Untitled

SEEKING THE CAUSES
10J
midst of abundance, that multitudes labored with bent
backs to produce luxuries for the few. Their
eyes were
opened to the wrong of hunger, poverty, unemployment,
of woman and child labor, and of all the miseries that
human souls. And in their revolt
press heavily upon
they saw kings, judges, police officials, legislators, captains
of industry, who were said to be directly responsible
for these social ills. It was not society or a system
or even a class that was to blame; it was McKinley, or
Carnot, or Frick.
And those whom some worshiped as
heroes, these men loathed as tyrants.
The powerful have thought to deprive the poor of
souls. They have liked to think that they would forever
bear their cross in peace. Yet when anarchism comes
and touches the souls of the poor it finds not dead blocks
of wood or mere senseless cogs in an industrial machine;
it finds the living, who can pray and weep, love
and hate. No matter how seared their souls become,
there is yet a possibility that their whole beings may revolt
under wrong. When the anarchist deifies even the
veriest wreck of society
— this individual, "this god,
— though in the germ" when he inflames it with dignity
and with pride, when he fills its whole being with a
thirst for awful and incredible vengeance, you have Duval,
Lingg, Ravachol, Luccheni, and Bonnot. Add to
their desire for revenge the philosophy of anarchism and
of our schoolbooks, that individuals are the makers of
history, and the result is terrorism.
Other students of terrorism have noted the prevalence
of violence in those countries and times where the
courts are corrupt, where the law is brutal and oppressive,
or where men are convinced that no available machinery
exists to execute the ends of justice.
This latter
is the explanation given for the numerous lynchings