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challenge,
SEEKING THE CAUSES 95
and take that life! "If
you cannonade us, we
shall dynamite you," said Louis Lingg. (8) And we answer,
"If you dynamite us, we shall cannonade you."
And in so far as this is our sole attitude toward these
rebels, wherein are we superior For Lingg to say that
was at least heroic. For us so to answer is not even
heroic. Our paid men see to it. It is done as a matter
of course and forgotten.
These men say that justice exists only for the powerful,
that the poor are robbed, and that "the lamp of their
soul" is
put out. They beg us to listen, and we will not.
They ask us to read, and we will not. "It takes a loud
voice to make the deaf hear," said Vaillant. They then
give all they
have to execute one dreadful deed of
propaganda in order to awaken us. Must even this fail
We can hang them, but can we forget them After
every deed of the anarchists the press, the police, and the
pulpit carry on for weeks a frenzied discussion over
their atrocities. The lives of these Propagandists of the
Deed are then crushed out, and in a few months even
their names are forgotten. There seems to be an innate
dread among us to seek the causes that lie at the bottom
of these distressing symptoms of our present social
regime. We prefer,
it seems, to become like that we contemplate.
We seek to terrorize them, as they seek to
terrorize us. As the anarchist believes that oppression
may be ended by the murder of the oppressor, so society
cherishes the thought that anarchism may be ended by
the murder of the anarchist. Are not our methods in
truth the same, and can any man doubt that both are
equally futile and senseless Both the anarchy of the
powerful and the anarchy of the weak are stupid and
abortive, in that they lead to results diametrically op-