at American speed, which, under Utopian conditions, it should exceed. But, generally speaking, it does not go on so fast. There are, then, Checks on population, of a different sort—Preventive—those which diminish the birth-rate. It is evident that there are many checks of this kind—among them vicious practices. But on these, Malthus, a clergyman, had no mercy. He classed them as Positive Checks,— appearing to hold, rather dogmatically, that they restrain increase as much by raising the death-rate as by lowering the birth-rate; nor did he withhold this censure from the least injurious among them, such as those afterwards proposed by the Malthusian Socialist, Robert Owen.[2] The only check, which Malthus would admit to be truly Preventive, or Prudential, is continence. This check is, certainly, far from inefficacious. The lowest savages, who graze like apes, know, indeed, nothing about it. But in the stage of hunting nomadism, a young man is not allowed to marry till the cruel rites of barbarian confirmation have proved him fit for his father's trade of war. If he cannot pass, he is good for nothing but a priest; and where priests do not fight (as sometimes they do) the general rule is that they are celibates. Among cattle-raising nomads, polygamy prevails; and men who are not smart enough to acquire stock can get no wives. In the agricultural state, and still more the commercial, it is mere commonplace that to marry without the means of supporting a family is imprudent. Thus, from the lowest conditions of man to the highest, we find continence increasing uniformly with civilization, except as superstition sometimes intervenes to cause a factitious increase, which, we may suspect, of being rather apparent than real. In that increasing celibacy whose causes are economic, much, no doubt, is loose; but much is genuine. It requires some force of character, some foresight, some judgment, to do what Jacob did for Rachel. Yet this is what many young men do in all social states, from the nomadic shepherds upwards, but increasingly. If the qualities they show be among those which make success in the battle of life, as they very clearly are, has not Godwin's materialistic philosophy confounded effect with cause? Is it not this improvement of habits which has made increase in wealth and knowledge? If the latter tails, as we see it has so far failed, to "substitute the industrial régime for the military," is not that because the improvement of habits is by no means as general as are some of its superficial effects? A beggar may be made more comfortable in London than a king in Darkest Africa; but there is no making a fool anything else than a fool, or saving him from being pushed to the worst place among competitors wherever he may happen to live. From these discussions sprang the famous essay of Malthus which was published in 1798. The prodigious sensation which it immediately produced caused five editions to follow during the author's life. The second, and most important, appeared in 1803. This book, with expansions, revisions, replies to critics,—in short, the subject of this book, variously handled—is coextensive with Malthus' literary activity. (He had, indeed, written an earlier pamphlet called The Crisis, in defense of Pitt's administration; but, by his father's advice, he kept it out of print.) The first edition of the Essay described its topic as the Principle of Population viewed with relation to the Future Improvement of Mankind. The motive of a critique on Godwin's Political Justice was still in Malthus' mind. He had also another reason for introducing his study in this way. Professing to be a Christian, and having recently taken holy orders, he knew well enough that he would be attacked on the ground of impugning the Divine goodness; and that no one would be so savage as his fellow-priests for this and other reasons. He, therefore, must have his theory about the future improvement of mankind, which, if not so rose-colored as Godwin's, must be sufficient for the pious purpose of vindicating the ways of God to man. Malthus professes, accordingly, to desire the future improvement of mankind as much as Godwin can desire it.' The only question between them is about practicable means. Having argued as above that Godwin's Utopia, if set up, would fall; and, moreover, that it could not be set up, without a radical change in regard to an important relation which Godwin had forgotten to mention; Malthus proceeds to contend that his law of population, though it may seem hard to rebellious flesh, is, in truth, the law of human progress from the brute state of the lowest savage upwards. As distinctly as his most illustrious pupil, Darwin, does Malthus perceive that "the struggle for existence" is what makes us progressively better fitted to exist." It is also what makes us more worthy. Terrible as have been the struggles, it is to them we owe it that we are not picking worms out of rotten trees, or ranging the sea-shore for carrion. It is because our ancestors were cannibals that they have, everywhere except in the most inaccessible jungles and islands, exterminated those weaker brothers of theirs who could be content with wild fruits or dead fish. That, as here, so at every later step in the struggle, whether between nations or individuals, the world has been made better by the success of the strongest, bravest, and shrewdest, can scarcely, indeed, be disputed, but it will not be adequately understood without our realizing that the improvement has been moral, no less than physical and intellectual. On a general view, it seems evident enough that the vices—sloth, cowardice, conceit, spite, envy, vanity, ill-temper, gluttony, lasciviousness,—are decided handicaps in the struggle, which must be, and are, wearing down, through the ill-success of those in whom they principally prevail. Of two only—avarice and falsehood—can it be pretended that they help anyone to outdo competitors. But too is allowed in granting that they generally do. They may help an individual on a pinch. But compare nations, classes, sects, parties, whose lives are longer than those of individuals—nay, compare, not two but many, individuals—and it will be clear enough that neither piggishness nor rascality pays; that cunning, though an advantage in itself, is no such advantage as a reputation for veracity; that though generosity is often imprudent, it is not prudent to lack generosity. And thus the cynical saying that prudence is the only virtue God rewards may be transfigured into this reverent sentiment that all the virtues can be deduced from the promises of one who will grant a sure reward to even prudence. Thus the actual causes of past improvement guide us to the process of future. The general direction is that in which Godwin can see no obstacles. War, slavery, punishments, in equalities of fortune and station, and the passions which cause them, are very bad things, to be avoided by everyman, for himself, no less than for the sake of humanity. The man, who will not fight if he can help it, is wiser than the bully. But it does not do to forget that the best-tempered men will fight for life and those things without which life is worthless; that it is the direction of advantage in such necessary strife which has displaced those who thought fighting a sufficient end by those who very reluctantly adopt it as a means; that the one great error, of imprudence in giving life before providing material to support life, will continue as long as committed, to make the struggle for existence inevitable. In the second edition of the Essay, all this elaborate Theodice disappears. [3] So do many rhetorical passages, chief among them the famous one about "Nature's mighty feast," which all the world quotes, and generally garbles. There was a reason for this change. Malthus was now a famous man. Attacks on his doctrines from the side of superstition had come, of course: but they did not amount to as much as he expected; and he had ceased to care for them.[4] By Socialists, if the term at this early date be proper, his work had been rather well received than otherwise—Godwin particularly using expressions which implied that he had learned by it; as, from his life and associations we should infer, he easily might. The day when demolishing Malthus appeared a part of every radical's appointed task did not come till Ricardo (died 1823) had drawn certain inferences from the theory of Malthus, about which more anon. Of more interest to Malthus' scientific mind were criticisms on statistical and other positive grounds. to keep strictly within facts. Even the title was altered accordingly. His subject is declared to be, not the future improvement, but the past history and present prospects of mankind. In the substance of his reasoning there was one modification which his opponents naturally worked for all it was worth. In the edition of 1798 he had described the positive checks on population as "Vice and Misery," the preventive as based upon "the fear of them." A criticism, in which he admitted force, was that he had said nothing about hope. Ambition, the desire of improving one's condition, is certainly a chief cause of continence, and this is something more than fear of vice and misery for oneself or his posterity. Acknowledging this, the tone of theorizing is certainly more optimistic than before. This change in Malthus' language, rather than his meaning, together with the confession that he should have been more explicit at first, is the basis of the criticism often made by Coleridge and others, that the theory is a truism from which nothing can be inferred. That it is no truism, but an extremely complicated equation, may certainly be inferred from the facility with which critics misunderstand it, the multiplicity of ways in which they manage to do that, and the oft-recurring argument ad verccundum—it is very strange that Menu, Confucius, Moses, Solon, Cato, even the ascetic Roman Catholic publicists, should have held up increasing the species as a sacred duty; and that discovering the direful results of doing so should have been reserved for Mal- thus![5] Of the four subsequent editions, nothing need be said here, except that they become progressively more statistical, comprehensive, and bold, until even friendly critics thought he would have been clearer for taking less pains to be clear.

(To be continued.)

[1] This is one of Henry George's arguments to show that population may increase indefinitely—an argument utterly idiotic as the next sentence shows.

[2] If he were wrong in this, he at least had something to say. Under the Roman Empire celibacy, of course, as a rule, improves, which, even under the Republic, had become a common way of avoiding the pecuniary pressure, increased to immense proportions. This saved the Roman peace from ending in famine, like the Mogul. But it did not avert dissolution of the Empire. Malthus would have been quite in the ordinary way of thinking if he attributed Roman misfortunes to Roman vice; and maintained that a chaste celibacy might have had better results.

[3] George says that the Malthusian theory did not originally involve the idea of progress. Referred even to the later editions of Malthus, this is incorrect; but for the first it is ridiculous, and shows at once that George never read what Malthus wrote in 1798.

[4] Those acquainted with Malthus in after life say he was one of the gentlest and most amiable of men; which we are also told about Ricardo and Adam Smith. But there are letters of his tutor extant, from which it appears that he had been a most pugnacious boy; and a phrenologist, reading his works with knowledge of their occasions, would find ground on every page for saying: "Firmness and combativeness, Large!" Malthus said that the charges of discouraging benevolence, and commending infanticide and abortion, etc., etc., gave him pain, when they were honest misunderstandings; but, considered as polemical tricks, he had learned to despise them, and got over answering.

[5] George, whose "refutation of Malthus" is useful because it gives in epitome those of every one else, with exquisite consistency, suggests both these views; sometimes wondering ironically that this great truth never was discovered before; sometimes intimating that it does not amount to a great truth, because everybody knows all the truth there is in it. and governs himself accordingly. That Malthus actually stated all the truth there is in this, would never be suspected by a reader of George.

CONTENTS

Freedom in America. Poem. Walter Crane .. 97
Observations and comments . . . . . . . . . . . 98
The Movement for Free Speech . . . . . . . . . 103
A Demand for Free Speech . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Our Friends, the Enemy. . . . . . . . 110
A Visit to Yonkers. H. Kelly . . . . . 111
The French Revolution. Hippolyte Havel. 116
A Scientist on a Scientist? D.M. Kider 119
What We Did to Bernard Carlin. Grace Potter 121
The Release of Michael Costello. Voltairine de Cleyre 125

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The Terror in Russia

By PETER KROPOTKIN

A BOOK OF FACTS, containing valuable and reliable information about the present conditions in Russia.

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FREETHOUGHT

By Edward H. Guillaume

Great word, that fill'st my mind with calm delight,
I love to feel, but cannot hope to tell,
How, like the noonday sun, thou dost dispel
The mists of error that impede our sight!
What noble dreams, what yearning hopes excite!
What memories, too, awake at the sound of thee,
Like a myriad ripples on a wind-swept sea!
How full and irresistible thy might!
Thou casuist to grow pale the tyrant's cheek;
Thou art the knell that loud proclaims the fall
Of despots and of priests, and those who seek
To crush the human mind beneath their thrall:
Thou dost avenge all wrong, make strong the weak --
Nobility and heritage of all.

OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise"
Was the cant they handed slaves in long ago.
Where ignorance is hell, ' tis cowards who disguise
The things that every freeman ought to know.

Again and again it is being demonstrated by history and experience that the truest reality is -- the ideal.

The Timid, Lacking hope or vision, lose themselves in fear, discourage magnify difficulties, and shrink back in terror from possible danger.

The bold, inspired by the ideal, courageously face apparently insurmountable obstacles, defy danger, dare and do, and ultimately conquer.

Numerous are the instances of this eternal truth. the present revolution in Spain is a case in point. It is comparatively recently that the Anarchists have initiated their anti-militarist propaganda. Scornfully the world smiled at their lilliputian effort Even alleged radicals, when not directly antagonistic, shook their wise heads, pityingly: "Visionaries ! An Impossible task."

But timidity lacks the power to discourage the social pioneer, whose wagon is hitched to a star. His vision armors him with determination and perseverance. His faith makes him impressnable to scorn or ridicule. THe visionary, the impractical idealist -- he is the inevitable conqueror.

Arduous labor, his; and dangerous. But the sympathy of fellow workers, the understanding of congenial spirits is a powerful sustainer. Gradually he forges on and on, courageously and confidently, step by step he paves his way, he rises, falls and rises again, and forward and upward he strives, ever beholding his beckoning star. And then, lo! thousands are following him, and the whole country rings with the cry, Down with War !

Behold Spain!

And then again he labors. The owls hoot, the wolves give chase. But on and on he goes. Now parrying, now attacking, yet never lured into by-ways. He carries the banner of Liberty. Anarchy is his ideal. Revolution his road. Along his way he sows the seeds of discontent and plants the trees of Better Things. Woods and valleys he traverses, the song of Life and Joy on his lips, and over hill and mountains floats the echo of his voice, "The General Strike." On and on he goes, hated, jeered, driven. An enemy of society -- a dangerous lunatic -- an impractical visionary --

Then, lo! Behold Belgium, France, Russia, Spain, Sweden.

And on he goes, carrying the banner of Liberty. Anarchy is his ideal, Revolution his road.

* * *

THE Legal farce of "judging" the Hindu student, Madar Lal Dhingra, forcibly reminds one of the circumstances attending the judicial murder of Robert Emmet. Indeed, the comparison is highly appropriate, since British rule in India to-day is, in all essentials, an exact replica of the condition of Ireland in emmet's time.

But a whole century has passed since the hanging of the leaders of the "United Irishmen"; in the perspective of the decades the world celebrates Robert Emmet as a great patriot and noble martyr. But Dhingra is "a common murderer." The difference is merely one of time. Indeed, the Indian student has but trodden in the foot-steps of the great Irishman; the very spirit of Robert Emmet vibrates in the Hindu's dying words, " What I whale done, you would expect every true Englishman to do. If the Germans have no right to take possession of England, neither has England the right to take possession of India, oppressing and tyrannizing my country-men."

Prophetically Dhingra foresees the time that will justify him and his act. His clear vision inspires him with the challenge to his judges, "I am proud to receive the honor you have thus bestowed upon me!" Full Well he knows that history repeats itself, and that in his case, as in Emmet's, posterity will see in his present judges the real and only criminals, and that its voice will echo the brave words of Krishnavarma and all sincere revolutionists, "Political assassination is no crime."

* * *

ANOTHER Judas Is carrot unmasked in the person of "General Harting"; Russian peasants flogged to death for inability to pay exorbitant taxes; the prisons overcrowded; politicals tortured; the hangman busy at his trade; an unbroken line of Russia's noblest sons and daughters stretching across the snow of Siberia -- such is the prelude to the Tsar's visit to England.

Acclaimed by the international flunkeys in and out of uniform, Nicholas goes a-visiting, proclaiming the gospel of good-will and peace. Civilized mankind stands aghast at the spectacle: his mouth runs honey, while his hands drip blood, each drop the life of a tortured, murdered innocent.

Very timely, indeed, is the exposure of the terrible conditions prevailing in Russia, as set forth in facts and figures by Peter Kropotkin in his latest work. "The Terror in Russia." The data contained in the book form the basis of the speech delivered by Comrade Kropotkin on the occasion of the meeting of welcome to Vera Figner, the venerable Russian revolutionist who septa twenty-three years in the schlüsselburg fortress. Kropotkin's speech delivered June 23rd, at the South Place Institute, London, is reproduced, in part, in this issue.

The horrors of the Tsar's rule, as depicted in "The Terror of Russia." will shock the civilized world. The tortures of the Spanish Inquisition fade into insignificance as compared with the terrible brutality of the Cossack régime. We recommend the book to the thoughtful consideration of all friends of Russia. May it prove a clarion call to awaken the conscience of the world to the imperative necessity of wiping off the curse of official Russia from the face of the earth.

* * *

Not since the historic days of Homestead has Pennsylvania witnessed such a momentous clash of capital and labor as in the present strike of the employees of the Pressed Steel Car Company at McKee's Rocks.

This struggle once more proves the infamy of the business elements and the servility of the press. The strikers have been almost unanimously condemned for "disturbing business" and interfering with the gathering of profits. And that in view of the admitted fact that the Pressed Steel works are a veritable shambles, that the strikers were forced to slave for the most pitiable wages and were treated with indescribable arrogance and brutality by the officials of the car company.

Driven to desperation, the workingmen declared a strike, demanding a living wage and more decent treatment. Little enough, indeed. Yet the company promptly refused the demand, and a prominent Pittsburg daily commented, editorially: "People that strike from any cause hardly ever deserve much sympathy. But when they interfere with business and disturb order they must be brought to terms by all means, rather than be negotiated with."

The Process of bringing the strikers to terms "by all means" then began. President Hoffstott, of the Pressed Steel Car Company, proved himself a worth disciple of the notorious Frick, of Homestead-Pinkerton fame. With the aid of the State constabulary he introduced a reign of blood, resorting to the vilest plutocratic methods of eviction, arrest, and indiscriminate shooting down, with the single object of terrorizing the strikers into submission.

But the spirit of intelligent revolt is not to be broken so easily. Unorganized though the strikers were, they made a brave and determined resistance. Whipped into unity by their terrible condition, they formed a force that the combined strength of capital and state have so far found impossible to overcome.

Gradually, yet surely, the intelligent co-operation and manly stand of the McKee's Rocks "foreign strikers" are compelling the respect of the country. Whatever the result of the strike may be, those underpaid and persecuted workers have already won a great moral victory.

* * *

THERE are signs of a tardy awakening in at least one direction. The police, the detectives, and all that monstrous army for which the grinding of the criminal condemnation mill means place and profit, have so overplayed their part that the storm is rising. Books such as "The Turn of the Balance" and "9009" have been published, and by their obvious veracity and tense indignation are compelling the attention of a hitherto indifferent public. Periodical literature is beginning to bristle with the subject, and this is a sure sign, for the men who make their living by writing for our magazines have an unerring nose for the topic that is really alive.

Here and there a man escapes from prison — one among thousands, or rather tens of thousands — who has the capacity and the powerful position that enables him to talk, and talk with some chance of being heard. They have a man of that type in California, Griffith J. Griffith, who, as luck would have it, is a man of means, a speaker, and a trained writer by profession. He has been telling stories of his experiences in San Quentin — the scene of "9009" — and is making the good, easy citizens of California sit up.

They have formed a Prison Reform League there, which is endeavoring to arouse the entire country to our treatment of crime and criminals. It is issuing syndicate letters and much other literature denouncing that treatment as founded on revenge and worthy only of the Dark Ages. It is adding its mite to the exposure of the conditions prevailing in southern convict camps — a crime of international proportions — and is doing what it can to throw light on the mediaeval tortures applied to helpless prisoners among communities that fancy they are civilized.

Probation leagues have sprung up — we note their formation in Chicago and St. Paul, and others may have escaped us. They voice the same general complaint: that this society is manufacturing criminals wholesale; that it is actuated solely by the fiendish policy of revenge; that its deterrent punishments do not deter; that it gives men no chance, and that so long as it continues in that folly it will be tearing itself to pieces. We may think the work of many of these leagues and writers insufficient; we may feel that they have not yet struck the root of the evil; but they are doing a great work as stirrers of discontent. They are making people think, and to make them think is to make them disgusted with affairs as they are run at present by our unspeakable politicians and their henchmen.

We Anarchists have good cause to know how true is the proverb that when you want to hang a dog, you must give him a bad name. The literature that is being born from these prison revelations will go far toward shaking that national self-complacency which has been the hardest of all enemies to combat. A good many highly respectable gentlemen are going to get the worst of names, and the entire machinery for the administration of what, with an irony never equalled in history, is known as "Justice" is destined to find itself in the foulest of odor before many years have passed. Thus the harvest ripens, and the dawn of a new era grows brighter on the old horizon.

* * *

A RATHER expedient, if not ingenious, defence has been advanced by the United States Senator, who, charged with assaulting a negro dining-car waiter, justified his act by declaring, "I did not strike a man. I slapped a nigger." The judge proved his respect for the law and its makers by agreeing with the Senator.

This case is by no means an isolated one. Nor is the attitude of the senatorial pugilist towards the negro exclusively southern, as some are inclined to believe. The argument that "slapping a nigger" is not "striking a man" holds good practically throughout the country. But few white people in this enlightened land have risen to the level of recognizing in the negro a fellow-man, a social equal. To the great majority a difference of color is, per se, an evidence of inferiority. Even some radicals are not entirely free from this most stupid of prejudices. And yet, impartially speaking, the spirit which sees in the colored man "only a nigger" is itself convincing proof of a mental kink, of intellectual immaturity.

* * *

THE recent grant of old-age pensions in Great Britain has called forth much discussion of the perennial question of poverty. As is usual, the newspaper philosophers are more voluminous than illuminative. Especially is common sense at a premium in the learned disquisitions. As to originality, it is terra incognita. Exploded theories of fatalistic, religious, pseudo-Malthusian, etc., conceptions of poverty are rehashed with an air of self-satisfied finality. None, evidently, dare analyze the vital relation of poverty to capitalist economics. One publication, however, suggests in a spirit of bantering levity, the various "possibilities" that would result if the hundred thousand unemployed of New York decided to steal rather than starve.

The suggestion may be worthy of serious consideration. What would society do with a hundred thousand "criminals" determined to eat rather than die of hunger? And suppose the unemployed all over the country were to follow the example of their New York brothers. The prisons could not hold one-fiftieth of the number. What would then happen if the poor, the underfed, the starving decided that it is as senseless as it is disgraceful to hunger amidst plenty?

They would eat and grow strong and forever forget that things are more sacred than lives.

* * *

THE sight of a woman riding astride has so shocked the virtuous sensibilities of a Georgia legislator that he hastened to introduce a bill, making the practice a felony. If the bill is to become a law, it will be as criminal for a woman to ride in a natural and comfortable manner as it is to live so.

The Georgia Solon is no doubt consistent. Woman cannot be suffered to discard the shackles of hoary custom that have from time immemorial kept her the submissive slave of man. Riding astride, for a woman, is an open defiance of established usage, hence immoral. Encouragement in this particular would doubtlessly lead to woman's gradual emancipation from other accepted facts. What would then become of the supremacy of men like our virtuous Solon ?

* * *

A BRIGHT little magazinelet, Freeland, has reached this office. It contains 64 pages, the contents of which are thus characterized in the publisher's prospectus: "Devoted to economics and politics, critical in basis, libertarian in tendency, and constructive in method, favoring the largest individual development within the bounds of the law of equal freedom."

Address Alexander Horr, Station Box 2010, San Francisco, Cal.

ON PATRIOTISM

By B. RUSSELL HERTS.

THERE is a feeling in the heart of man to-day which has swayed the course of history for near a thousand years, which has established empires, dethroned monarchs and popes, built up continents, forced friends and families into separation; which has given birth to sorrow and rejoicing, love and hatred, cruelty, crime, and inspiration for ten centuries, and which is now one of the greatest ethical, psychological, and sociological influences upon the mind of the twentieth-century man.

Here in America is the spirit of Patriotism especially powerful, for it has been the cause and explanation of our conduct ever since the memorable days nearly a century and a half ago, when our first patriots cried out for "freedom" and "representation." It is in great measure responsible for all of our noble deeds, for our speeches, our sacrifices, our panics, bloodshed, and crimes. And through the decades as our country grew and prospered, it has grown and prospered, until to-day there is a kinship of national reverence between all the Europeans, Asiatics, and Negroes within the land, and the presence of Patriotism in one's soul is taken as one of the fundamental tests of character. So far has this proceeded that he who does not hasten to rise and uncover at the opening strains of the national melody, who does not believe and claim America to be capable of all things, who does not deem it a sacred duty to go forth, if called, and crush his brother-being upon the battlefield, is gazed upon, for the most part, with fear and hatred, mingled with a touch of scorn.

In this centennial year of our greatest president, when thousands of speeches have been sounding in every corner of the land, when thousands more of written works plentifully decorated with the words "heroism," "Patriotism," "American," are circulated and read in every home, is it not well to cease our impassioned declaiming, our joyous singing, even our loving reverence, for a moment, and give ourselves to the task of verifying the absoluteness, the fundamentality, the value of the glorious Patriotism which impels us to all these exhibitions?

Whence comes it? Is it eternal? And, if not, what is its cause and origin, and more especially, in this pragmatic age, why does it exist? What is its contribution to human happiness and progress?

In judging present matters, or preparing for those of the future, we have only our knowledge of the past as a foundation for assumptions. Let us review and employ what economics has taught us, and that we may reach the fundamental, let us revert to the borderland of the pre-historic.

At the earliest times which we have thus far been enabled to study, man presents himself to us in a state of what has been called "individual economy." His chief cares were the finding of food, and the securing of protection against the ravages of beasts, the encroachments of neighboring men, and the terrors of nature. To this stage succeeded that in which the family became the typical economic entity, when man began to realize the pleasure and usefulness of domestic life, and to protect against his enemies not only himself and his personal belongings, but also his home and all the kinsmen who gathered thereabout. Thus came the clan into being, and man's love became inclusive of his relatives.

Gradually the more civilized sections of mankind retired from their nomadic existence and settled into groups, each occupying a definite territorial district. The necessity for some scheme for the production and distribution of goods, and for the insurance of government and protection, became immediately apparent. The formation of the town or city was the result. In order to render this organization secure and powerful, it was necessary for the individual to pledge himself to protect his city in times of danger, and to assist it in the acquirement of wealth and authority. Thus was a measure of the love and loyalty, formerly lavished upon the family, transferred to the community.

During medieval times men unconsciously began to realize that geographical, linguistic, and other features contributed to render desirable the formation of larger units than that of the town. So we find extensive territories, each containing many cities, the people of which speak the same language, possess substantially the same political point of view, and dwell within certain barriers difficult of passage, each held together by the love and loyalty of their inhabitants. City warfare ceases and allegiance is transferred from the smaller to the larger group.

The nation being a recent development, it is clear that national feeling has had but a limited existence. But, it may be answered, the sentiment of which Patriotism is an outgrowth has been man's ever since we know of his presence on earth. The contention must be admitted: the quality in which we so greatly delight is directly traceable to the self-love of the savage. Broadened, extended, it is, but only because the economic unit is more embracing now than ever before. Egotism for the nation is but an extension of personal egotism, and the national selfishness which prompts a man to seek the aggrandizement of one people at the expense of another is but the descendent of primitive man's lust for power and mastery.

The world is now divided into nations, and national feeling is universally respected. Yet is the nation anyless arbitrary, any more fundamental, a division, than was the family or the city? Has our reverence for the typical, temporary economic group, having passed through many stages at last reached its fixed and final form?

Let one gaze guardedly into the future and he perceives a stage beyond: a stage when material barriers shall disappear, and race hatreds be no more; when national prejudices, national egotism, national selfishness, even national love shall be swallowed up in a new spirit — the spirit of humanitarianism, the only possible Patriotism in a state of international economy.

There is, indeed, considerable evidence that this transition is soon actually to be consummated. The improvements of the last half-century in transportation have destroyed the importance of national geographical barriers, while the proposed universal language may remove the present national linguistic differences; the peace conferences are gradually imposing upon us a recognition of the desirability of uprooting national hatreds, while the recent advancement of such countries as Japan is teaching us the absurdity of national self-satisfaction. Moral, social, and political questions of world-significance are everywhere usurping the place in men's minds previously occupied by interest in national affairs, so that now, in the discussions of scientists, Anarchists, capitalists, unionists, Socialists, nationality is practically a negligible quantity.

Many deplore this condition. To them the gradually waning sentiment is a symbol of all that is great and noble in an accomplishment of modern times. They see that Patriotism has been essential to man's uplifting, and so they insist that it is still desirable. They demand the continuation of war because, in the past, man has lost, and therefore enobled, his personality through deeds of valor. They are like those who would restore the Church to its place of power, and re-establish its tyrannies and extravagances, because long ago on account, or in spite, of these, a Bramante, a Rafael, a Michael Angelo has been nursed in its bosom. Is it their serious belief that those lips must be wet with new-sucked blood from which the breath of inspiration is to come, or that the meadows must be manured with lies and wretchedness and crime, on the produce of which genius is to be reared? Six thousand years, at least, it was, before mankind could mould a Michael Angelo; if this hypothesis were true, one might well wish six thousand times as long to pass before such another were given to the world.

But man is confident that it is not so. Religion was alone in its inspiration, the Church alone in its patronage of artists, because thought and activity were over-shadowed by these forces. Man's creative capacity demands material to mould: these themes were at hand, and all else was forbidden. It has been the same with war. So long as war exists as a significant and spectacular element in modern life, it will continue to be a theme of poets and painters. But does this import that its withdrawal will mean the death of the inspiration which gave birth to the poems and pictures which deal with war? Would it not simply signify the transference of this to another field — perhaps to one of the many fields as yet unrecognized as fit for the purposes of art? In the work of the moderns do we not already see the puffing, plunging engine with its newly-realized harmony of creaks and crashings; the stern, pale steamship clearing the stormiest sea with perfect precision, the mud-, or soot-, or grease-begrimed laborer cognizant of the nobility, because of the usefulness, of his task — do we not daily see these and a hundred such subjects usurping the places of the discarded topics of past decades? For the purposes of art physical strife between men has served its term — man is moving to a music vibrant, powerful, inspiring far beyond the clash of arms.

Then there be those who tell us that, while war is waging its death struggle, nationality is a youth newly-awakened to his power. They would destroy what has become apparently repellent to them, but at the same time retain the economic and political conditions from which this has arisen. The thing is impossible. The existence of nationality signifies the continuance in each nation of the desire for its own aggrandisement. Such a competition implies conflict, and harmony is, and must be, the aim of those who would annihilate war. Conflict has existed and thrived under every state of society thus far known to history. There is but one condition conceivable to the mind of man under which war cannot exist — that in which no final economic group is recognized.

Every change through which man has passed has made him more humanitarian: the love of family being less selfish and personal than the love of self, that of city than that of family, and the fleeting feeling of to-day a step still in advance; so that the state of internationality is the logical and natural outcome. This appears to be the final, fundamental form, for we can imagine nought beyond, Desired or repugnant to us as the change may be, it yet remains inevitable — imminent.

We are told that as long as honor and self-respect live among peoples, so long will war persist. History itself confutes this. In the evolution of the ages even honor is subject to mutation. We remember that the abolition of duelling was opposed, and for many years retarded by the supremacy of the feeling of personal honor — under the name of chivalry. Now we find the destruction of national duelling opposed by the appeal to national honor under the name of Patriotism. Duelling has been over-thrown and chivalry is but remembered. National duelling, war, will be abolished, and for the accomplishment of this Patriotism must perish. There can be only one fatherland for the man whom it is the most divine task of civilization to produce: the world; and his Patriotism will not evince itself in the stolid love of self, family, city, or State, but in the sacrifice of all for humanity!

THE SPANISH UPRISING

By Emma Goldman

WITHIN the last two weeks organized authority has been shaken to its very foundations by the revolutionary uprising in Spain.

To think that neither the influence of religion, with its power to dull the human mind, nor the army with its lead and iron methods, no longer serves as a safeguard against revolution! Moreover, the rebels, once having thrown off the bridle, know no bounds. They actually "burn churches and outrage nuns." What beasts! What brutes!

In view of the fact that these blood-curdling stories emanate from a servile and prostitute press, ever ready to malign and misrepresent the least revolt against tyranny, one will do well to carefully weigh and measure these reports. But even if they were true, if the Spanish people really burned churches and maltreated the cuervos negros* what of it? Has not the Catholic Church, especially in Latin countries, driven the people to despair; has it not for centuries lived off their sweat and blood; has it not used every means to lash them into submission and rob them of their energies and manhood ? Were the people of Spain to retaliate a million-fold, it would sink into insignificance compared with the countless crimes and black terror of the Catholic Church.

Politicians and vote hucksters only can maintain the lie that religion is a "private affair." Revolutionists the world over have realized long ago that religion is one of the greatest obstacles to the emancipation of mankind, hence the strongest support of tyranny and oppression.

The most striking feature of the present uprising does not consist in what has or has not been done to churches and nuns. Much rather it is to be found in the tremendous anti-military spirit and the recognition of that most effective weapon, the General Strike.

While it is true that the Moroccan war — a struggle for the enrichment of a handful of speculators — has fanned the spark of popular discontent into fire, it is much more true that the anti-militarist agitation, carried on in Latin countries for years, has paved the way for the present revolt.

Militarism, like the church, is one of the strongest bulwarks of our present system. This has become particularly apparent during recent years. Governments employ armies not merely to subdue weaker nations and conquer territory, but to silence the slightest cry of discontent at home. Realizing this, the revolutionary elements in every land have inaugurated a wide-spread agitation against militarism. The present Spanish uprising — the most heroic and inspiring revolutionary event of recent years — is the direct result of those efforts. And the General Strike?

True, a leading German Socialist not long ago declared the General Strike to be general nonsense; and when asked if the workers of the world should prevent the possible coalition of European powers against the Russian Revolution by the declaration of a General Strike, he scornfully ridiculed the suggestion. How foolish the "Sage of Berlin" must feel in face of the fact that the General Strike has since proved such a tremendous weapon in the hands of labor.

Yet another cause, no doubt, aided in preparing the Spanish uprising — the memory of Montjuich, that hell of the modern Spanish Inquisition.

Twelve years ago a bomb exploded during a religious procession at Barcelona. Immediately three hundred workingmen were arrested and tortured in the most fiendish manner: hot irons, the thumbscrew, and rack were employed to extort confessions. When, finally, the majority of the victims perished, and a cry of indignation arose all over Europe, the few survivors of the torture were released. Perchance among the participants in the present revolt are friends and relatives of those victims. This, together with the unspeakable oppression, exploitation, and forced military service suffered by the Spanish people, sufficiently explains the present revolution.

I am not optimistic enough to hope that the heroic and self-sacrificing efforts of our Spanish brothers will forever abolish torture and tyranny. But as a forerunner of a greater and more effective storm they are wonderfully encouraging and invigorating. Those who have the revolutionary spirit can learn from Spanish events the great power of anti-militarism and the General Strike.
*Black Crows -- popular expression of scorn for the black clergy.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF RUSSIA*

By PETER KROPOTKIN.

NEVER were the conditions of Russia so desperately bad as they are now. Neither during the depressing years of the reign of Alexander III., nor during the wild reaction of the last years of Alexander II., nor even during the mad despotism of Nicholas I., did the orgies of the defenders of autocracy reach the climax they have attained now. Even that little, that microscopically little, that had been obtained in Russia for some protection of the individual from the bureaucracy, is now wiped off from life as something unworthy, useless, harmful.

From the very first day of his accession to the throne, Nicholas II. permitted himself, In virtue of his own personal will, surreptitiously to alter the established Constitution of Finland. In his very first manifesto, issued on the day of his father's death, he ordered the words, "Grand Duke of Finland," to be taken out of the title of the Emperor of Russia. By a stroke of his pen he thus abolished the ninety-year old autonomy of a nation which peacefully followed its own development; he tore to pieces the treaties of annexation of Finland; he gave the lie to the oath taken by his father and grandfather.

His first act was to put himself above the binding laws of the country. And now, for fourteen years in succession, he patronizes those who trample under foot all the concessions that give however slight a guarantee to the individual's personal safety against the outrageous attacks of the rulers of Russia — the gangs of hooligans who find their immunity by entering the ranks of the present rulers of Russia. undertaken the rooting out of all the best forces of the Russian nation. Such a bacchanalia of savagery and cruelty Russia has not seen since the times of the half- mad Tsar, John IV. — also surrounded by fortune-tellers — the murderer of his own son. Thus it is that in the twentieth century Russia has again to live through that shameful page of her history.

The abolition of the old-established rights of the nationalities allied with Russia in the Caucasus and Finland; the sending of hundreds of students as soldiers to Port Arthur, as a punishment for disturbances; the surrender of the schools into the hands of the illiterate priests, church cantors, and bell ringers; the bribing of the army by doubling the pay of the officers in those parts of the Empire where the state of siege was introduced; the surrender of the most vital parts of the State organization to all sorts of adventurers, like Bezobrazoff and Stoessel, provided they would grovel at the feet of "our father the Tsar" and "our mothers the Empresses"; and finally, the handing over of all the life of Russia to the adventurer Von Plehve and his secret agents, because that man had promised Nicholas II. in 1903 to maintain autocracy by secret police rule for another ten years — this is what Russia got during the first ten years of his reign from Nicholas II., whom the plunderers of Russia now call their father.

And now, after the defeat of the first efforts of the Revolution, Russia has been given up to a band of thieves, murderers, and criminals against all the moral conceptions of mankind. The prisons are overcrowded; many of them contain three and four times more inmates than they were built for. And such an overcrowding is bound to continue, because the present rulers of Russia are prosecuting now, before their packed courts, thousands of persons, for all they have done and said during the years of relative liberty, 1905 and 1906. All that was considered then as necessary and desirable for the renovation of Russia, is prosecuted now. A book issued at that time, a meeting convoked to discuss the strike which compelled Nicholas II. to make his first concessions, a speech delivered at a meeting, or even in court by a lawyer, or in the Duma by a Deputy — all this is now prosecuted. And in these prosecutions they have returned to the ways and habits that were dear to the mad Tsar John and his pet, B'asmanoff — they have reintroduced torture.

Yes, they torture now in Russia — it is an established fact; and when a court in Warsaw, in Riga, or in South Russia has condemned, no matter how mildly, some of these torturers to imprisonment, it is sufficient for one of the modern pets of the present Tsar — that is, for Dr. Dubrovin, the president of the Union of Russian Men — to ask Nicholas II. to pardon the condemned torturers, and these wild beasts are pardoned at once; and the Prime Minister is not ashamed to hurry to wire to the respective Governor this new token of the Tsar's solicitude for his subjects.

Friends, these are not tales that I tell you! This is what stands in black upon white in all the daily papers published in Russia itself. This is said openly in the Duma; this is the matter of decisions of the Russian Courts. Just quite lately it has been disclosed before a court in Finland that the murderers of the two members of the Duma, Hertzenstein and Yollos, both, please mark, most pacific men, whose great crime was to be specialists in financial matters and matters concerning the misery of the Russian peasants — it appears now that the murderers of these two men were members of the secret police staff, and at the same time were in the service of that same Union of Russian Men whose badge the Tsar has been wearing till quite lately, whom he declared to be his most loyal subjects. The president of that Union, that same Dr. Dubrovin whom Nicholas II. receives personally, and to whom he lately again handed £1,000, is now prosecuted by a Finnish court — the murder of Hertzenstein took place in Finland — as an accomplice to the murder and as the paymaster for it; and his accomplice Kraskovsky has already been arrested a few days ago in Russia. These are the men whom the Tsar describes as his only loyal subjects.

The prisons are overcrowded. Typhus — hunger typhus, eruptive and recurrent typhus — ravages the prisons of thirty-five provinces, and there from spreads amongst the soldiers of the garrison and the warders in the cities. In the Lukoyanoff prison, 2,500 prisoners have already died from typhus, 1,300 in the main Kieff prison, and so on all over Russia. These are the official figures. Persons ill with typhus, with wandering minds, and a temperature of 104 degrees, are brought to court — there were three such cases — and the jurors are compelled to refuse to act, and the president of the court-martial says to the prosecutor: "But look yourself at the man; you will see he cannot be tried!"

Worse than that. Men wandering in mind from typhus are brought to the scaffold in that state and hanged, under the very windows of one of the Duma Deputies detained at Moscow, who has described it in full in a letter to the Duma. As to the scenes that take place at the executions, of which they need such a number to maintain their scandalous rule — and for which they hire assassins in the prisons — these scenes are so horrible that I will not describe them. Tolstoi has told some of them to the world. Have these horrors been stopped by M. Stolypin or his master ? No! They continue! They have grown worse!

Friends, it is with a bleeding heart that I describe to you these horrors. They are not mere horrors for me. They tell me the tale of how low Russia has sunk to tolerate them — to find men to give them support. But I will ask you, Has ever anything worse happened in Turkey while it was under the rule of that man whom Gladstone had the courage to call in the eyes of Europe, "the Assassin"?

Turkey has shaken off the rule of the assassin. That will be done in Russia as well.

It certainly will. It is a fact that Russia is no more what it was before the movement of 1905-6. You will not find now at St. Petersburg 70,000 men willing to go to the Tsar with a petition, carrying his portrait and ikons, as they did on Bloody Sunday, when for a whole week before it everything was organized, with the full knowledge of Nicholas II., by his uncle and cousins, to massacre thousands of these much too confiding men. Now you will not find, even in the remotest villages, men so simple as to trust the Tsar.

That has been won by our martyrs.

A new Russia has been born during these three or four years, a Russia which has tasted liberty and will never more return under the old yoke. It looks very quiet now; but it is no more in the circles of the intellectuals, it is in the factories, it is especially in the villages amidst the peasants, that the spirit of revolt is growing. That spirit they will not kill by hangings and shootings. By the blood they make flow, they only prepare rivers of blood; and surely the day is not far off when not only the "loyal" subjects from Dubrovin's gangs, but all those who are supporting the present regime by their slavish attitude or indifference, will have to repent their present slavishness or their indifference.
*Part of a speech delivered June 23rd at the South Place Institute at a meeting of welcome to Vera Figner. Reprinted from the London Freedom.
* * *

SOCIALISTS AND POLITICS

By H. KELLY.

IF man were not so divinely inconsistent, the world would be a dull and uninteresting place to live in; which is an excellent reason why we should extol consistency.

Socialists all over the world advocate the "conquest of political power" as the one and only method of destroying capitalism and the inauguration of the Cooperative Commonwealth. It is true Socialists differ in their methods of electioneering, some indulging in phrases sweet to the ear, as "voting a means of gauging their strength," "serving notice on the capitalist," and so on, to differentiate them from their — to them — less revolutionary brethren; but as the needle turns to the pole, so do all Marxian's in the end turn to the "conquest of political power" by parliamentary methods. And here let us say that by "political" methods the Socialists really mean parliamentary methods. Acts of regicide, General Strike, or armed uprising may be, and usually are, political in character, but they are decidedly not parliamentary. It may safely be assumed that not more than one per cent, of the Socialists mean anything but electioneering when they speak of the conquest of political power, as a visit to their meetings or perusal of their publications will prove.

The strength of the Socialist movement is computed at eleven million, which means that in countries where there is full or partial suffrage eleven million adults voted for Socialist candidates for office. With this in mind, we are sometimes amused, but more often impatient, at their fulminations against the inevitable result of their tactics, the case of N. Briand being the latest in point.

The advent of N. Briand, former revolutionary Socialist and anti-militarist, to the place of Prime Minister of France is not surprising and should not give rise to congratulation or condemnation. It was the natural and logical conclusion of a policy and that thing the Socialists dilate on so strongly — environment. It is true, M. Lepine, Prefect of Police of Paris, will still continue to suppress, wherever possible, revolutionary demonstrations; anti-militarists will be condemned by "Comrade" Briand as by his capitalistic predecessors; private plunder protected with due diligence; in short, things will continue precisely as they did under the "red republican" and former revolutionist M. Clemenceau. Why? The answer is obvious. France is still a prey to the fetich of property, church, government, patriotism, and other superstitions, and M. Briand accepts office with the tacit, if not outspoken, recognition of this fact and an informal promise to his employers not to run counter to them. In this respect he is no different from any man elected or appointed to office. While a member of the Combes Cabinet, Clemenceau brought a storm of censure upon his head for temporizing with strikers and marching under the red flag. He did temporize with them, and if his previous struggles for liberty count for anything in our estimation of his character, he was doubtlessly quite sincere in his promises to try and remedy the strikers' grievances. The strikers had been tricked so often they declined to accept his promises. Thus he was face to face with two problems, resign from office or call out the troops to crush them. He chose the latter, with results well known. It was the same with Millerand, when he ordered out troops to suppress strikers, and we assume he will act the same as a member of Briand's Cabinet as of Wedlock-Rousseau's. The same with John Burns in his attack on the unemployed. When a man is elected or appointed to a governmental office, his position is analogous to the man hired by a private capitalist. His business is to look after the interests of his employer. The Socialists see this quite clearly as long as it relates merely to what may be defined as a cabinet of a capitalistic government; but they cannot see it from any other angle. If a Socialist were elected governor of New York State in November he would be expected to obey the laws; if he did not, he would be impeached. If called on for troops to suppress strikers, he would be compelled to furnish them or prove they were not needed. It's true, Altgeld refused to call out troops in the Pullman strike, but his reasons were those of any honest man, a believer in capitalism. That is, they were not needed because the strikers were not committing acts of violence. The action of Briand, Viviani, and Millerand in entering a "Republican Cabinet" is no more and no less inconsistent than any Socialist Mayor in France — there are a number of them — who is at present defending capitalistic interests by enforcing capitalistic laws on behalf of property and sending people to jail for disobeying those laws. Parliamentarians are aware that Socialism will never hinge on one bill in Congress or the Legislature; and until such time as they would be in full power, and able and willing to change the laws they found on the statute books, they would be supposed to enforce them. If a Socialist were elected Mayor of New York it would be his duty to jail (through his Commissioner of Police) hungry women who stole bread, and strikers who "slugged" "scabs" for taking their jobs; and in this respect he would be no worse than those who enter a "capitalistic cabinet." Life is a compromise, true enough; but if a modicum of purity and self-respect is to be maintained, politics must be eschewed. It is as certain as anything can be that the Socialists now denouncing Briand — and rightly so — as a traitor, for cooperating with capitalists in the formation of a Republican cabinet, will at the next election make promises equally dishonest because equally impossible of realization. It may be honest and to the best interests of Socialism to flirt with Prohibition and restriction of immigration; but in the light of the Communist Manifesto they make strange bed-fellows, and we have no doubt many a Socialist will have to wrestle with his conscience before swallowing the platform, adopted by the last Socialist convention. Our own opinion of platforms was voiced by Horace Greely, who said: "Platforms were made to spit on."

ANARCHISM AND MALTHUS

By C. L. JAMES.

(Concluded)

REFUTATIONS continue to rain, however. Of these criticisms which show only the writer's limited acquaintance with his subject (and they are the immense majority) it is unnecessary to say more. There are, however, two kinds not uncommonly heard from persons who know what they are talking about. One disputes the validity of the geometric and arithmetical ratios.[1] A sufficient reply was given by Mill. The increase of unchecked population is geometrical. That of food may be more than arithmetical. But what is the use of talking about increase of food when geometrical increase of population, if it did not bring back the Positive Check in other ways, as, of course, it would, must soon restore that Check in the inexorable form of crowding? The other criticism, much more practical, is perhaps intended only as a criticism, not a refutation; but if this be meant the critic sought to say so, — first, in order to clear themselves of identification with the Sadlers, Godwins, Coleridges, De Quinceys, Georges, and others whose refuted refutations ring hollow down the corridors of time; secondly, that they may avoid exercising a pernicious influence upon readers less informed than themselves. The criticism is based on the obvious fact that since Malthus wrote, wealth, at least in England, has increased much faster than population — a fact from whose significance the one word emigration takes a great deal — but here become possible suggestions which make this criticism a phase of the others — we do not know what intenser cultivation may effect — the actual habits of mankind are not such as to bring in the Positive Check, etc., etc." Speak unto us smooth things; prophesy unto us deceits!" We do know that intenser cultivation will never banish need for the Prudential Check: and the habits of mankind are such as to invite the Positive when they are such as to invite wars for a harbor or a diamond mine every few years. I am sorry to say that Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops, contains passages which are adapted (I cannot believe intended) to encourage in careless readers the loose idea that "everything is lovely" except certain human institutions (which, saving only the subjection of women, are not causes but effects).

To conclude the story of Malthus. One of the lies is that he had thirteen children! He had three, of whom only two survived him. His wife came from a part of England which he is known to have visited many years before. It is probable there was a long engagement. Malthus certainly was a good deal older at marriage than the average. His life and teachings appear, therefore, to have been entirely consistent. Among the many attempts to refute him one was by suggesting that man in his developed state might be above the desire of sex, and that the need for propagation might be superseded by terrestrial immortality! Malthus treated this fully as respectfully as it deserved. He said that, while bondage to the desire was a potent source of vice and misery, the desire itself was a principal source of the moral virtues and of happiness, with which it would be by no means desirable, if it were credible, that mankind in general should dispense. The effect of these discussions on Godwin's active imagination may be seen on comparing his famous novels. Caleb Williams (1794) gives no hint of anything supernatural. It is a powerful arraignment of "Things As They Are." In St. Leon (1832) the hero attains terrestrial immortality, and, like the Wandering Jew, finds it the greatest of all imaginable curses; but, pervading the story is the sub thought of Godwin's invincible Optimism — a Salathiel, a St. Leon, would not be miserable in a world where all the people were immortal. The time which Godwin chose for his attempt at refuting Malthus is also significant — it was in 1820, when Ricardo was deducing from the Malthusian theory corollaries whose legitimacy no one then seems to have disputed except Malthus himself. Malthus died, from disease of the heart, in 1834, the sixty-eighth year of his age. Godwin followed on the 7th of April, 1836. Of the two, Malthus had best maintained his philosophic dignity. The Anarchist Godwin stooped to accept a sinecure office from the Liberal administration of Earl Grey. Malthus declined the tardy favor offered by government to him. "In their death," says the best biographer of Malthus, "they were still divided; but, si quis piorumanimis locus, they are divided no longer, and think hard thoughts of each other no more."

Before the eyes of both there was growing up a power unobserved of either, but predestined to solve their problem. Commerce could never cheapen itself out of existence while population, varying with cheapness of food, kept up the struggle for existence: nor, though commerce which cannot do that teaches solidarity, could it prevent recurrence of those crises when "the eyeless I howls in darkness." But increase of the Prudential Check on population has always kept up with, or rather it has gone before and been the source of, economic progress. Its increase has depended on that of hope, this on increase of liberty, increase of liberty on those "accidents" by which Providence has from time to time interfered to give men intent on enslaving each other and themselves another call to reflection. If, then, there be a tendency in the bourgeois system which brings liberty and hope to women; from that we really may expect revolutionary changes. For the female is the less amorous sex. The last proposition, which certainly does sound rather like a stock assertion, may have been unknown to both Godwin and Malthus. But no reader of Darwin can help knowing that it has been demonstrated by exhaustive application to every animal species and been found the clue to progress through heredity. Women have never chosen to breed food for gun powder. They have submitted to do so only because they could not help themselves. Now there is in the bourgeois system a tendency which, by bringing liberty and hope to women, promises far more energetic restraint on propagation than the world has ever known, — a tendency which capitalists view with indifference; reactionaries, and Socialists, not infrequently, with alarm; judicious friends of humanity, with unmixed satisfaction. The wages paid directly to women in the factories first afforded to proletarian women, unprotected by settlements and other contrivances of the rich, a means to live which was not easily taken from them. True to the maxim that it is not misery but hope which works improvement, they, who till now had been well enough content not to own themselves, became refractory the moment the had something to lose. The entire modern movement for the property rights of married women, equality of pay with men for all working women, opening of all the trades to women, political equality of the sexes, easy divorce, began with employment of women as bread-winners, which came in as a necessity of the bourgeois situation. That complete emancipation of women, defect in food for gunpowder, cessation of war, the down-fall of those appliances for plunder which war created, are all threatened by this movement, there can be no occasion for me to prove. Mr. Roosevelt will show you that — and afterwards gnash his teeth.

The Malthusian Theory is the fatal objection to every form of Socialism, even if called Anarchism, which encourages man to think that he can enslave women and escape the most righteous retribution of being a slave him-self. It is the strongest possible argument for that kind of Socialism or Anarchism which proposes, through complete emancipation of women, to abolish the fundamental tyranny from whence all others spring.

*To illustrate again the facility with which these things may be misunderstood, dependent on the complexity of that relation which some try to evade by calling it a truism — I have said here, in the name of Malthus, too, that what enables a high rate of propagation to go on is increase of the death-rate. But the death-rate, from all causes and in all places of statistical census taken together, has decreased notably since we began to have reliable returns (which is only since about 17o0 A. D.); and what little we know about earlier times indicates that the death-rate has always decreased, on the whole, since men emerged from the grazing state of savagery, where the average duration of life is said to be only thirteen years. How do these statements agree? Simply enough. Who said propagation had gone on un slackened? The reasoning of Malthus, and mine, has all been to the effect that the Prudential Check has gained on the Positive almost continuously since men emerged from utter barbarism, except where increased facility of living has, for a time, caused it to be neglected. Wherever that happens — as when a prairie changes into a Chicago — we may see that the death rate does increase as soon as that facility of living which relaxed the Prudential Check encourages propagation sufficiently to recall the Positive.

* * *

OUR FIGHT

By E. G.

OF all the forces that help to enslave man, that of habit is the most pernicious. Not a superstition or prejudice ran compare in its binding and fettering influence on human action with the power of habit.

Take, for instance, the police of New York or other cities. For years they have practiced the habit of stop-ping meetings, clubbing audiences, bullying speakers and hall keepers. Had they met with any real opposition, interference might never have become a habit.

After all, the police are not interested in whatever a speaker may say; nor is their official zeal so very intense that they would go out of their way to annoy people. It is simply the habit of annoying or interference, that's all.

It is also the force of habit that will make the people submit, meekly, to police bullying.

The public has endured arbitrary, brutal treatment so long, until it has gotten quite used to it. The inevitable result is that the police invade the people's rights, sup-press free speech, act brutally, because of the same reason that makes the public cringe and bow and submit; namely, the force of habit.

Sometimes, however, two habits may clash and then it will depend on the strength of either as to who shall remain the victor.

The habit of rebellion, for instance, has overcome the most deeply rooted habit of submission. True, there are not many with whom rebellion becomes a habit. Most people are inspired by the moment and then slink back into the old indifferent state. But there are a few whose very blood nurtures rebellion into a habit; and though they meet with a thousand obstacles, they will continue to rebel, even if their lives were at stake. Such must have been the force that gave birth to the Free Speech Committee. If it were not for the habit of rebellion, the men and women who formed themselves into that fighting body could never have undertaken such a task. First, there was the time-worn habit of the police to grow violently mad at the "red sounding" term of Anarchism and Emma Goldman.

Second, there was the habit of inconsistency on the part of many radicals, who stand for free speech, with a "but" dangling at free speech.

Third, the Committee realized that the interest in principles is not so great as to induce many people to part with some of their worldly goods; yet money was needed. But, habit came along and cried, Onward. What else was there to do but heed?

On May 23rd the police habit of interference reached its culminating point in the breaking up of a literary meeting, the forcible eviction of an audience, and the impudent police declaration that Emma Goldman will never again be allowed to speak in New York.

Two months later Emma Goldman, did speak in a public meeting, and what is more, not a single uniformed officer was present.

How wonderful! Nothing so very wonderful, except the clash of habits in open battle with the habit of rebellion carrying off the victory.

No doubt, the change in the police department of New York City may have had something to do with the new methods of the police. New York is too cosmopolitan and advanced a city to stand for a military regime. Bingham, while a tin soldier, was nevertheless possessed by the military spirit. What he could not suppress with iron methods, he would make impossible with lies and meanness. The new Commissioner probably has more brains, is therefore amenable to reason. At any rate, we welcome the change. But it is not that alone that has helped to disperse the cloud of despotism that made every Anarchist public utterance in New York impossible.

The credit is due chiefly to the strenuous efforts of the Free Speech Committee.

The demand for free speech, signed by a hundred public-spirited men and women and circulated all over the country, worked like magic.

The protest meeting at Cooper Union aroused a great deal of enthusiasm, while the broad-minded attitude of the Chicago Public and the St. Louis Mirror contributed towards the enlightenment of some "good" people as to the real status of free speech. But most of all it was the unceasing energy of a few optimistic spirits who persevered in exercising "hypnotic influence" on police headquarters.

Thus it came to pass that free speech could be re-established in New York City, partially at least, and that Newark, Jersey City, and Brooklyn have also been rescued from the habit of police invasion.

All this, however, should lead no one astray. So long as free speech must go knocking at the doors of every chief or captain, it is nowhere at home and there fore never safe.

The Free Speech Committee realizes this; it is there-fore determined to continue in its habit of opposition to invasion until free speech can assert itself without special privileges.

There are scores of cities in America where free speech has been thrown upon the dust-heap. The Free Speech Committee means to carry its fight into these benighted towns. Philadelphia, Providence, Worcester, Buffalo, Chicago, Indianapolis are to be treated to a dose of the rebellious habit until free speech becomes a reality.

Ours is a material world, and while the spirit is one of the greatest assets for a good fight, material aid is needed. If the readers of MOTHER EARTH, too, have the habit of rebellion, they will feel impelled to send part of it in the form of a check to our valued Chairman, Leonard Abbott, 41 W. 25th Street, New York City.

The habit of being a target for the police is quite strong with me. I do not mind it a bit, as they are poor shots, and therefore can inflict no vital wound.

I shall therefore go right on to every place in the land and leave it only when I have established free speech as a right, and not as a privilege.

FRANSISCO FERRER

Charles E. Hooper.

Still groans Prometheus bound, and still descends,
From yon man-fashioned Phantom of the skies,
The triple-headed bird of prey that blends
Warfare with greed and sacerdotal lies.

Soldiers of Truth, they death-drops we salute;
In them Humanity is heart renewed;
Dried be the tear, the rising curse be mute;
In blood lies Liberty's beatitude.

But what of Spain—priest-trampled Spain? Who knows
To-morrow's doom of infamy or fame?
At least in they loved country still live those
Who burn to spread they martyred spirit's flame.

"Long lie the Modern School"—They message, flung
Straight to the murderous muzzles ere they sped
Destruction to a brain too finely strung,
Re-echoed, links the living to the dead;

The living, not in guilty Spain alone,
But wheresoever men have eyes to see
And hearts to feel: There, ready, stands the throne,
Reared by Light-yielding labors like thine own,
That waits thy spirit's King, the World-community.

--London Literary Guide.

OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS

THE whole history of the Catholic Church has been An uninterrupted orgy of violence and crime, persecution and murder. The vicars of the meek Carpenter who taught "Love thine enemies" have ever preached his gospel with rack and thumbscrem. Fire and sword were their good Christian weapons. Darkness and ignorance their supreme opportunity. The terrible result is all too evident in countries ruled by the Church. Ignorance and poverty are most frightful in proportion To Catholic influence. Spain is its stronghold. Fearfully The black beast of Rome guards her ancient domain. She trembles at the approach of light. Justly she sees in the torch of science the threatened destruction of her tyrannical power. The Educator is her most feared enemy.

In the present, as in the past, the Church dreads nothing more than ideas,--ideas of liberty, of light and justice. Their touch-bearers are blasphemers, heretics. They must die, for the greater glory of the Church and The continued reign of superstition and darkness.

Thus Ferrer had to die. Nay, more. He had to expiate a double heresy, for he blasphemed both Church and State. Too wide his view to be confined to the peril of priestcraft. Too clear his sight not to realize the blight of authority, civil no less than religious, that holds mankind in bondage. Full well he knew that in the lexicon of the State Liberty has no more lace than Light in that of the Church. Against both these powers of darkness Francisco Ferrer was a mighty protestant. He opposed to their pernicious, enslaving activity the most efficacious method: the enlightenment of the child. He knew that an enslaved child meant a free man. But this great crime neither Church nor State could forgive. The black Shylocks demanded their pound of flesh. A servile government readily acquiesced, and thus the noblest, truest friend of mankind was assassinated.

* * *

SELDOM has the solidarity of governments beenmore convincingly demonstrated than by the Ferrer case. Governments often deem it necessary to make hostile demonstrations against each other. Usually it is the stronger taking advantage of the weaker power, for thebenefit of home capitalists, or to divert popular discontent into artificial channels, this fanning the fires of jingoism, so conducive to the interests of despotism.

But in the Ferrer case the various States have given a remarkable proof of solidarity. No European government found a single work of censure for the farcical trail and atrocious murder at Montjuich. And our own government, forever pretending to be truly representative, -- why has it ignored popular indignation at Ferrer's assassination? Why does it remain mute in the face of the world-wide protest? Neither Federal nor State government dared to utter a word in condemnation of the foulest deed of the twentieth century.

The powers at Washington never lose time in espressing, unauthorized, "the sympathy of the American people" for some royal idiot overtaken by the hand of an avenging Nemesis. This has been repeatedly done within recent years, without the knowledge or consent of the people; in fact, contrary to their desires and expressed sentiment, and in direct defiance of the American tradition abhorring and tyranny of the Old World despotisms. Why, then, is Washington mute at the outrage committed in Spain? If it may without authorization express the alleged sympathy of the American people for a dead tyrant, may it not voice the expressed indignation of the people at the wrong done to humanity? If the authorities, State and Federal, had possessed the faintest spark of manhood, they should have first expressed to the people of Spain and the orphans of Ferrer the sympathy of the American public and its abhorrence of the assassination. They the official representatives in America of the Catholic Church and Spanish government should have been notified that the American people could not tolerate in their midst the official presence of assassins' agents.

Such should have been the attitude of a government having even the faintest pretentions to being representa- tive of the nation. But such pretentions are the veriest hypocrisy. Goverments represent nothing but chicanery, fraud, and the violence of the few toward the many. The very essence of governments is suppression and mer- der. Their mission is to defend and preserve existing conditions of injustice, oppression, and tyranny—and this is why all governments are solidaric.

* * *

LET no one deceive himself with the belief that the dastardly crime of Montjuich would not be possible in these United States.

It may seem like a far cry from American to Spain. And yet the comparison is justified. Indeed, this country has but scant reason to point the finger of scorn at benighted Spain, in the fond belief that we are more civilized, more progressive.

If the possibility of a Ferrer outrage may serve as a criterion of the people's place in the ethical progress of the world, then the "land of the free and the home of the brave" properly belongs in the utmost rear of the march.

Just twenty-two years ago a tragedy was enacted upon the stage of American life which, for brutality and monstrous malignity, far overshadows the terrible hapenings in Spain. Eight of the noblest of men were torn from the midst of their friends and condemned to death under circumstances closely resembling the martyrdom of Ferrer. As in the case of the Spanish educator, the only crime of our Chicago comrades consisted in their loyal service to humanity. They had raised their voices in protest against social injustice and devoted their lived to the enlightenment of their fellow-men. This was the most unpardonable crime man could be guilty of—in Spain as in America,--a crime punishable with death.

The circumstances surrounding the trail of our Chicago martyrs were also peculiarly like those of Ferrer's. Perjury and false evidence were resorted to by an American court to accomplish the fiendish plot against the men Accused of complicity in the Haymarket bomb incident. Not a shred of evidence could be proved by Governor AltGeld, who liberated the three imprisoned Anarchists. But lack of evidence could be no obstacle to the infamous cabal of authority and privilege: in spite of their proved innocence five men were judicially slaughtered.

If anything, the Chicago court was more brutal, more atrocious than that of Spain. The latter at least has the excuse—pitiable as it is—of an actual condition of martial law. Nothing of the kind existed in Chicago, in 1887. Our comrades were tried, not by a court marital, like Ferrer, but by a civil tribunal which decreed the slaying of the Anarchists by resorting to every conceivable perfidy within the range of judicial authority.

* * *

TO those who still cling to the ragged edges of American liberty, the latest governmental outrages should furnish sufficient proof that liberty is no more.

The President of a "free" people, embraces the tyrant of Mexico, whose dark and criminal deeds surpass eve those of the Russian autocracy. The government of a "free" country lends itself as hangman of the personal rights and liberties of people whose only offence consists in daring to oppose the despotic régime of the Mexican Tsar. At the latter's request De Lara, a cultured Mexican residing at Los Angeles, has been arrested, Refused a trail, and is about to be turned over to the Tender mercies of the Weyler of Mexico.

In our own city, a brilliant writer and cartoonist, Carlo De Fornaro, well known in artistic circles, has been convicted of criminal libel, because be, too, had dared to raise his voice in behalf of his outraged country. In the work, "Diaz, Tsar of Mexico," Fornaro boldly tore the mask off the hypocritical face of Perfidious Diaz, that the world might see him as he is.

The portrait drawn by the pen of this gifted artist Was the writing on the wall which evidently disturbed the slumbers of the Mexican oppressor. Criticism and the truth are ever a menace to tyranny. The Mexican government had successfully suppressed free expression in its own country and has now went its representative to accomplish the same result in America. That Diaz could fully rely on his colleagues in Washington to do his bidding is best proved by the outrageous action of the jury which found Fornaro guilty of libeling —Diaz. As if the English tongue is rich enough in strong expressions to libel a Diaz.

The thinking element of the West has awakened to the danger of Mexican rule in America, inasmuch as they have inaugurated a tremendous agitation in behalf of De Lara. Shall we in the East not follow their commendable example? A strong vigorous movement should immediately be started in behalf of Fornaro, in behalf of free speech. It behooves us to lend our assistance in freeing Mexico, for the time is not far when we shall need the assistance of Mexico to free us.

* * *

THE killing of Prince Ito by a Korean patriot Marks an important step in the awakening of that unfortunate country. The birth of the individual revolutionist historically precedes national revolt. And surely Korea has sufficient cause to rejoice over the deed of her son, more courageous than his brothers. For Ito, as Resident General of Korea, proved a veritable demon in the ferocious suppression of every aspiration of the Koreans for national independence and well-being. His administration reduced that country to the last extreme slavery. The shot that laid Ito low was but the echo of a people's desperate cry For relief.

* * *

IT is no exaggeration to say that Samuel Gompers is The most perniciously reactionary factor in the American labor movement. It is he, chiefly, who is responsible for the present pitiful, helpless condition of the organized workingmen of this country. His whole official life has been devoted to instilling the belief that the true solution of the labor question is to be found in the "closer approach of capital and labor." He has preached the gospel of harmony between master and slave till the workers have grown to look upon the exploiting parasites as their true benefactors. His craft union methods and tactics have encouraged internal strife and robbed the workers of their initiative and independence. They have been persistently drilled to rely on the authority of their leaders—in and out of the union—and their minds poisoned and their energy paralyzed by the sanctity of contracts. Self-help and direct economic action have been tabooed, legal justice eulogized, and the courts apotheosized till labor has become emasculated of all manhood.

Not content with having degraded and debauched American labor, Gompers undertook to carry his pernicious gospel to the workers of Europe. On his recent trip abroad he exhausted the colors of the rainbow in painting the prosperity an power of the American workingmen. He was inexpressibly shocked by the miserable condition of the wage slaves of the Old World; he severely [criticized] their ineffective methods of fighting the encroachments of capital, contrasting them with the enlightened and successful tactics of the "world's most powerful labor body," the A. F. of L.

Having thus satisfactorily—to himself, chiefly—accomplished this mission, Gompers set sail for American, the Eldorado of labor.

But oh, the ironly of fate! The last strains of his Swan-like song has scarcely left his lips, when the electric wire flashed the news to Gompers that the Court of Appeals had ordered him to be thrown into prison! It has confirmed the judgment of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, declaring— in essence—that American labor had no rights as against capital, and no standing in the courts of law. Did Gompers, the head of the "world's most powerful Labor body," indignantly protest against this infamous Judicial raping of his organization? Not he. He is too Loyal a slave to rebel against sacred decisions of the august Judiciary. In the last issue of the American Federationist Gompers servilely proclaims his unshaken faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and calls upon the faithful to—appeal to the higher court.

Sancta Simplicitas, if not worse. Has Gompers the courage to call upon American labor to proclaim a General Strike as a protest against the court's decision, . . . . but, then, neither Gompers nor his organization has the courage of virile manhood.

* * *

FOR years New York and Brooklyn have been police-ridden cities. So much so that one was not quite safe from them in his own home. As to outrages on fundamental principles, that was an open daily exercise of the police.

Since the removal of the military police Commissioner Bingham, his successor has tried to rescue free speech, at least, from the clutches of his subordinates, and especially to free hallkeepers from the police reign of terror.

Like all reforms, the efforts of our new Commissioner have succeeded in relieving the agony, but not in curing the disease. There are still numerous precincts where captains reign supreme, bullying hall owners and preventing the holding of meetings.

One of there heroes, Captain Shaw, has just been removed to Brooklyn, where he continues his old tactics practiced for many years in New York.

A meeting of Comrade Goldman was stopped November 5th in the habitual sneaky way: intimidation of the hallkeeper. When Captain Shaw was confronted by the order of his superior to keep hands off the meeting, the brave knight lied himself our of the difficultly, throwing the blame on the lights in the hall, which had suddenly refused to burn. Our friends procured from the Commissioner permission to hold an open air meeting, at which they addressed—during an hour and a half—an audience of three thousand people attracted by the police closing the hall.

The meeting was unusually quiet and orderly, which did not seem to please the Brooklyn police. Suddenly a sergeant appeared on the scene, roughly demanding our permit. When Comrade Reitman did not comply quick enough with the demand, he was placed under arrest. The following morning he was fined five dollars for the terrible offence of having told the policeman that it was none of his business whether we had a permit. Not a policeman's business to meddle in the free exercise of a right? No this business to break up a peaceful meeting? That was, indeed, a crime.

The comic side of the affair was furnished by His Majesty, Capt. Shaw. He appeared before the Judge to swear out a warrant for Comrade Emma Goldman, who, he said, had called him a grafter and had attacked the Catholic Church. Even a Brooklyn judge could see the humor of the situation. He would not issue the warrant, but went out of his way to tell our comrade that he knew her theories stood for kindness. It is to be regretted, however that the Judge doesn't know enough of them to practice kindness in the courts. The brutality and coarseness of the officers that morning were the most disgraceful scene we have witnessed in a long time.

* * *

THE industrial Workers of the World of Spokane, Wash., are setting a splendid example of fighting the enemies of speech. The local authorities had suddenly decided to stop the I. W. W. open-air meetings. Our Spokane comrades have been carrying on an energetic propaganda, striking at the very vitals on Mammon by their fearless denunciation of the employment sharks—the modern eunuchs of capitalism. Hence the attempt to throttle free speech.

But our friends were not to be so easily daunted. They insisted on their rights. They were not naïve enough to believe that anything would be "granted" them. They had the courage to demand and take their rights, by continuing to hold open-air meetings, police orders to the contrary notwithstanding. The energy and determination of the brave fighters resulted in numerous arrests: Comrade Elisabeth Gurley Flynn and two other I. W. W. organizers, as well as the editors of the Industrial Worker and the secretary of the Central Committee of the I. W. W. unions, were Thrown into jail. But prison and threats of bodily injury could not discourage these devoted men and Women. No sooner was one speaker dragged off the platform than another took his place. Scores of fighters stood ready to assert their right of free speech, so that the Spokane prison is now overfilled, and plenty of comrades are on hand to continue the fight.

That these methods of establishing our rights are the proper ones has already been proved by Comrade Flynn and others at Missoula, Mont. There the number of I. W. W. people willing and ready to go to prison for free speech so overtaxed the town jail's capacity that the authorities were forced to cry for mercy. They feared the town would go into bankruptcy if our comrades persisted in becoming the city's free boarders. Thus freedom of speech was established in Missoula. Thus also—and thus alone—will it have to be established everywhere.

* * *

THE case of Comrades Schreiber and Adams, now before the Supreme Court of New Jersey, has again demonstrated to what depths government will stoop in its persecution of Anarchists.

Schreiber and Adams were convicted last June in The Trenton court of "conspiracy to rob" (no robbery had taken place), on the exclusive testimony of a certain New York police spy and his assistants. The evidence against them was so flimsy, the trial such a farce, that the Machinist Union (of which Schreiber was a most active member) took up the matter, raised funds and appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

The arguments of counsel before the latter body are sufficient to convince even a prejudiced mind that the verdict of guilty against Schreiber and Adam was the direct result of police conspirators seeking promotion. Of course, the underlying reason for the prosecution was the circumstance of the prisoners' being Anarchists.

Our experience with authority has been of a character to exclude surprise at any atrocity government might commit. But that workingmen, strikers at that, should lend themselves the willing tools of a police outrage, is very sad indeed. We blush for American labor to acknowledge that the jury which condemned Schreiber and Adams consisted almost exclusively of striking hatters.

* * *

WE hail the resurrection of the Firebrand, the fort-nightly Anarchist review published and edited by Ross Winn. In these days of general apathy and ever-growing encroachment of despotism every additional champion of Liberty is a valuable aid in the service of humanity. Comrade Winn is especially fitted for the task: he is a born fighter, with a clear, broad outlook, and a sharp and fearless pen. The trumpet calls, the need is great—Welcome, Comrade!

Those wishing to subscribe for the Firebrand may Address Ross Winn, Mt. Juliet, Tenn., or the office of

MOTHER EARTH.

LADY

By W. C. OWEN.

Fast and faster the dancers fly;
Gaily my lady flashes by;
Bright on her bosom jewels gleam;
While in the depths, 'mid heat and steam,
Where gases creep and stones fly thick,
The diamond digger swings his pick —
But who wants to know
Of the depths below
Where labor is weaving
Its shroud of woe?
Bravely my lady sweeps along,
Greedily viewed by the envious throng;
The wealth of a world on her shoulders lies;
While, over the way, with weary eyes,
Stitch by stitch, through an endless day,
Her seamstress toils and receives as pay —
But a lady so fair
One should always spare
The tedious tale
Or a life of care.
The wine glows red in my lady's glass;
Many and merry the jests that pass;
Loving laughter and winning smile
Circle from lip to lip, the while
Clothed in rags, at her very gates,
Gaunt-eyed hunger in silence waits——
But sights like these
Would little please
My lady in her
Hours of ease.
Sweetly humble my lady's face
As she bends her knee at the throne of grace;
She thinks of the sin and sorrow and shame;
Thinks of the story of him who came
From the starry regions of infinite space
With a message of love to the human race,—
So my lady will give a charity fete
And wear a gown of the latest date.

* * *

OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS

THERE is, even among radicals, a certain bourgeois attitude of mind which scoffs at every suggestion of the people's power for solidaric effort, mutual help, and free coöperation. All such could profitably employ a leisure hour by studying the wonderful spirit of the striking shirt-waist makers.

In the face of tremendous odds, practically without organization, more than fifteen thousand workers have dared to defy their masters and have struck for better conditions. The loyalty, self-sacrifice, and perseverance manifested by the strikers—most of them in actual want—are nothing short of heroic. Exposed to the brutal persecution of the police and the "mercy" of prejudiced judges,—not to speak of the rigors of a severe winter, involving untold misery and suffering—the strikers have remained steadfast and loyal to a de-gree seldom paralleled in labor troubles. Practically no desertions have taken place from their ranks. Rare-ly have working men and women given such a convincing demonstration of conscious solidarity and sin-gleness of purpose.

This strike but gives one a glimpse into the grand possibilities of a people inspired by a common cause and the will to achieve.

* * *

THE devotion and energy of the strikers seemed, at the beginning of the strike, to promise a speedy victory. If their efforts have so far not proved as suc-cessful as expected, the cause is probably to be found in the manner the struggle has been conducted.

Various factors have no doubt contributed to the prolongation of the waist-makers' strike. But it must not be forgotten that the longer such a fight is drawn out, the less chance for the workingmen to win, since both their treasury and power of resistance are thus severely sapped. In the struggle between master and slave, the latter—to be successful—must strike quickly and, above all, as hard as possible. Those who are conducting the present strike have apparently ignored this most vital consideration.

Further, it is questionable whether the practice of settling with individual manufacturers (the employees of the latter resuming work) is really beneficial to the strike. Whatever benefit small groups of strikers may thus gain is more than offset by the opportunity afforded to the larger manufacturers to have their work done secretly in the "settled" shops. Again, the depletion of the ranks is a source of suspicion and distrust, and tends to minimize the importance of the strike. On the whole, the practice of gradual settling weakens rather than strengthens the cause at stake.

But still more serious is the failure of the strike leaders to demand the active coöperation of other labor bodies. That, apparently, was not considered as important as dilly-dallying with arbitration and wasting time currying favor with rich ladies whose leisure hangs heavy on their hands.

No attempt has been made to interest even the directly allied trades of the Garment Workers in a sympathetic General Strike. And yet such a step should have been suggested by all the experience of the past. In modern days of centralized industry and the thorough organization of capital, no strike of ordinary proportions, of a single branch of a great industry, has much chance of success. The standing army of Hunger, eager for the least crumb, and the uniformed army of police and military are both at the instant service of capital. In a test of mere financial endurance labor is necessarily the loser. Its sole hope lies in hitting quick and hard, but no single branch of any industry can deliver such a blow. It requires the combined strength of all the departments of any given industry.

But whatever the outcome of the present strike, the waist-makers, as well as the workers at large, are learning the urgent and valuable lesson of industrial organization and the General Strike.

* * *

THE comparative silence of the capitalist press in regard to the Spokane free speech fight is calculated to create the impression that the fight is over. Such, however, is by no means the case. In spite of the systematic police outrages, our Spokane comrades have not in the least abated their efforts; on the contrary, they are more than ever determined to continue the struggle till they conquer the right of free speech.

The local authorities have followed the conviction of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn* with another trump card. Realizing that the I. W. W. had a powerful weapon of publicity in their organ, the Industrial Worker, the police raided the I. W. W. headquarters, confiscating the whole issue as it came from the press, and destroying seven thousand copies. This was supplemented by the arrest of four men on the charge of selling the "libellous and incendiary" paper. But all these and similar outrages have failed to terrorize our friends. The Industrial Worker continues its appearance, being now issued at Seattle, Wash., fully prepared to wage war relentlessly and energetically, if the friends of free speech and an unmuzzled press will aid this great struggle, financially as well as morally.

* * *

THE Russian government has absolutely ignored the petition sent to Premier Stolypin by five hundred prominent Americans, asking a "fair trial" for Nicholas Tchaikovsky and Catharine Breshkovskaia. Almost two months have passed since the petition was sent, yet so far neither reply nor even an acknowledgment has been received. This attitude of the Russian government is not merely a direct slap in the face of the signers of the petition. It presages a sinister intention. Those familiar with the spirit of the Tsar's autocracy have good cause to fear the worst for the two noble veterans of the Russian Revolution.

*The money (3o.oo) collected at several E. G. lectures for Comrade Flynn has been forwarded directly to the latter, who is at present out on bail pending the appeal of her case.

The similarity between Russia and Spain has been repeatedly pointed out in these pages. In the brutal stifling of every popular aspiration towards liberty, in the fiendishness of political suppression and religious intolerance, and—above all—in the defiance of all sense of fair play toward political prisoners, Russia is synonymous with Spain. The hasty assassination of Ferrer was dictated by the fear of a potential world protest. Russia may follow the example of Spain, if the voice of the civilized world does not make itself heard before it is too late.

* * *

THE frequent and terrible disasters in American coal mines, resulting in an inquiry begun in 1908, have finally brought to light information of a very striking character.

Statistics gathered by the Geological Survey show 2,061 miners killed and 4,800 injured in the coal mines in 1906, and 3,125 killed and 5,800 injured in 1907. The death rate for 1907 was 4.86 for every 1,000 men employed. The European coal producing countries show a death rate in mines of 1 in every 1,000 employed, and not more than 2. In other words, for every miner killed in European coal mines, from 2 to 4 are killed in the United States.

The natural question arises, Why is the death rate in American coal mines so much greater than in Europe? The question is vital if we bear in mind that—according to the conservative estimates of the government experts—more than 30,000 miners have been killed in the United States since 1889.

Some light on the question is thrown by the data for 1908. The public was aroused over the great mine disasters of 1906 and 1907. The general agitation which followed forced Congress to appropriate a large sum for the investigation of the causes of mine fatalities. Remarkable coincidence: the statistics for the year 1908 show a decided decrease in the number of deaths in the coal mines, as compared with those of the previous year: 2,450 in 1908, as against 3,125 in 1907— a decrease of 675.

Six hundred and seventy-five of the country's most useful men saved, within one year, from a terrible and premature death! That is a very great gain, indeed, due chiefly to the active popular protest against the wilful slaughter of miners through the insatiable greed and criminal negligence of the coal barons. The work of the experimental stations further proves beyond doubt that the majority of accidents could be avoided by improving the conditions of the mines, introducing safety appliances, and otherwise forcing the operators to a higher sense of responsibility toward the producers of the coal.

Europe has long since awakened to this necessity, hence the reduction in the death rate in their coal mines. Yet neither Europe nor America can make mining or similar work really safe as long as the principle of commercial competition makes things more valuable than human lives.

* * *

THE sporadic investigations into our reform and penal institutions all bear a striking similarity of refrain: cruelty to prisoners, overcrowded conditions, "irregularities" in the accounts.

The investigator's berth is rather a comfortable one, but when will the gullible public realize that such investigations are worse than wasted effort? The intelligent observer needs no "special inspectors" to discover to him the corruption and barbarity of our institutions. The prison is but the perfected copy of the latter, with all that such perfection implies. There is nothing more brutalizing than authority. The irresponsible sway of prison wardens merely accentuates this truth. Humanity and kindness are not to be expected in an environment the very atmosphere of which breathes violence and suppression. As to corruption and graft, these are the very life of our com-petitive system, with the penitentiary as its natural outlet. What concerns the overcrowded condition of our prisons, 'tis merely an evidence that crime is growing faster than we can build jails. Verily, the great increase of crime is no credit to our industrial system, with its wage slavery, unemployment, and starvation.

It is a very serious condition that confronts us. Superficial investigation of already well-known facts will avail nothing. More penitentiaries will not solve the problem. Our reformers will have to dig deeper to strike the root of graft, abuse, and crime, in and out of prison.

* * *

SADAKICHI HARTMANN, well known to our to readers, has managed somehow to publish a little magazine of his own, called The Stylus, devoted to art and self expression. The subscription price is rather high, i. e., $3.00, but the editor contends that there are so few people anyhow who are interested in art that those who are will gladly pay the admission. If you are interested, write for a sample copy to The Stylus Publishing Co., 122 East 25th street, Room 505, New York.

* * *

FRIENDS and Readers of MOTHER EARTH: We have heard of late a great deal of the wonderful wave of prosperity. We don't know whether it has yet reached you, but we at the office of MOTHER EARTH haven't noticed even a ripple of it.

As usual, we are placed before the alternative of either burying the magazine or invading the country, that is, going on a lecture tour. Feeling deeply with you and not wishing you to go to the expense of wearing mourning, the publisher of this magazine has decided to inflict herself on poor humanity.

Dates have already been arranged for Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburg, and St. Louis. The friends in other cities who are desirous of having Comrade Emma Goldman lecture will please communicate with M. E. (210 East I3th St., New York). All mail will be forwarded.

The work in behalf of free speech has not been in vain, after all. Two years ago our Comrade was forcibly dragged off the platform in Chicago; now she is to address a number of meetings in that city.

In Detroit she was stopped three years ago, and when arrangements for lectures were begun this time the local Chief of Police expressed his determination to follow the established precedent. However, persistency and the keeping of the free speech issue constantly before the public are having a salutary effect.

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC

By EMMA GOLDMAN.

OUR reformers have suddenly made a great discovery: the white slave traffic. The papers are full of these "unheard of conditions" in our midst, and the lawmakers are already planning a new set of laws to check the horror.

How is it that an institution, known almost to every child, should have been discovered so suddenly? How is it that this evil, known to all sociologists, should now be made such an important issue?

It is significant that whenever the public mind is to diverted from a great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency, gambling, saloons, etc. And what is the result of such crusades? Gambling is increasing, saloons are doing a lively business through back entrances, prostitution is at its height, and the system of pimps and cadets is but aggravated.

To assume that the recent investigation of the white slave traffic by George Kibbe Turner and others (and by the way, a very superficial investigation), has discovered anything new is, to say the least, very foolish. Prostitution was and is a widespread evil, yet mankind goes on its business, perfectly indifferent to the sufferings and distress of the victims of prostitution. As indifferent, indeed, as mankind has so far remained to our industrial system, or to economic prostitution.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested,—for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. The "righteous" cry against the white slave traffic is such a toy. It serves to amuse the people for a little while, and it will help to create a few more fat political jobs—parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives, etc.

What really is the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course: the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, "Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?"

Naturally, our reformers say nothing about this cause. George Kibbe Turner and all other scribblers know the cause well enough, but it doesn't pay to say anything about it. It is so much more profitable to play the Pharisee, to pretend an outraged morality, than to go to the bottom of things. Yet no less an authority than Dr. Sanger, the author of "The History of Prostitution,"** although not a radical, has this to say:

"A prolific cause of female depravity can be found in the several tables, showing the description of the employment pursued and the wages received by the women previous to their fall, and it will be a question for the political economist to decide how far mere business consideration should be an apology on the part of employers for a reduction in their rates of remuneration, and whether the savings of a small percentage on wages is not more than counterbalanced by the enormous amount of taxation enforced on the public at large to defray the expenses incurred on account of a system of vice, which is the direct result in many cases of insufficient compensation of honest labor."

The economic reason given for prostitution in the above quotation can be found in all works of any consequence dealing with the question. Nor is it necessary to seek information in books; one has but to observe every-day life to realize that there are thousands of girls working for two or three dollars a week, withering away in factories and shops, while life passes by in all its joy and glory, leaving them behind. What else are they to do? However, our present-day reformers would do well to look into Dr. Sanger's book. There they will find that out of 2,000 cases under his observation, but few came from the middle classes, from well-ordered conditions, or pleasant homes. By far the largest majority were working girls and working women. Some driven into prostitution through sheer want, others because of a cruel, wretched life at home, others again because of thwarted and crippled physical natures (which I will speak of again later on). Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of 2,000 cases 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guarantee for their safety and purity in the sanctity of marriage.

** It is a significant fact that Dr. Sanger's book has been excluded from the U. S. mails. Evidently the authorities are not anxious that the public be informed as to the true cause of prostitution.

The very last to cry out against prostitution is our "respectable" class, since it was that class that ushered in prostitution, from Moses to Trinity Church. Dr. H. Bloss, Dr. Alfred Blaschko, Dr. W. W. Sanger, and other eminent writers on this subject convincingly prove that prostitution originated with the so-called upper classes. I quote Dr. Sanger:

"Our most ancient and historical records are believed to be the books of Moses; according to them it must be admitted that prostitutes were common among the Jews, many centuries before Christ. Moses appears to have connived at the intercourse of Jewish young men with foreign prostitutes. He took an Ethiopian woman himself. Assyrian women, Moabites, Midianites, and other neighbors of the Jews established themselves as prostitutes in the land of Israel. Jephtha, the son of a prostitute, became none the less Chief of Israel." Moses evidently believed that therein lay the greatest safeguard for the daughters of his own people. We shall see presently that the Christians were not so considerate of their own daughters, since they did not employ foreigners for that purpose.

The history of the Christian Church will also serve as a history of prostitution, since the two always went hand in hand and furnished thereby great revenues for the Church.

Dr. Sanger cites the case of Pope Clement II., who issued a bull that all prostitutes were to pay a certain amount of their earnings, or that those living on prostitution were compelled to give half their income to the Church. Pope Sixtus IV. received 20,000 ducats from a single brothel, which, incidentally, he himself had built. Nor is it unknown that a great many cloisters and nunneries were in reality nothing else than brothels. In modern times the Church is a little more careful in that direction. At least, it does not openly demand tribute from prostitutes. It finds it much more profitable to go in for real estate, like Trinity Church, for instance, to rent out death traps at an exorbitant price to those who live off and on prostitution.

Much as I should like to, my space will not admit speaking of prostitution in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and during the Middle Ages. The conditions in the latter period are particularly interesting, inasmuch as prostitution was organized into guilds, presided over by a Brothel Queen. These guilds employed strikes as a medium of improving their condition and keeping a standard price. Certainly that is more practical a method than the one used by the modern wage slave in society.

Never, however, did prostitution reach its present depraved and criminal position, because at no time in past ages was prostitution persecuted and hounded as it is to-day, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, where Phariseeism is at its height, where each one is busy hiding the skeletons in his own home by pointing to the sore of the other fellow.

But I must not lose sight of the present issue, the white slave traffic. I have already spoken of the economic cause, but I think a cause much deeper and by far of greater importance is the complete ignorance on sex matters. It is a conceded fact that woman has been reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and people who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and thrown into prison. Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an easy prey to prostitution or any other form of a relationship which degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification.

It is due to this ignorance that the entire life and nature of the girl is thwarted and crippled. We have long ago taken it as a self-evident fact that the boy may follow the call of the wild, that is to say that the boy may, as soon as his sex nature asserts itself, satisfy that nature, but our moralists are scandalized at the very thought that the nature of a girl should assert itself. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it to many.

Having been looked upon as a mere sex-commodity, the woman's honor, decency, morality, and usefulness have become a part of her sex life. Thus society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good and noble in a human being. This double standard of morality has played no little part in the creation and perpetuation of prostitution. It involves the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which alleged "innocence," together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature, helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to avoid or prevent. This state of affairs finds a masterly portrayal in Zola's "Fecundity."

Girls, mere children, work in crowded, overheated rooms ten to twelve hours daily at a machine, which tends to keep them in a constant over-excited sex state. Many of these girls haven't any home or comforts of any kind; therefore the street or some place of cheap amusement is the only means of forgetting their daily routine. This naturally brings them into close proximity with the other sex. It is hard to say which of the two factors brings the girl's over-sexed condition to a climax, but it certainly is the most natural thing that a climax should follow. That is the first step toward prostitution. Nor is the girl to be held responsible for it. On the contrary, it is altogether the fault of society, the fault of our lack of understanding, of lack of appreciation of life in the making; especially is it the criminal fault of our moralists, who condemn a girl for all eternity because she has gone from "the path of virtue"; that is, because her first sex experience has taken place without the sanction of the Church or State.

The girl finds herself a complete outcast, with the doors of home and society closed in her face. Her entire training and tradition are such that the girl herself feels depraved and fallen, and therefore has no ground to stand upon, or any hold that will lift her up, instead of throwing her down. Thus society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

Much stress is laid on white slaves being imported into America. How would America ever retain her virtue if she didn't have Europe to help her out ? I will not deny that this may be the case in some instances, any more than I will deny that there are emissaries of Germany and other countries luring economic slaves into America, hut I absolutely deny that prostitution is recruited, to any appreciable extent, from Europe. It may be true that the majority of prostitutes of New York City are foreigners, but that is only because the majority of the population is foreign. The moment we go to any other American city, to Chicago or the middle West, we shall find that the number of foreign prostitutes is by far a minority.

Equally exaggerated is the belief that the majority of street girls in this city were engaged in this business before they came to America. Most of the girls speak excellent English, they are Americanized in habits and appearance,—a thing absolutely impossible unless they have lived in this country many years. That is, they were driven into prostitution by American conditions, by the thoroughly American custom for excessive display of finery and clothes, which, of course, necessitates money, money that can not be earned in shops or factories. The equanimity of the moralists is not disturbed by the respectable woman gratifying her clothesophobia by marrying for money; why are they so outraged if the poor girl sells herself for the same reason? The only difference lies in the amount received, and of course in the seal society either gives or withholds.

I am sure that no one will accuse me of nationalist tendencies. I am glad to say that I have developed out of that, as out of many other prejudices. If, therefore, I resent the statement that Jewish prostitutes are imported, it is not because of any Judaistic sympathies, but because of the fact inherent in the lives of these people. No one but the most superficial will claim that the Jewish girls migrate to strange lands unless they have some tie or relation that brings them there. The Jewish girl is not adventurous. Until recent years, she had never left home, not even so far as the next village or town, unless it were to visit some relative. Is it then credible that Jewish girls would leave their parents or families, travel thousands of miles to strange lands, through the influence and promises of strange forces? Go to any of the large incoming steamers and see for yourself if these girls do not come either with their parents, brothers, aunts, or other kinsfolk. There may be exceptions, of course, but to state that a large number of Jewish girls are imported for prostitution, or any other purpose, is simply not to know the Jewish psychology.

On the other hand, it speaks of very little business ability on the part of importers of the white slaves, if they assume that the girls from the peasant regions of Poland, Bohemia, or Hungary in their native peasant crude state and attire would make a profitable business investment. These poor ignorant girls, in their undeveloped state, with their shawls about their heads, look much too unattractive to even the most stupid man. It therefore follows that before they can be made fit for business, they, too, must be Americanized, which would require not merely a week or a month, but considerable time. They must at least learn the rudiments of English, but more than anything else they must learn American shrewdness, in order to protect themselves against the many uniformed cadets, who prey on them and fleece them at every step.

To ascribe the increase of prostitution to alleged importation, to the growth of the cadet system, or similar causes, is highly superficial. I have already referred to the former. As to the cadet system, abhorrent as it is, we must not ignore the fact that it is essentially a phase of modern prostitution,—a phase accentuated by suppression and graft, resulting from sporadic crusades against the social evil.

The origin of the cadets, as an institution, can be traced to the Lexow investigation in New York City, in 1894. Thanks to that moral spasm, keepers of brothels, as well as unfortunate victims of the street, were turned over to the tender mercies of the police. The inevitable consequence of exorbitant bribes and the penitentiary followed.

While comparatively protected in the brothels, where they represented a certain value, the unfortunate girls now found themselves on the street, absolutely at the mercy of the graft-greedy police. Desperate, needing protection and longing for affection, these girls naturally proved an easy prey to cadets, themselves the result of the spirit of our commercial age. Thus the cadet system was the direct outgrowth of police persecution, graft, and attempted suppression of prostitution. It were sheer folly to confute this modern phase of the social evil with the causes of the latter.

The serious student of this problem realizes that legislative enactments, stringent laws, and similar methods can not possibly eradicate, nor even ameliorate this evil. Those best familiar with the subject agree on this vital point. Dr. Alfred Blaschko, an eminent authority, convincingly proves in his "Prostitution im 19. Jahrhundert" that governmental suppression and moral crusades accomplish nothing save driving the evil into secret channels, multiplying its dangers to the community. In this claim he is supported by such thorough students as Havelock Ellis, Dr. H. Bloss, and others.

Mere suppression and barbaric enactment can serve but to embitter and further degrade the unfortunate victims of ignorance and stupidity. The latter has reached its highest expression in the proposed law to make humane treatment of prostitutes a crime, punishing anyone sheltering a prostitute with five years imprisonment and $10,000 fine. Such an attitude merely exposes the terrible lack of understanding of the true causes of prostitution, as a social factor, as well as manifesting the Puritanic spirit of the Scarlet Letter days.

An educated public opinion, freed from the legal and moral hounding of the prostitute, can alone help to ameliorate present conditions. Wilful shutting of eyes and ignoring of the evil, as an actual social factor of modern life, can but aggravate matters. We must rise above our foolish notions of "better than thou," and learn to recognize in the prostitute a product of social conditions. Such a realization will sweep away the attitude of hypocrisy and insure a greater understanding and more humane treatment. As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values—especially the moral ones—coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

IOKANAAN TO SALOME

To Miss Mary Garden, with her permission.
By WILLIAM MOUNTAIN.

THOU beauteous serpent and thou ancient shame!
Thou wonder and thou wounder of the earth!
Eden was darkened when thy beauty came,
And cursed was the day that gave thee birth.

Mad men have painted thee on prison walls,
In dark delirious hours when their chains
Seemed loosed from aching limbs, but left them thralls
To dreams from which they woke to fiercer pains.

Thou art the world's desire and all its sin!
Things long forgotten flame in thy swift eye;
Dead lusts that long but never solace win,
Remorse that gnaws, and starved satiety.

The languorous East is sleeping in thy face,
The fiery West burns in thy purple veins,
And all the smouldering passions of the race
Flare in the souls of them thy lust disdains.

Dead loves and ghosts of unremembered days,
And far-off yearnings kindle at thy kiss;
Long-buried hopes thy hot caresses raise,
Unwilling shapes from time's unplumbed abyss.

Thou art the world's delight since life began;
Euphrates knew thee and the sacred Nile;
The primal instinct of the earliest man
Uprears in him who sickens 'neath thy smile.

Thy beauty is the lily in decay,
Thy singing like the sirens of the sea;
Lo, thou art her whose memory is dismay,
The sorrows of mankind thy progeny.

Thou art a symbol of the earth-old ache,
The ever-blooming flower of desire,
The dream of beauty for its own fair sake,
The cry for joy e'en from the funeral pyre.

Thy voice is sweeter than the camel bell
That tinkles when the weary caravan
Rests by the city gates; but down in hell
Its breath the fires of the unhappy fan.

Thy hair's a forest, shadowy, sweet as myrrh,
Where grief might swoon and heaven find in its scent;
Thy mouth's a ruby, thy lips lovelier
Than all the jewels of the Orient.

Thine eyes are like the fairest stars of eve,
And thy feet touch the tile like flowers that fall;
I dare not watch thy unveiled bosom heave
Lest His sworn prophet prove love's willing thrall.

For I could be the dust beneath thy feet,
To trample, shod with lust and wet with tears;
For oh! the odor of thy breath is sweet,
And thy sad smile is older than the years.

Thy hair winds round the world, thy passion streams
Almost a glory from thy finger-tips;
How might the weary yield to happy dreams,
And suck nepenthe from thy fatal lips!

Thine arms embrace the earth, the stars, the sun,
Thy shadow flares across the frightened sky;
The desert conquered first or thou hadst won!
Ah, slay me, Herod, for I fain would die.

* * *

ANARCHIST SYMPOSUM***

PROUDHON.

PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON, the French Anarchist, born in 1809, and writing between the years 1848 and 1863, takes the same position as that occupied by the American Abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, when he said: "God has given mankind one, and only one, rule to success—utter and exact justice. That, he has guaranteed, shall always be expediency." His central conception is that of Herbert Spencer, as expressed by the latter in his "Plea for Liberty," namely that "justice" is the cement that holds society together. The following quotations from his writings illustrate his views:

"Justice is the central star which governs societies; the pole about which the political world revolves; the principle and rule of all transactions. Nothing is done among men that is not in the name of right; nothing without invoking justice."

He scoffs at the idea of the law representing justice, as will be seen from the following passages:

"Laws and ordinances fall like hail on the poor populace. After a while the political soil wil be covered with a layer of paper, and all the geologists will have to do will be to list it under the name of papyraceous formation, among the epochs of the earth's history. . . . Do you believe that the populace, or the government itself, can keep its sanity in this labyrinth?

"I am ready to make terms, but I will have no laws; I acknowledge none; I protest against every order which an ostensibly necessary authority shall please to impose on my free will. Laws! We know what they are and what they are worth. Cobwebs for the powerful and rich; chains which no steel can break for the little and the poor; fishers' nets in the hands of the government."

Proudhon's conception of the future is that men and women, living under conditions of equal freedom, instead of being governed by laws imposed by external authority, will govern themselves by voluntary contracts. On this head he says:
***The Symposium will consist of extracts from the world's greatest thinkers and writers on the subject of Anarchism, including Proudhon, Warren, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Stirner, and others. Some of the quotations are according to Steven T. Byington's translation.
"That I may remain free, that I may be subjected to no law but my own, and that I may govern myself, the edifice of society must be rebuilt upon the idea of CONTRACT."

Proudhon has no belief in the State as a protector or righter of wrongs. He rejects it absolutely as being an involuntary relation, and declares emphatically that "the government of man by man is slavery." He asserts (and in this respect Herbert Spencer agrees with him entirely) that the extent to which the rule of authority does or does not prevail is an absolutely true test of the civilization or barbarism of any given society; that the lower the general intellectual development of any given society, the more it is characterized by the authority of man over man.

Government by party is fully as objectionable, in Proudhon's view, as government by a Tsar, as will be seen from the following passage:

"All parties without exception, in so far as they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism; and there will be no liberty for citizens, nor order for societies, no union among workingmen, till in the political catechism the renunciation of authority shall have replaced faith in authority. No more parties, no more authority, absolute liberty of man and citizen—there, in three words, is my political and social confession of faith."

"Authority, government, power, State—these words all denote the same thing—each man sees in it the means of oppressing and exploiting his fellows. Absolutists, doctrinaires, demagogues, and Socialists turn their eyes incessantly to authority."

Criticising the methods of acquiring wealth, then in vogue, Proudhon—in one of his earlier publications—made use of the expression "property is robbery." This unfortunate but catchy phrase was taken up immediately, and has been employed industriously ever since as proof that Proudhon was a Communist. He was at constant pains to refute this misrepresentation. Writing in 1850, he said:

"What I sought for as far back as 1840 in defining property, what I am wanting now, is not a destruction; I have said it till I am tired. That would have been to fall with Rousseau, Plato, Louis Blanc himself, and all the adversaries of property, into Communism, against which I protest with all my might; what I ask for property is a oalance—that is, justice.

Proudhon declares in the most emphatic manner that his whole aim is to give each man the full product of his labor, and his position is that this will be possible only under conditions of freedom, wherein men and women, standing on a footing of equal opportunity, determine for themselves what they shall give and what they shall receive in return, binding themselves by their own voluntary contracts.

As to the method by which the transformation that he regards as absolutely necessary is to be accomplished, Proudhon speaks with no uncertain voice. He rejects most positively all suggestions of an artificially created, violent revolution, declaring that the new conditions will appear only "as soon as the idea is popularized." He mocks the physical force advocates, say-ing: "Accomplish the revolution, they say, and after this everything will be cleared up. As if the revolution itself could be accomplished without a leading idea."

"To secure justice to one's self by bloodshed is an extremity to which the Californians, gathered since yesterday to seek for gold, may be reduced; but may the luck of France preserve us from it."

"Despite the violence which we witness I do not believe that hereafter liberty will need to use force to claim its rights and avenge its wrongs. Reason will serve us better; and patience, like the revolution, is invincible."

To those who object that the educational method is an impossibility, since the professions, the middle class, and the powers that be are impervious to reason, and the populace, brutalized by servitude, remains hopelessly indifferent, he replies: "Don't worry. Just as the lack of ideas makes one lose the most promising games, war against ideas can only push forward the revolution. Do you not see already that the régime of authority, of inequality, of predestination, of eternal salvation, and of reasons of State is daily becoming more intolerable for the well-to-do classes, whose conscience and reason it tortures, than for the mass, whose stomach cries out against it?"

In consequence of his holding these opinions, those who profess the "class struggle" doctrine in its narrowest sense and believe that the social question is a stomach question, to be settled solely by those whose stomachs are affected, speak contemptuously of Proudhon as a middle-class philosopher.

* * *

MONKEY VS. MAN

GO to the monkey, thou voter, consider his ways and be wise. Do the monkeys pay ground rent to the descendants of the first old ape who discovered the valleys where the monkeys live? Do they hire the trees from the chimpanzee who first found the forest?

Do they buy the cocoanuts from the great-great grandchildren of the gorilla who invented a way to crack them ?

Do they allow two or three monkeys to form a corporation and obtain control of all the paths that lead through the woods?

Do they permit some smart young monkey, with superior business ability, to claim all the springs of water in the forest as his own, because of some alleged bargain made by their ancestors 500 years ago?

Do they allow a smart gang of monkey lawyers to so tangle up their conceptions of ownership that a few will obtain possession of everything?

Do they appoint a few monkeys to govern them and then allow those appointed monkeys to rob the tribe and mismanage all its affairs?

Do they build up a monkey city and then hand over the land, and the paths, and the trees, and the springs, and the fruits, to a few monkeys who sat on a log and chattered while all the work was going on ?

* * *

FOR THE REVOLUTION IN SPAIN

AN APPEAL FOR SOLIDARITY

AFTER the recent bloody events in Spain, caused by the war in Morocco, when the Spanish proletariat protested against that horrible slaughter, undertaken solely for the profit of a few capitalists; after all the brutalities perpetrated by the Civil Guards against the defenseless women and children who were massacred in the streets of Barcelona, because they refused to let their fathers, brothers, and husbands go to the national shambles; after the unmerciful and ferocious persecutions of propagandists of radical ideas, by means of imprisonment, exiles, and death; after reactionary clericalism had vented its insatiable thirst for martyr's blood and had murdered the great educator, Francisco Ferrer, the man who tried to regenerate the Spanish people by working for the enlightenment of the child and by teaching principles of right and justice; after this orgy of violence and crime, executed in the name or religion, capitalism, and the State,—we, the torch-bearers of liberty, acting in the name of civilization, do intend to continue the fight in Spain, so that we may destroy the shameful monarchy of the insane Alfonso XIII., who is ruled by the high clergy, the genuine representatives of the Inquisition of Torquemada, and who hold the people in darkness and ignorance, and continue the old reactionary traditions and absurd superstitions.

We are convinced that while the present conditions in Spain continue there will be no chance for the people to be educated in the new ideas of progress, but that they will be ignorant and servile; and that there will always be danger to men who, like Ferrer, may try to continue the generous work of this martyr of the Modern School.

At the beginning of our efforts, we known that obstacles will be found in the road of the struggle; but we count on many good fighters who will triumph or perish for the principles of right and justice in their desire to put an end to all the infamy consummated for so many centuries in the land of the Inquisition.

OUR OBJECT.

All those who reject the reactionary ideas of absolutism, are on our side, and we wish to fight all together, without regard to individual principles or separative ideas, forming a radical "block" in order to overthrow the present régime, and to open the road for more advanced institutions.

WHO WE ARE: SOLIDARITY NECESSARY.

We, the "Pro-Spanish Revolutionary Committee" of New York, are a branch of the "Revolutionary Party," with headquarters in Paris, composed of Spanish revolutionists, but enjoying the co-operation of intelligent and generous foreign fighters, who conduct an international agitation in all the principal cities of Europe. In order to raise the means for this purpose, we are appointed in this city, as representatives of the radical Spanish colony, to collect money in the United States from all who are willing to help toward the total destruction of Spanish Reaction.

We hope that all the radical fighters of all countries will give us a hand, because our cause is the cause of all sufferers and slaves throughout the world. We must show a practical revolutionary alliance facing the power of our tyrants and making effective a strong solidarity among the international proletariat.

In the name of civilization and progress, we call upon the radical people to assist us in the struggle against despotism and barbarism.

Shall we be heard?

Yours for the Revolution,

AGUSTIN CASTAÑEDA
JAIME VIDAL
JOSE RUBIO
AQUILINO CHAO
ENRIQUE BENAVIDES
RUFINO ALONSO
MANUEL MARTIÑEZ MANUEL VASQUEZ
GAYETANO SOIM´E
MANUEL VALD´ES
MATEO FIGERROTT
ALFONSO MORELLO
ENRIQUE ALVAREZ
HERMEÑEGILDO GAUNDO

LEOPOLDO GARCIA

New York, December 15, 1909.

N. B.—All the contributions for this purpose should be sent to the treasurer, A. Castañeda, 72 Liberty St., Brooklyn, N. Y.

J. VIDAL, Secretary.

THE PRIEST AND THE DEVIL

By FEDOR DOSTOYEVSKY.****

BEFORE the altar in a splendid church, glistening with gold and silver and lit up by a multitude of candles, stood a priest arrayed in beautiful robe and gorgeous mantle. He' was a portly, dignified man, with ruddy cheeks and well-kept beard. His voice was sonorous and his mien haughty. His appearance was in keeping with the church, which glowed and shone with luxury.

The congregation, however, presented a different picture. It consisted mostly of poor workingmen and peasants, old women and beggars. Their clothing was shabby and exhaled the peculiar odor of poverty. Their thin facesbore the marks of hunger and their hands the marks of toil. It was a picture of want and misery.

The priest burned incense before the holy pictures, and then piously and solemnly raised his voice and preached.

"My dear brethren in Christ," he said, "our dear Lord gave you life, and it is your duty to be satisfied with it. But are you satisfied ? No.

"First of all, you do not have enough faith in our dear Lord and His saints and miracles. You do not give as freely as you should from your earnings to the holy church.

"In the second place, you do not obey the authorities. You oppose the powers of the world, the Tsar and his officers. You despise the laws.

"It is written in the Bible, 'Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and give unto God that which is God's.' But you do not do it! And do you know what this means ? This is a deadly sin. Indeed, I tell you, it is the devil who is tempting you to go his way. It is he who tempts your souls, and you imagine it is your own free-will that prompts you to act in this way. His will it is, not yours.

**** Fedor Dostoyevsky achieved fame as the author of two of the most powerful psychical studies ever penned: "Poor Folk" and "Crime and Punishment," both of which have been translated into most European languages. During his incarceration, for political reasons, in the terrible fortress of SS. Peter and Paul—an imprisonment which ruined his constitution and caused his early death—he wrote the following sketch upon the wall of his cell.

He is waiting for your death. He is burning with eagerness to possess your souls. He will dance before the flames of hell, in which your souls will suffer agonies.

"Therefore, I warn you, my brethren, I admonish you to leave the path of damnation. There is still time. O God, have mercy!"

The people listened, trembling. They believed the priest's solemn words. They sighed and crossed themselves, and fervently kissed the floor. The priest also crossed himself, turned his back to the people—and smiled.

It so happened that the devil was just passing by the church while the priest was speaking thus to the people. He heard his name mentioned, so he stood by the open window and listened. He saw the people kiss the priest's hand. He saw how the priest, bending before a gilded picture of some saint, hastily pocketed the money which the poor people had put down there for the holy church. This provoked the devil, and no sooner did the priest leave the church than he ran after him and caught hold of his holy mantle.

"Hello, you fat little father!" he said. "What made you lie so to those poor misled people? What tortures of hell did you depict? Don't you know they are already suffering the tortures of hell in their earthly lives ? Don't you know that you and the authorities of the State are my representatives on earth ? It is you who make them suffer the pains of hell with which you threaten them. Don't you know this ? Well, then, come with me!"

The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him high in the air, and carried him to a factory, to an iron foundry. He saw the workmen there running and hurrying to and fro and toiling in the scorching heat. Very soon the thick, heavy air and the heat are too much for the priest. With tears in his eyes, he pleads with the devil: "Let me go! Let me leave this hell!"

"Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more places." The devil gets hold of him again and drags him off to a farm. There he sees the workmen threshing the grain. The dust and heat are insufferable. The over-seer carries a knout, and unmercifully beats anyone who falls to the ground overcome by hard work or hunger.

Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same workers live with their families—dirty, cold, smoky, ill-smelling holes. The devil grins. He points out the poverty and hardship which are at home here.

"Well, isn't this enough ?" he asks. And it seems as if even he, the devil, pities the people. The pious servant of God can hardly bear it. With uplifted hands he begs: "Let me go away from here. Yes, yes! This is hell on earth!"

"Well, then, you see. And you still promise them another hell. You torment them, torture them to death mentally when they are already all but dead physically! Come on! I will show you one more hell—one more, the very worst."

He took him to a prison, and showed him a dungeon, with its foul air and the many human forms, robbed of all health and energy, lying on the floor, covered with vermin that were devouring their poor, naked, emaciated bodies.

"Take off your silken clothes," said the devil to the priest; "put on your ankles heavy chains such as these unfortunates wear; lie down on the cold and filthy floor— and then talk to them about a hell that still awaits them!"

"No, no!" answered the priest. "I cannot think of anything more dreadful than this. I entreat you, let me go away from here!"

"Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than this. Did you not know it ? Did you not know that these men and women whom you were frightening with the picture of a hell hereafter—did you not know that they are in hell right here, before they die?"

The priest hung his head. He did not know where to look in his confusion.

The devil smiled maliciously. "Yes, little father, you are going to say that the world likes to be cheated. Well, now!" And he released his hold.

The priest tucked up his long mantle and ran as fast as his legs would carry him.

The devil watched and laughed.

* * *

This story came into my mind while listening to the sermon of the prison chaplain, and I wrote it down on the wall to-day, December 13, 1849.

A PRISONER.

INTERNATIONAL NOTES

GERMANY.

The Anarchist Conference held recently at Leipzig did not bring about the desired result. Indeed, it merely served to aggravate existing friction. The decision of the Congress concerning the reorganization of the German Anarchist Federation has not been accepted by most of the groups, on the ground that it is too centralistic and authoritarian. The groups favor federative organization.

The Berlin Revolutionar has suspended publication. In its place another paper, Der Anarchist, has made its appearance in Leipzig. Thus the Anarchist movement of Germany now possesses three papers: Der Freie Arbeiter, having a circulation of 5,000; Der Anarchist, with 2,000 subscribers, and Der Socialist, of Berlin, with a like number of readers.

SWITZERLAND.

The Anti-Militaristic Congress, called by the Federative Committee of the Roman Trades Federation and the Anarchist papers Voix du Peuple and Le Reveil, took place at Bienne, amid great attendance. In spite of the opposition of the Socialists, who showed them-selves true patriots, the Congress proved very successful. It was the unanimous decision of the delegates to continue the anti-militarist propaganda with all possible energy and vigor.

ENGLAND.

While the International Press Congress was holding its sessions in London, and a high government official was eulogizing the grand English liberty of the press, our Comrade Guy A. Aldred was convicted in Old Bailey to a year's imprisonment on the charge of "seditious libel," resulting from the fact that Aldred published one number of the Indian Sociologist. The latter is the organ of the Hindu revolutionists, edited by Krishna Varma, who was forced to flee to Paris, his liberty being threatened by the government of Great Britain.

After the killing of Sir Curzon Wyllie by the Hindu revolutionist Dingra, the former publisher of the Sociologist, A. Fletcher Horsley—an ordinary printer in no way interested in the movement for India's liberation— was condemned to four months' hard labor. As no printer could be found willing to risk incarceration by publishing the paper, Comrade Aldred offered his services, which circumstance resulted in the charge of seditious libel and imprisonment.

Evidently the boasted English liberty of the press is no less a humbug than its "free" speech. The condemnation by an English court of John Most and Vladimir Bourtzeff, some years ago, at the instigation of the Russian government, has long since characterized the quality of English liberty, not to mention the treatment of Irish Nationalists.

* * *

The oppressive and repressive measures employed by the British government in India do not seem to achieve the ends desired. The attitude of that much-exploited country is well voiced by the Free Hindusthan:

Repression, tyranny, and indiscriminate punishment of innocent men have been the watchwords of the government of the alien domination in India ever since we began the commercial boycott of English goods. The tiger qualities of the British are much in evidence now in India. They think that by the strength of the sword they will keep down India! It is this arrogance that has brought about the bomb, and the more they tyrannize over a helpless and unarmed people, the more terrorism will grow. We may deprecate terrorism as outlandish and foreign to our culture, but it is inevitable as long as this tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants that are responsible for it. It is the only resource for a helpless and unarmed people when brought to the verge of despair. It is never criminal on their part. The crime lies with the tyrant.

The Hindu publication. Band Mataram, of Calcutta, suppressed by the government, is now published in Switzerland. All communications should be addressed to Madame Cama, Poste Restante, Geneve.

SPAIN.

The fall of Maura's cabinet did not result in the expected cessation of reactionary outrages. The "liberal" régime of Moret has proved as tyrannous as that of his predecessor. The courts-martial of Barcelona continue their bloody work: to the long list of those doomed to death, forced labor, and deportation, and those still suffering in the fortress, forty-two new condemnations have been added, among them two death sentences, ten life imprisonments, and the rest condemned to long years of hard labor.

The Paris Committee for the defence of the victims of the Spanish reaction is determined to continue its war against the "liberal" tyranny in order to arouse the Spanish people to the necessity of abolishing the terrible autocracy of the present régime. It is doing its utmost to waken the conscience of the international proletariat to the point of boycotting Spanish goods, and thus striking at the very vitals of Spanish capitalism.

Comrade Charles Malato writes us from Paris:

Dear Comrades: I have just received your letter including a check for $93.00 (478 francs) which you collected for the imprisoned comrades. I shall immediately consult with Comrades Charles Albert and Moreno about the disposition of the money.

There are still in the Barcelona jails over a hundred prisoners. We are now intensifying our campaign to prevent the execution of the twelve comrades, including three women, sentenced to death.

We have just held a massmeeting, with Soledad Villa franca, the companion and co-worker of Ferrer, as our chief speaker. It was a triumph for us, who claim the right of free love and free union as against the hypocrisy of legality, to witness the respect and enthusiastic sympathy with which our friend Soledad was welcomed.

I will do everything possible to comply with your request to procure Ferrer's works. He wrote many articles; yet, being extremely modest, he rarely signed them. He was principally an organizer and founder of schools, libraries, and reviews. During his incarceration in 1906-07 he wrote two important manuscripts,—one about rational morality, the other about federative communism. But, unfortunately, those works have been destroyed by the police in Mongat

* * *

The Spanish correspondent of a French paper thus describes the burial of Francisco Ferrer:

It was by a very special favor that the relations of the victim were allowed to be present at his burial. Ferrer remained visible in his open coffin, according to the Spanish custom, until the last moment. The modest coffin of blackened pine was brought down in the night. Ferrer was stretched out in the same gray garments which have been seen in his latest photographs. His head was wrapped in blood-stained bandages, but this sinister turban did not conceal the broken bones and the fragments of his oozing brain. His right cheek-bone was broken in, and an open wound stretched up to his temples. His throat was bleeding a little, and had been stopped up with a handful of chalk. In the middle of his forehead a small orifice revealed the passage of a bullet, which had gone out at the top of his skull. His face was bloodless ; but his hands were swollen and black, and added to the sinister horror of the spectacle. When the coffin was lifted for burial, I noticed that it had been standing on a big pool of blood, and all through the funeral procession the horrible box left traces of its passage along the road. The authorities would not allow burial in a private tomb, and the remains were consigned to the common ditch. The family, however, was permitted to put a stone to indicate where he had been buried. His mother was taken ill during this painful ceremony. It is related that this poor old woman came to the office of the Castle of Montjuich the previous evening asking to see her son, not knowing that he had already been shot. Permission was refused without any explanations being given.