The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a grey-haired man in his fifties, who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I? None! When I am out I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me as an old friend.’ Then would come a glass too much of drink in their company, excited talk about some capital fun—some capital ‘new stroke’ to be made in the way of theft—and, partly from weakness of will, partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be locked uponce more. So it had been several times before in his life. Two months passed, however, after his release, and he was not yet back to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to feel uneasy about him. ‘Has he had time to move to another judicial district, that he is not yet back? One can only hope that he has not been involved in some bad affair,’ they would say, meaning something worse than theft. ‘That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet man.’ But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up there, and was now endeavouring to be transferred to Clairvaux.
The old prisoners were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun their prison experience in childhood or early youth, others at a riper age. But ‘once in prison, always in prison,’ such is the saying derived from experience. And now, having reached or passed over the age of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in a gaol. To quicken their departure from life the prison administration used to send them to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woollen refuse. The dust in the workshop soon gave these old men consumption, which finally released them. Then four fellow prisoners would carry the old comrade to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest would march in front of the procession, mechanically reciting his prayer and looking round at the chestnut or fir-trees along the road, and the four comrades carrying the coffin would enjoy their momentary escape out of prison, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony.
When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had tobe abandoned. In fact, even solitary confinement is no obstacle to intercourse between the prisoners.
To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed voices, by means of whispers, hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of notes, every news of any interest spreads immediately all over the prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or in thecour d’honneur, where the lodgings of the administration are situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, where the employers of the factories live, or in the wide world of Paris politics, but that it is communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops, and cells. Frenchmen are of too communicative a nature for their underground telegraph ever to be stopped. We had no intercourse with the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day. ‘John, the gardener, is back for two years.’ ‘Such an inspector’s wife has had a fearful scrimmage with So-and-So’s wife.’ ‘James, in the cells, has been caught transmitting a note of friendship to John from the framers’ workshop.’ ‘That old beast So-and-So is no more minister of justice: the ministry has been upset.’ And so on; and when the news goes that ‘Jack has got two five-penny packets of tobacco in exchange for two flannel spencers,’ it flies round the prison in no time.
Demands for tobacco were continually pouring in upon us; and when a small lawyer detained in the prison wanted to transmit to me a note, in order to ask my wife, who was staying in the village, to see from time to time his wife, who was also there, quite a number of men took the liveliest interest in the transmission of that message, which had to pass I do not know how many hands before it reached its goal. And when there was something that might specially interest us in a paper, this paper, in some unaccountable way, would reach us, with a little stone wrapped into it, to help its being thrown over a high wall.
Cellular imprisonment is no obstacle to communication. When we came to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the cellular quarter, it was bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, indeed, that when I wrote to my wife, who was then at Paris, and she got my letter, she did not recognize the writing, my hand being so stiff with the cold. The order came to heat the cells as much as possible; but do what they might, the cells remained as cold as ever. It appeared afterwards that all the hot-air tubes in the cells were choked with scraps of paper, bits of notes, penknives, and all sorts of small things which several generations of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.
Martin, the same friend of mine whom I have already mentioned, obtained permission to serve part of his time in cellular confinement. He preferred isolation to life in a room with a dozen comrades, and went to a cell in the cellular building. To his great astonishment he found that he was not at all alone in his cell. The walls and the keyholes spoke round him. In a day or two all the inmates of the cells knew who he was, and he had acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing himself had no idea of the aspects it takes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.
I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, ‘In Russian and French Prisons,’ which I published in England in 1886, soon after my release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as ‘the criminals’ proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which areconsidered as a preventive measure against anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them and for rendering these offences worse and worse after a man has received prison education. Everyone knows that the absence of education, the dislike of regular work acquired since childhood, the physical unpreparedness for sustained effort, the love of adventure when it receives a wrong direction, the gambling propensities, the absence of energy and an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others, are the causes which bring this category of men before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature—each one of them—which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as there are prisons. Incarceration in a prison necessarily, fatally, destroys the energy of a man, and still more kills his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will. To possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisonermustbe killed, and it is killed. Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy. Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased during his prison years. If, before he first came to the prison, he soon felt tired by monotonous work, which he could not do properly, or had a grudge against underpaid overwork, his dislike now becomes hatred. If he doubted about the social utility of current rules of morality, now, after having cast a critical glance upon the official defenders of these rules, and learned his comrades’ opinions of them, he openly casts the rules overboard. And if he has gotinto trouble in consequence of a morbid development of the passionate sensual side of his nature, now, after having spent a number of years in prison, this morbid character is still more developed—in many cases to an appalling extent. In this last direction—the most dangerous of all—prison education is most effective.
In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth, and what workshops of physical and moral deterioration the dirty, overcrowded, ‘unreformed’ Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if there were less overcrowding in the rooms, and a certain classification of the prisoners, and healthy occupations were provided for them, the institution might be substantially improved. Now, I had to part with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large, the best ‘reformed’ prisons—whether cellular or not—are as bad as, or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old. They do not ‘reform’ the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The thief, the swindler, the rough man, and so on, who has spent some years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than ever to resume his former career; he is better prepared for it; he has learned how to do it better; he is more embittered against society, and he finds a more solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs; necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to go farther and farther along the anti-social path which first brought him before a law court. The offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labour colony. In the above-mentioned book I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.
Personally I have no reason whatever to complain of the years I have spent in a French prison. For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder, all the petty miseries of prison life, are not worth speaking of. Of course, when we heard of the active political life which was going on in France, we resented very much our forced inactivity. The end of the first year, especially during a gloomy winter, is always hard for the prisoner. And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty. When I saw from our windows the meadows assuming their green garb, and the hills covered with a spring haze, or when I saw a train flying into a dale between the hills, I certainly felt a strong desire to follow it, to breathe the air of the woods, to be carried along with the stream of human life into a busy town. But one who casts his lot with an advanced party must be prepared to spend a number of years in prison, and he need not grudge it. He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the stream of human progress which spreads and strengthens the ideas which are dear to him.
At Lyons my comrades, my wife, and myself certainly found the warders a very rough set of men. But after a couple of encounters all was set right. Moreover, the prison administration knew that we had the Paris press with us, and they did not want to draw upon themselves the thunders of Rochefort or the cutting criticisms of Clémenceau. And at Clairvaux there was no need of such a restraint. All the administration had been renewed a few months before we came thither. A prisoner had been killed by warders in his cell, and his corpse had been hanged to simulate suicide; but this time the affair leaked out through the doctor; the governor was dismissed, and altogether a better tone prevailed in the prison. I took back from Clairvaux the best recollections of its governor; and altogether, while I was there,I more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the institutions to which they belong. But having no personal griefs, I can all the more freely, and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself, as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and a source of unfathomable evil to society.
One thing more I must mention as it struck me, perhaps, even more than the demoralising effects of prisons upon their inmates. What a nest of infection is every prison, and even a law court for its neighbourhood—for the people who live about them. Lombroso has made very much of the ‘criminal type’ which he believes to have discovered amongst the inmates of the prisons. If he had made the same efforts to observe people who hang about the law courts—detectives, spies, small solicitors, informers, people preying upon simpletons, and the like—he would have probably concluded that his ‘criminal type’ has a far greater geographical extension than the prison walls. I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type, sunk far below the average type of mankind, as I saw by the score round and within the Palais de Justice at Lyons. Certainly not within the prison walls of Clairvaux. Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these types; but they represent quite a world which gravitates round the law courts, and infuses its infection far and wide around them. And the same is true of each central prison like Clairvaux. Quite an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts spreads like a blot of oil round every prison.
I saw all this; and if before my condemnation I already knew that society is wrong in its present system of punishments, after I left Clairvaux I knew that it is not only wrong and unjust in this system, but that it is simply foolish when, in its partly unconscious and partly wilful ignorance of realities, it maintains at its own expense these universities of crime and these sinks of corruption,acting under the illusion that they are necessary as a bridle to the criminal instincts of man.
Every revolutionist meets a number of spies andagents provocateursin his path, and I have had my fair share of them. All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile. However, they are mainly dangerous to young people. One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard. They are recruited from the scum of society, amongst men of the lowest moral standard, and if one is watchful of the moral character of the men he meets with, he soon notices something in the manners of these ‘pillars of society’ which shocks him, and then he asks himself the question: ‘What has brought this person to me? What in the world can he have in common with us?’ In most cases this simple question is sufficient to put a man upon his guard.
When I first came to Geneva, the agent of the Russian government who had been commissioned to spy the refugees was well known to all of us. He went under the name of Count Something; but as he had no footman and no carriage on which to emblazon his coronet and arms, he had had them embroidered on a sort of mantle which covered his tiny dog. We saw him occasionally in the cafés, without speaking to him; he was, in fact, an ‘innocent’ who simply bought in the kiosques all the publications of the exiles, very probably adding to them such comments as he thought would please his chiefs.
Different men began to pour in when Geneva was peopled with more and more refugees of the young generation; and yet, in one way or another, they also became known to us.
When a stranger appeared on our horizon, he was asked with usual nihilist frankness about his past and his present prospects, and it soon appeared what sort of person he or she was. Frankness in mutual intercourse is altogether the best way for bringing about proper relations between men. In this case it was invaluable. Numbers of persons whom none of us had known or heard of in Russia—absolute strangers to the circles—came to Geneva, and many of them, a few days or even hours after their arrival, stood on the most friendly terms with the colony of refugees; but in some way or another the spies never succeeded in crossing the threshold of familiarity. A spy might make common acquaintances; he might give the best accounts, sometimes correct, of his past in Russia; he might possess in perfection the nihilist slang and manners, but he never could assimilate the particular kind of nihilist ethics which had grown up amongst the Russian youth—and this alone kept him at a distance from our colony. Spies can imitate anything else but those ethics.
When I was working with Reclus there was at Clarens one such individual, from whom we all kept aloof. We knew nothing bad about him, but we felt that he was not ‘ours,’ and as he tried only the more to penetrate into our society, we became suspicious of him. I had never said a word to him, and consequently he was especially after me. Seeing that he could not approach me through the usual channels, he began to write me letters, giving me mysterious appointments for mysterious purposes in the woods and in similar places. For fun, I once accepted his invitation and went to the spot, with a good friend following me at a distance; but the man, who probably had a confederate, must have noticed that I was not alone, and did not appear. So I was spared the pleasure of ever saying to him a single word. Besides, I worked at that time so hard that every minute of my time was taken up either with the Geography or ‘Le Révolté,’ and I entered into no conspiracies. However,we learned later on that this man used to send to the Third Section detailed reports about the supposed conversations which he had had with me, my supposed confidences, and the terrible plots which I was concocting at St. Petersburg against the Tsar’s life! All that was taken for ready money at St. Petersburg. And in Italy, too. When Cafiero was arrested one day in Switzerland, he was shown formidable reports of Italian spies, who warned their government that Cafiero and I, loaded with bombs, were going to enter Italy. The fact was that I never was in Italy, and never had had any intention of visiting the country.
In point of fact, however, the spies do not always fabricate reports wholesale. They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told. We passed some merry moments about a report which was addressed to the French government by a French spy who followed my wife and myself as we were travelling in 1881 from Paris to London. The spy, probably playing a double part—as they often do—had sold that report to Rochefort, who published it in his paper. Everything that the spy had told in this report was correct—but the way he had told it!
He wrote for instance: ‘I took the next compartment to the one that Kropótkin had taken with his wife.’ Quite true; he was there. We noticed him, for he had managed at once to attract our attention by his sullen, unpleasant face. ‘They spoke Russian all the time, in order not to be understood by the other passengers.’ Very true again: we spoke Russian as we always do. ‘When they came to Calais, they both took abouillon.’ Most correct again: we took abouillon. But here the mysterious part of the journey begins. ‘After that, they both suddenly disappeared, and I looked for them in vain, on the platform and elsewhere; and when they reappeared, he was in disguise, and was followed by a Russian priest, who neverleft him until they reached London, where I lost sight of the priest.’ All that was true again. My wife had a slight toothache, and I asked the keeper of the restaurant to let us go into his private room, where the tooth could be stopped. So we had disappeared indeed; and as we had to cross the Channel, I put my soft felt hat into my pocket and put on a fur cap: so I was ‘in disguise.’ As to the mysterious priest, he was also there. He was not a Russian, but this is irrelevant: he wore at any rate the dress of the Greek priests. I saw him standing at the counter and asking something which no one understood. ‘Agua, agua,’ he repeated in a woful tone. ‘Give the gentleman a glass of water,’ I said to the waiter. Whereupon the priest began to thank me for my intervention with a truly Eastern effusion. My wife took pity on him and spoke to him in different languages, but he understood none but modern Greek. It appeared at last that he knew a few words in one of the South Slavonian languages, and we could make out: ‘I am a Greek; Turkish embassy, London.’ We told him, mostly by signs, that we too were going to London, and that he might travel with us.
The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy, even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had newspapers in their hands. One was English, and the other—a tall, nice-looking person, who spoke good French—pretended to be English. After having exchanged a few words, she asked meà brûle-pourpoint: ‘What do you think of Count Ignátieff?’ And immediately after that: ‘Are you soon going to kill the new Tsar?’ I was clear as to her profession from these two questions; but, thinking of my priest, I said to her: ‘Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?’ ‘Street So-and so, number So-and-so,’ she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in a class. ‘You could, I suppose, also givethe address of the Russian embassy?’ I asked her, and the address having been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: ‘Enough of that; ladies do not carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!’
But to return to my trustworthy French spy. ‘He alighted at Charing Cross’—he wrote in his report—‘but for more than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that everyone else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman—12, street So-and-so—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighbourhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.’
All facts in this narrative are true again—the address and the rest; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and my friend overslept himself. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloak-room, drove to his house.
‘There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their luggage.’ Even the remark about the curtains was correct: we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog.
When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to thebringing out of ‘Le Révolté.’ One day as I came to our printing office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper like ‘Le Révolté’ in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name—Tohnlehm, let us say—and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in certain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry with the Russian Government, for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indefinite impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.
From the café he took me to his rooms in an hotel, and there began to show less reserve and to appear more like himself and in a still more unpleasant light. ‘Don’t doubt my fortune,’ he said to me; ‘I have made a capital invention. There’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum for it, and give it all for the cause of the revolution in Russia.’ And he showed me, to my astonishment, a miserable candlestick, the originality of which was that it was awfully ugly and had three bits of wire to put the candle in. The poorest housewife would not have cared for such a candlestick, and even if it could have been patented, no ironmonger would have paid the patentee more than a couple of sovereigns. ‘A rich man placing his hopes on such a candlestick! This man,’ I thought to myself, ‘can never have seen better ones,’ and my opinion about him was made up: ‘He was no rich man at all, and the money he offered was not his own.’ So I bluntly told him: ‘Very well, if you are so anxious to have a Russian revolutionary paper, and hold the flattering opinion about myself which you have expressed, you will have to put your money in my name at a bank, and at my entiredisposal. But I warn you that you will have absolutely nothing to do with the paper.’ ‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘but just see to it, and sometimes advise you, and aid you in smuggling it into Russia.’ ‘No, nothing of the sort! You need not see me at all.’ My friends thought that I was too hard upon the man, but some time after that a letter was received from St. Petersburg warning us that we would have the visit of a spy of the Third Section—Tohnlehm by name. The candlestick had thus rendered us a good service.
Candlesticks, or anything else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881 we received, on a foggy morning, the visit of two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. He had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to England. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions whatever about him; but I was very busy that day with some work, and asked another friend who stayed close by to find them rooms and to take them about to see London. My wife had not yet seen London either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned saying to me: ‘Do you know, I dislike that man very much. Beware of him.’ ‘But why? What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing; but he is surely not “ours.” By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, I saw at once that he is not “ours,” and if he is not—why should he come to us?’ She was so certain of her suspicions that, while she performed her duties of hospitality, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study, even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanationshe gave were even still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they both left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having introduced to me the young man who, they had found out, at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland which we, the refugees, had received lately from the Executive Committee—they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg—and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.
To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was with Elisée Reclus in the mountains when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who announced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unpleasant impression, and Reclus had moreover some vague reminiscence of having heard the name of the writer in some unfavourable connection. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of all ascertain from whence the money came with which the paper was going to be started. ‘It may come from the Orleanists—an old trick of the family—and we must know its origin.’ My Paris friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offence, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: ‘If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.’
And so he did at last. Pressed by questions he said that the money came from his aunt—a rich lady ofantiquated opinions who yielded, however, to his fancy of having a paper and had parted with the money. The lady was not in France; she was staying at London. We insisted nevertheless upon having her name and address, and our friend Malatesta volunteered to see her. He went with an Italian friend who was connected with the second-hand trade in furniture. They found the lady occupying a small flat, and while Malatesta spoke to her and was more and more convinced that she was simply playing the aunt’s part in the comedy, the furniture-friend, looking round at the chairs and tables, discovered that all of them had been taken the day before—probably hired—from a second-hand furniture dealer, his neighbour. The labels of the dealer were still fastened to the chairs and the tables. This did not prove much, but naturally reinforced our suspicions. I absolutely refused to have anything to do with the paper.
The paper was of an unheard-of violence. Burning, assassination, dynamite bombs—there was nothing but that in it. I met the man, the editor of the paper, as I went to the London congress, and the moment I saw his sullen face, and heard a bit of his talk, and caught a glance of the sort of women with whom he always went about, my opinions concerning him were settled. At the congress, during which he introduced all sorts of terrible resolutions, the delegates kept aloof from him; and when he insisted upon having the addresses of anarchists all over the world, the refusal was made in anything but a flattering manner.
To make a long story short, he was unmasked a couple of months later, and the paper was stopped for ever on the very next day. Then, a couple of years after that, the prefect of police, Andrieux, published his ‘Memoirs,’ and in this book he told all about the paper which he had started and the explosions which his agents had organized at Paris, by putting sardine boxes filled with ‘something’ under the statue of Thiers.
One can imagine the quantities of money all these things cost the French and every other nation.
I might write several chapters on this subject, but I will mention only one more story of two adventurers at Clairvaux.
My wife stayed in the only inn of the little village which has grown up under the shadow of the prison wall. One day the landlady entered her room with a message from two gentlemen, who came to the hotel and wanted to see my wife. The landlady interceded with all her eloquence in their favour. ‘Oh, I know the world,’ she said, ‘and I may assure you, madame, that they are the most correct gentlemen. Nothing could be morecomme-il-faut. One of them gave the name of a German officer. He is surely a baron or a “milord,” and the other is his interpreter. They know you perfectly well. The baron is going now to Africa, perhaps never to return, and he wants to see you before he leaves.’
My wife looked at the address of the message, which was: ‘A Madame la Principesse Kropotkine,’ and needed no further proof of thecomme-el-fautof the two gentlemen. As to the contents of the message, they were even worse than the address. Against all rules of grammar and common-sense the ‘baron’ wrote about a mysterious communication which he had to make. She refused point-blank to receive the baron and his interpreter.
Thereupon the baron wrote to my wife letter upon letter, which she returned unopened. All the village soon became divided into two parties—one siding with the baron and led by the landlady, and the other against him, and headed, as a matter of fact, by the landlady’s husband. Quite a romance was circulated. ‘The baron had known my wife before her marriage. He had danced with her many times at the Russian embassy in Vienna. He was still in love with her, but she, thecruel one, refused even to allow him to cast a glance at her before he went upon his perilous expedition....’
Then came the mysterious story of a boy whom we were said to conceal. ‘Where is their boy?’ the baron wanted to know. ‘They have a son, six years old by this time—where is he?’ ‘She never would part with a boy if she had one,’ the one party said. ‘Yes, they have one, but they conceal him,’ the other party maintained.
For us two, this contest was a very interesting revelation. It proved that our letters were not only read by the prison authorities, but that their contents were made known to the Russian embassy as well. When I was at Lyons, and my wife went to see Elisée Reclus in Switzerland, she wrote to me once that ‘our boy’ was going on well; his health was excellent, and they all spent a very nice evening at the anniversary of his fifth birthday. I knew that she meant ‘Le Révolté,’ which we often used to name in conversation ‘ourgamin’—our naughty boy. But now that these gentlemen were inquiring about ‘ourgamin,’ and even designated so correctly his age, it was evident that the letter had passed through other hands than those of the governor. It was well to know such a thing.
Nothing escapes the attention of village folk in the country, and the baron soon awakened suspicions. He wrote a new letter to my wife, even more loquacious than the former ones. Now, he asked her pardon for having tried to introduce himself as an acquaintance. He owned that she did not know him; but nevertheless he was a well-wisher. He had to make to her a most important communication. My life was in danger and he wanted to warn her. The baron and his secretary took an outing in the fields to read together that letter and to consult about its tenor—the forest-guard following them at a distance—but they quarrelled about it, and the letter was torn to pieces and thrown in thefields. The forester waited till they were out of sight, gathered the pieces, connected them, and read the letter. In one hour’s time the village knew that the baron had never really been acquainted with my wife; the romance which was so sentimentally repeated by the baron’s party crumbled to pieces.
‘Ah, then, they are not what they pretended to be,’ thebrigadier de gendarmerieconcluded in his turn; ‘then they must be German spies’—and he arrested them.
It must be said in his excuse that a German spy had really been at Clairvaux shortly before. In time of war the vast buildings of the prison might serve as depôts for provisions or barracks for the army, and the German General Staff was surely interested to know the inner capacity of the prison buildings. A jovial travelling photographer came accordingly to our village, made friends with everyone by photographing them for nothing, and was admitted to photograph, not only the inside of the prison yards, but also the dormitories. Having done this, he travelled to some other town on the eastern frontier, and was there arrested by the French authorities as a man found in possession of compromising military documents. The brigadier, fresh from the impression of the photographer’s visit, jumped to the conclusion that the baron and his secretary were also German spies, and took them in custody to the little town of Bar-sur-Aube. There they were released next morning, the local paper stating that they were not German spies but ‘persons commissioned by another more friendly power.’
Now public opinion turned entirely against the baron and his secretary, who had to live through more adventures. After their release they entered a small village café, and there ventilatedtheirgriefs in German in a friendly conversation over a bottle of wine. ‘You were stupid, you were a coward,’ the would-be interpreter said to the would-be baron. ‘IfIhad been in your place,I would have shot that examining magistrate with this revolver. Let him only repeat that withme—he will have these bullets in his head!’ And so on.
A commercial traveller who quietly sat in the corner of the room, rushed at once to the brigadier to report the conversation which he had overheard. The brigadier made at once an official report, and once more arrested the secretary—a pharmacist from Strasburg. He was taken before a police court at the same town of Bar-sur-Aube, and got a full month’s imprisonment for ‘menaces uttered against a magistrate in a public place.’ At last the two adventurers left Clairvaux.
These spy adventures ended in a comical way. But how many tragedies—terrible tragedies—we owe to these villains! Precious lives lost, and whole families wrecked, simply to get an easy living for such swindlers. When one thinks of the thousands of spies going about the world in the pay of all governments; of the traps they lay for all sorts of artless people; of the lives they sometimes bring to a tragical end, and the sorrows they sow broadcast; of the vast sums of money thrown away in the maintenance of that army recruited from the scum of society; of the corruption of all sorts which they pour into society at large, nay, even into families, one cannot but be appalled at the immensity of the evil which is thus done. And this army of villains is not only limited to those who play the spy on revolutionists or to the military espionage system. In this country there are papers, especially in the watering towns, whose columns are covered with advertisements of private detective agencies which undertake to collect all sorts of information for divorce suits, to spy upon husbands for their wives and upon wives for their husbands, to penetrate into families and entrap simpletons, and who will undertake anything which may be asked of them, for a corresponding sum of money. And while people feel scandalized at the espionagevillainies lately revealed in the highest military spheres of France, they do not notice that amongst themselves, perhaps under their own roofs, the same and even worse things are being committed by both the official and private detective agencies.
Demands for our release were continually raised, both in the Press and in the Chamber of Deputies—the more so as about the same time that we were condemned Louise Michel was condemned, too—for robbery. Louise Michel, who always gives literally her last shawl or cloak to the woman who is in need of it, and who never could be compelled, during her imprisonment, to have better food, because she always gave her fellow prisoners what was sent to her, was condemned, together with another comrade, Pouget, to nine years’ imprisonment for highway robbery! That sounded too bad even for the middle-class opportunists. She marched one day at the head of a procession of the unemployed, and, entering a baker’s shop, took a few loaves from it and distributed them to the hungry column: this was her robbery. The release of the anarchists thus became a war-cry against the government, and in the autumn of 1885 all my comrades save three were set at liberty by a decree of President Grévy. Then the outcry on behalf of Louise Michel and myself became still louder. However, Alexander III. objected to it; and one day the prime minister, M. Freycinet, answering an interpellation in the Chamber, said that ‘diplomatic difficulties stood in the way of Kropótkin’s release.’ Strange words in the mouth of the prime minister of an independent country; but still stranger words have been heard since in connection with that ill-omened alliance of France with imperial Russia.
At last, in the middle of January 1886, both LouiseMichel and Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clairvaux, were set free.
We went to Paris and stayed there for a few weeks with our friend, Elie Reclus—a writer of great power in anthropology, who is often mistaken outside France for his younger brother, the geographer, Elisée. A close friendship has united the two brothers from early youth. When the time came for them to enter a university, they went from a small country place in the valley of the Gironde to Strasburg, making the journey on foot—accompanied, as true wandering students, by their dog; and when they stayed at some village it was the dog which got his bowl of soup, while the two brothers’ supper very often consisted of bread only, with a few apples. From Strasburg the younger brother went to Berlin, whereto he was attracted by the lectures of the great Ritter. Later on, in the forties, they were both at Paris. Elie Reclus became a convinced Fourierist, and both saw in the republic of 1848 the coming of a new era of social evolution. Consequently, after Napoleon III.’scoup d’état, they both had to leave France, and emigrated to England. When the amnesty was voted, and they returned to Paris, Elie edited there a Fourierist co-operative paper which was widely spread among the workers. It is not generally known, but may be interesting to note, that Napoleon III.—who played the part of a Cæsar, interested, as behoves a Cæsar, in the conditions of the working classes—used to send one of his aides-de-camp to the printing office of the paper, each time it was printed, to take to the Tuileries the first sheet issued from the press. He was, later on, even ready to patronize the International Workingmen’s Association, on the condition that it should put in one of its reports a few words of confidence in the great socialist plans of the Cæsar; and he ordered its prosecution when the Internationalists refused point-blank to do anything of the sort.
When the Commune was proclaimed, both brothersheartily joined it and Elie accepted the post of keeper of the National Library and the Louvre museum under Vaillant. It was, to a great extent, to his foresight and to his hard work that we owe the preservation of the invaluable treasures of human knowledge and art accumulated in these two institutions; otherwise they would have perished during the bombardment of Paris by the armies ofThiers, and the subsequent conflagration. A passionate lover of Greek art, and profoundly acquainted with it, he had had all the most precious statues and vases of the Louvre packed and stored in the caves, while the greatest precautions were taken to protect the building of the National Library from the conflagration which raged round it. His wife, a courageous, worthy companion of the philosopher, followed in the streets by her two little boys, organized in the meantime in her own quarter of the town the feeding of the population which had been reduced to sheer destitution by a second siege. During the final few weeks of its existence, the Commune at last realized that a supply of food to the population, which was deprived of the means of earning it for itself, ought to have been the Commune’s first duty, and volunteers organized the relief. It was by mere accident that Elie Reclus, who had kept to his post till the last moment, escaped being shot by the Versailles troops; and a sentence of deportation having been pronounced upon him—for having dared to accept so necessary a service under the Commune—he went with his family into exile. Now, on his return to Paris, he had resumed the work of his life—ethnology. What this work is may be judged from a few, very few, chapters of it published in book form under the title of ‘Primitive Folk’ and ‘The Australians,’ as well as from the history of the origin of religions, which he now lectures upon at theÉcole des Hautes Études, at Brussels—a foundation of his brother. In the whole of the ethnological literature there are not many works imbuedto the same extent with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the true nature of primitive man. As to his ‘Origin of Religions’ (which is being published in the review, ‘Société Nouvelle,’ and its continuation ‘Humanité Nouvelle’), it is, I venture to say, the best work on the subject that has been published—undoubtedly superior to Herbert Spencer’s attempt in the same direction, because Herbert Spencer, with all his immense intellect, does not possess that understanding of the artless and simple nature of the primitive man which Elie Reclus possesses to a rare perfection, and to which he has added an extremely wide knowledge of a rather underrated branch of folk-psychology—the evolution and transformation of beliefs. It is needless to speak of Elie Reclus’s infinite good nature and modesty, or of his superior intelligence and vast knowledge of all subjects relating to humanity; it is all comprehended in his style. With his unbounded modesty, his calm manner and his deep philosophical insight, he is the type of the Greek philosopher of antiquity. In a society less fond of patented tuition and of piecemeal instruction, and more appreciative of the development of wide humanitarian conceptions, he would be surrounded by flocks of pupils, like one of his Greek prototypes.
A very animated socialist and anarchist movement was going on at Paris while we stayed there. Louise Michel lectured every night, and aroused the enthusiasm of her audiences, whether they consisted of working men or were made up of middle-class people. Her already great popularity became still greater and spread even amongst the university students, who might hate advanced ideas but worshipped in her the ideal woman; so much so that a riot, caused by someone speaking disrespectfully of Louise Michel in the presence of students, took place one day in a café. The young people took up her defence and made a fearful uproar, smashing all the tables and glasses in the café. I also lectured onceon anarchism, before an audience of several thousand people, and left Paris immediately after that lecture, before the government could obey the injunctions of the reactionary and the pro-Russian press, which insisted upon my being expelled from France.
From Paris we went to London, where I found once more my two old friends, Stepniák and Tchaykóvsky. The socialist movement was in full swing, and life in London was no more the dull, vegetating existence that it had been for me four years before.
We settled in a small cottage at Harrow. We cared little about the furniture of our cottage, a good part of which I made myself with the aid of Tchaykóvsky—he had been in the meantime in the United States and had learned some carpentering—but we rejoiced immensely at having a small plot of heavy Middlesex clay in our garden. My wife and myself went with much enthusiasm into small culture, the admirable results of which I began to realize after having made acquaintance with the writings of Toubeau, and some Parismaraîchers(gardeners), and after our own experiment in the prison garden at Clairvaux. As for my wife, who had typhoid fever soon after we settled at Harrow, the work in the garden during the period of convalescence was more completely restorative for her than a stay at the very best sanatorium.
By the end of the summer a heavy stroke fell upon us. We learned that my brother Alexander was no longer alive.
During the years that I had been abroad before my imprisonment in France, we had never corresponded with each other. In the eyes of the Russian government, to love a brother who is persecuted for his political opinions is in itself a sin. To maintain relations with him after he has become a refugee is a crime. A subject of the Tsar must hate all the rebels against the supremeruler’s authority—and Alexander was in the clutches of the Russian police. I persistently refused therefore to write to him or to any of my relatives. After the Tsar had written on the petition of our sister Hélène, ‘Let him remain there,’ there was no hope of a speedy release for my brother. Two years after that, a committee was nominated to settle terms for those who had been exiled to Siberia without judgment for an undetermined time, and my brother got five years. That made seven with the two years he had already been kept there. Then a new committee was nominated under Lóris Mélikoff, and added another five years. My brother was thus to be liberated in October 1886. That made twelve years of exile, first in a tiny town of East Siberia, and afterwards at Tomsk—that is in the lowlands of West Siberia, where he had not even the dry and healthy climate of the high prairies farther East.
When I was imprisoned at Clairvaux, he wrote to me, and we exchanged a few letters. He wrote that as our letters would be read by the Russian police in Siberia and by the French prison authorities in France, we might as well write to each other under this double supervision. He spoke of his family life, of his three children whom he characterized admirably well, and of his work. He earnestly advised me to keep a watchful eye upon the development of science in Italy, where excellent and original researches are made, but remain unknown in the scientific world until they have been re-manufactured in Germany; and he gave me his opinions about the probable march of political life in Russia. He did not believe in the possibility with us in a near future, of constitutional rule on the pattern of the West European parliaments; but he looked forward—and found it quite sufficient for the moment—to the convocation of a sort of deliberative National Assembly (Zémskiy SobórorEtats Généraux). It wouldnot vote new laws, but would only work out the schemes of laws to which the imperial power and the Council of State would give their definitive form and the final sanction.
Above all he wrote to me about his scientific work. He always had a decided leaning towards astronomy, and when we were at St. Petersburg he had published in Russia an excellent summary of all our knowledge of the shooting stars. With his fine critical mind he soon saw the strong or the weak points of different hypotheses; and without sufficient knowledge of mathematics, but endowed with a powerful imagination, he succeeded in grasping the results of the most intricate mathematical researches. Living with his imagination amongst the moving celestial bodies, he realized their complex movements often better than some mathematicians—especially the pure algebraists—realize them, because they often lose sight of the realities of the physical world to see only the formulæ and their logical connections. Our St. Petersburg astronomers spoke to me with great appreciation of that work of my brother. Now he undertook to study the structure of the universe: to analyze the data and the hypotheses about the worlds of suns, star-clusters, and nebulæ in the infinite space, and to disentangle their probable grouping, their life, and the laws of their evolution and decay. The Púlkova astronomer, Gyldén, spoke highly of this new work of Alexander, and introduced him by correspondence to Mr. Holden in the United States, from whom I had lately the pleasure of hearing, at Washington, an appreciative estimate of my brother’s researches. Science is greatly in need, from time to time, of such scientific speculations of a higher standard, made by a scrupulously laborious, critical, and at the same time, imaginative mind.
But in a small town of Siberia, far away from all the libraries, unable to follow the progress of science,he had only succeeded in embodying in his work the researches which had been done up to the date of his exile. Some capital work had been done since—he knew it—but how could he get access to the necessary books so long as he remained in Siberia? The approach of the term of his liberation did not inspire him with hope either. He knew that he would not be allowed to stay in any of the university towns of Russia or of Western Europe, but that his exile to Siberia would be followed by a second exile, perhaps even worse than the first, to some hamlet of Eastern Russia.
Despair took possession of him. ‘A despair like Faust’s takes hold of me at times,’ he wrote to me. When the time of his liberation was coming, he sent his wife and children to Russia, taking advantage of one of the last steamers before the close of the navigation, and, on a gloomy night, the despair of Faust put an end to his life....
A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months—until a flash of light pierced it. It came next Spring, when a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and at whose helpless cry I overheard in my heart quite new chords vibrating.
In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups of workers going about in the streets singing ‘We’ve got no work to do,’ or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked at night into TrafalgarSquare to sleep there in the open air, under the wind and rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd, after having listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and Champion, rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows in the great shops. Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent, was the spirit which prevailed amongst the poorer portion of the working population in the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the recent history of the labour movement in England, but the symptoms of which were very well marked in 1886, would have been developed, and would have impressed its stamp upon the subsequent movement for a long time to come. However, the middle classes seemed to have realized the danger. Considerable sums of money were immediately subscribed in the West End for the relief of misery in the East End—certainly quite inadequate to relieve a widely spread destitution, but sufficient to show, at least, good intentions. As to the sentences which were passed upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two and three months’ imprisonment.
The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society. Beginning with the autumn and throughout the winter, I was asked to lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland. As I had, as a rule, accepted the first invitation I received to stay the night after the lecture, it consequently happened that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next night in the narrow abode of a working family. Every night I saw considerable numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s small parlour, or in the reception-rooms of the wealthy, the most animateddiscussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late hour of the night—with hope in the workman’s home, with apprehension in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.
In the mansions, the main question was to know, ‘What do the socialists want? What do they intend to do?’ and next, ‘What are the concessions which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given moment in order to avoid serious conflicts?’ In these conversations I seldom heard the justice of the socialist contention merely denied, or described as sheer nonsense. But I found also a firm conviction that a revolution was impossible in England; that the claims of the mass of the workers had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less; so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working classes of England as a pledge in the meantime of still more in the future. ‘We are a left-centre country, we live by compromises,’ I was once told by an old member of Parliament, who had had a wide experience of the life of his mother country.
In workmen’s dwellings too, I noticed a difference in the questions which were addressed to me in England to those which I was asked on the Continent. General principles, of which the partial applications will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest the Latin workers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in support of a strike, or organizes the feeding of the children at the schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as a matter of fact. ‘Of course, a hungry child cannot learn,’ a French worker says. ‘It must be fed.’ ‘Of course, the employer was wrong in forcing the workers to strike.’ This is all that is said, and no praise is given on account of such minor concessions by the present individualistsociety to communist principles. The thought of the worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he asks whether it is the Commune, or the unions of workers, or the State which ought to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement alone will be sufficient to maintain Society in working order, and what would be the moral restraint if Society parted with its present repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic government would be capable of accomplishing serious changes in the socialist direction, and whether accomplished facts ought not to precede legislation? and so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions, gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid. But, on the other hand, the impossibility of state administration of industries seemed to have been settled long ago in the workers’ minds, and what chiefly interested most of them were matters of constructive realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make such a realization possible. ‘Well, Kropótkin, suppose that to-morrow we were to take possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea about how to manage them?’ I would, for instance, be asked as soon as we had sat down in a small workman’s parlour. Or, ‘We don’t like the idea of state management of railways, and the present management by private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers owned all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?’ The lack of general ideas was thus supplemented by a desire of going deeper into the details of the realities.
Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways, some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the outside. In France or in Switzerland, the two parties—the workers and the middle classes—not only stood arrayed against each other, but were sharply separated. So itwas, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay in the country I was acquainted with none but workers—I hardly knew more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces, as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a movement, similar to what we had had in Russia in the early seventies, when our youth rushed ‘to the people,’ though by no means so intense, so full of self-sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of ‘charity.’ Here also, in England, a number of people went in all sorts of capacities to live near to the workers: in the slums, in people’s palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that a social revolution had commenced, like the hero of Morris’s comical play, ‘Tables Turned,’ who says that the revolution is not simply coming, but has already begun. As always happens however with such enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a long, tedious, preparatory, uphill work that had to be done, very many of them retired from active propaganda, and now stand outside of it as mere sympathetic onlookers.
I took a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades we started, in addition to the three socialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘Freedom,’ which continues to live up to the present day. At the same time I resumed mywork on anarchism where I had had to interrupt it at the moment of my arrest. The critical part of it was published during my Clairvaux imprisonment by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’ Now I began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society—so far as it can now be forecast—in a series of articles published at Paris in ‘La Révolté.’ Our ‘boy,’ ‘Le Révolté,’ prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, was compelled to change its title-page and now appeared under a feminine name. Later on these articles were published in a more elaborate form in a book, ‘La Conquête du Pain.’
These researches caused me to study more thoroughly certain points of the economic life of our present civilized nations. Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all. It is only the distribution which is defective; and if a social revolution took place, nothing more would be required than for everyone to return to his factory or workshop, Society taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value’ or benefits which now go to the capitalist. I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, so as to neglect, and often to prevent, the production of the very necessaries for life on a sufficient scale. None of these are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means nothing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is now considered as necessary for a decent existence. But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at thesame time both enjoyable manual work and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ which are now published as a book under the title of ‘Fields, Factories, and Workshops.’
Another great question also engrossed my attention. It is known to what conclusions Darwin’s formula, ‘The Struggle for Existence,’ had been developed by most of his followers, even the most intelligent of them, such as Huxley. There is no infamy in civilized society, or in the relations of the whites towards the so-called lower races, or of the ‘strong’ towards the ‘weak,’ which would not have found its excuse in this formula.
Already during my stay at Clairvaux I saw the necessity of completely revising the formula itself of ‘struggle for existence’ in the animal world, and its applications to human affairs. The attempts which had been made by a few socialists in this direction had not satisfied me, when I found in a lecture of a Russian zoologist, Prof. Kessler, a true expression of the law of struggle for life. ‘Mutual aid,’ he said in that lecture, ‘is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle; but for theprogressiveevolution of the species the former is far more important than the latter.’ These few words—confirmed unfortunately by only a couple of illustrations (to which Syévertsoff, the zoologist of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, added one or two more)—contained for me the key of the whole problem. When Huxley published in 1888 his atrocious article, ‘The Struggle for Existence: a Program,’ I decided to put in a readable form my objections to his way of understanding the struggle for life, among animals as well as among men, the materials for which I had accumulated during a couple of years. I spoke of it to my friends. However, I found that the comprehension of ‘struggle for life’ in the sense of a war-cry of ‘Woe to the weak,’ raised to the height of a commandment of nature revealed by science, was so deeply inrooted in this countrythat it had become almost a matter of religion. Two persons only supported me in my revolt against this misinterpretation of the facts of nature. The editor of the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Mr. James Knowles, with his admirable perspicacity, at once seized the gist of the matter, and with a truly youthful energy encouraged me to take it in hand. The other was H. W. Bates, whom Darwin has truly described in his autobiography as one of the most intelligent men whom he ever met. He was secretary of the Geographical Society, and I knew him. When I spoke to him of my intention he was delighted with it. ‘Yes, most assuredly write it,’ he said. ‘That is true Darwinism. It is a shame to think of what “they” have made of Darwin’s ideas. Write it, and when you have published it, I will write you a letter in that sense which you may publish.’ I could not have had better encouragement, and began the work which was published in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ under the titles of ‘Mutual Aid among Animals,’ ‘among Savages,’ ‘among Barbarians,’ ‘in the Mediæval City,’ and ‘among Ourselves.’ Unfortunately I neglected to submit to Bates the first two articles of this series, dealing with animals, which were published during his lifetime; I hoped to be soon ready with the second part of the work, ‘Mutual Aid among Men,’ but it took me several years before I completed it, and in the meantime Bates was no more among us.
The researches which I had to make during these studies in order to acquaint myself with the institutions of the barbarian period and with those of the mediæval free cities, led me to another important research—the part played in history by the state, since its last incarnation in Europe, during the last three centuries. And on the other side, the study of the mutual-support institutions at different stages of civilization, led me to examine the evolutionist bases of the sense of justice and of morality in man.
Within the last ten years the growth of socialism in England has taken a new aspect. Those who judge only by the numbers of socialist and anarchist meetings held in the country, and the audiences attracted by these meetings, are prone to conclude that socialist propaganda is now on the decline. And those who judge the progress of it by the numbers of votes that are given to those who claim to represent socialism in Parliament, jump to the conclusion that there is now hardly any socialist propaganda in England. But the depth and the penetration of the socialist ideas can nowhere be judged by the numbers of votes given in favour of those who bring more or less socialism into their electoral programmes. Still less so in England. The fact is, that out of the three directions of socialism which were formulated by Fourier, Saint Simon, and Robert Owen, it is the latter which prevails in England and Scotland. Consequently it is not so much by the numbers of meetings or socialist votes that the intensity of the movement must be judged, but by the infiltration of the socialist point of view into the trade unionist, the co-operative, and the so-called municipal socialist movements, as well as the general infiltration of socialist ideas all over the country. Under this aspect, the extent to which the socialist views have penetrated is vast in comparison to what it was in 1886; and I do not hesitate to say that it is simply immense in comparison to what it was in the years 1876-82. I may also add that the persevering endeavours of the tiny anarchist groups have contributed, to an extent which makes us feel that we have not wasted our time, to spread the ideas of No-Government, of the rights of the individual, of local action, and free agreement—as against those of State all-mightiness, centralization, and discipline, which were dominant twenty years ago.
Europe altogether is traversing now a very bad phase of the development of the military spirit. This was an unavoidable consequence of the victory obtained by theGerman military empire, with its universal military service system, over France in 1871, and it was already then foreseen and foretold by many—in an especially impressive form by Bakúnin. But the counter-current already begins to make itself felt in modern life.
As to the way communist ideas, divested of their monastic form, have penetrated in Europe and America, the extent of that penetration has been immense during the twenty-seven years that I have taken an active part in the socialist movement and could observe their growth. When I think of the vague, confused, timid ideas which were expressed by the workers at the first congresses of the International Workingmen’s Association, or which were current at Paris during the Commune insurrection, even amongst the most thoughtful of the leaders, and compare them with those which have been arrived at to-day by an immense number of working-men, I must say they seem to me as two entirely different worlds.
There is no period in history—with the exception, perhaps, of the period of the insurrections in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries (which led to the birth of the mediæval Communes), during which a similarly deep change has taken place in the current conceptions of Society. And now, in my fifty-seventh year, I am even more deeply convinced than I was twenty-five years ago, that a chance combination of accidental circumstances may bring about in Europe a revolution far more important and as widely spread as that of 1848; not in the sense of mere fighting between different parties, but in the sense of a deep and rapid social reconstruction; and I am convinced that whatever character such movements may take in different countries, there will be displayed in all of them a far deeper comprehension of the required changes than has ever been displayed within the last six centuries; while the resistance which such movements will meet in the privileged classes will hardly have the character of obtuse obstinacy which made revolutionsassume the violent character which they took in times past.
To obtain this immense result was well worth the efforts which so many thousands of men and women of all nations and all classes have made within the last thirty years.
THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED