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120 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
answer, they tell
us "that the accumulated forces in our
social and economic life, culminating in a political act of
violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere,
manifested in storm and lightning. To thoroughly appreciate
the truth of this view, one must feel intensely
the indignity of our social wrongs one's ; very being
must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions
of people are daily made to endure. Indeed, unless
we have become a part of humanity, we cannot even
faintly understand the just indignation that accumulates
in a human soul, the burning, surging passion that makes
the storm inevitable." (28) Such explosions of rage
one would expect from the unreasonable and the childlike.
They are bursts of passion that end in the knocking
of one's head against a stone wall. This may in truth be
the psychology of the violent, yet it cannot be the psychology
of a reasoning mind. This may explain the action of
those who have lost all control over themselves or even
the action of a class that has not advanced beyond the
stages of futile outbursts of passion, of aimless and suicidal
violence, and of self-destructive rage. But it is incredible
that it should be considered by anyone
as reasonable
or intelligent, or, least of all, revolutionary.
Probably still other causes of terrorism exist, but certainly
the chief are those above mentioned. The writings
of Bakounin, Nechayeff, Kropotkin, and Most; the
miserable conditions which surround the life of a multitude
of impoverished people the often savage repression
;
of any attempts on the part of the workers to improve
their conditions ; corrupt courts and parliaments and unjust
laws; a false conception of ethics; a high-wrought
nervous tension combined with compassion the egocentric
philosophy which deifies the individual and would
;
press its claims even to the destruction of all else in the