A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

four ringleaders were killed by garrotting. In September 1893, the Spanish Prime Minister,
Martinez de Campos, was attacked by an anarchist as he reviewed troops in Barcelona; two bombs
thrown by a man named Pallas killed his horse and six people, but left him only bruised. Pallas was
garrotted. Seven weeks later, two bombs were thrown in a theatre in Barcelona, causing panic and
leaving twenty-two dead and fifty injured. The police now began to make indiscriminate arrests -
the figure ran into thousands - and tortured suspects to extort confessions. Seven people confessed
and were executed, including the man who had admitted the theatre bombing.
In June 1896, a bomb was thrown at a religious procession in Barcelona, killing eleven and injuring
forty. The premier, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, ordered more mass arrests and torture. Four
suspected terrorists were executed, seventy-six sentenced to prison terms. An account of the
tortures published in a Paris newspaper caused an international outcry. In August 1897, Castillo
was taking a holiday at a spa in the Basque mountains when he was approached by a pleasantlooking
blond young man, who produced a revolver and killed him. Madame de Castillo hurled
herself on him screaming ‘Assassin.’ ‘I am not an assassin,’ replied the young man gravely, ‘I am
an avenger.’ He was in due course garrotted.
In September 1898, the empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of the emperor Franz Joseph, was
stabbed to death by a young Italian named Lucheni. He had remarked to a fellow workman: ‘Ah,
how I’d like to kill somebody. But it must be somebody important, so it gets in the papers.’
The next victim was the last of the nineteenth century. King Humbert of Italy had escaped one
assassination attempt in 1897, when a man tried to stab him in his carriage; he moved too quickly.
But in July 1900 he was distributing prizes to athletes in Monza when a man stepped up to the
carriage and killed him with four revolver shots. The assassin was an Italian named Bresci, who
had travelled from America. He was sentenced to life imprisonment - since Italy had no death
penalty - but committed suicide in prison.
In America, an unbalanced young Polish immigrant named Leon Czolgosz carried a clipping about
the assassination of King Humbert wherever he went. He attended anarchist meetings, but seemed
so muddled and strange that the comrades suspected him of being a police agent. In September
1901, Czolgosz stood in a line in Buffalo, New York State, to shake hands with President
McKinley, who was visiting the American Exposition. He shot McKinley, who died eight days
later. McKinley was the third American president to die at the hands of an assassin, the previous
two being Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield - the latter shot by an unbalanced religious maniac
named Charles Guiteau who liked to describe himself as the premier of England. Czolgosz was
electrocuted, although one psychiatrist diagnosed him as suffering from delusions. And McKinley’s
successor, Theodore Roosevelt, pushed Congress into amending the Immigration Act to exclude
anyone who taught disbelief in or opposition to organised government.
In England they had the good sense not to get too excited about anarchism. This was perhaps due to
the fact that the English have never shown much interest in ideas, unable to accept that they could
make the slightest practical difference. So every variety of anarchist and revolutionary was able to
find refuge in London, and be reasonably sure of receiving only minimum surveillance from the
police. The club in Berner Street in which Jack the Ripper committed the first of his doublemurders
was a well-known meeting place for foreign revolutionaries, one of many in London.
Because they were allowed to talk as much as they liked about violent revolution, they made no
attempt to practise it. The only ‘anarchist outrage’ of the 1890s in London was an attempt by a
feeble-minded youth, Martial Bourdin, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory (February 1892); the