SACRED ANARCHY.
WE just drew attention last week to the remarkable letter in the Daily News of February 2nd, on the creed of M. Ells& Reclus, the great geographer and socialist, who sympathises so cordially with the Nihilist conspirators of Lyons, and was willing to share his imprisonment with Prince Krapotkine, if he could provoke the French Government to include him among the victims of their prosecution. But the subject well deserves a somewhat closer attention, for it is in- deed perhaps the most curious phenomenon of the present day. What M. Elia& Reclus appears to believe is this,—that if once you can dissolve all existing institutions—Government, first of all—and especially get rid of the use of force in any organised way, men will then freely co-operate, first, in working for the production of what all need, and then in sharing—not, if we rightly understand him, equally, but in some reason- able proportion or other, the exact rectitude of which it will not be worth while to dispute—the produce which all have concurred to bring into existence. That we may not be supposed to put utterly incredible opinions into the great geographer's mouth, we will quote his exact language :—" Anarchists object, not to Governments alone, but to every sort of authority. What would you do on board a ship in a storm?' I asked M. Reclus. As Greek sailors,' he answered; choose the ablest mariner amongst us—the one with the best coup d'coil—to take the management of the ship. But we should neither treat him as a captain nor call him one,— simply carry out his directions, as one has to carry out the direc- tions of a surgeon who performs an operation. Every man to his metier." And this great division of property,' I inquired, how would you bring that about?' We don't intend to bring it about at all,' was his reply; we are not so bête as to suppose that it is either desirable or possible to make an equal division of property. But we look upon all property as the common possession of humanity, and we consider that it should be en- joyed in common. There is enough for all, and all should work, and all enjoy the fruits of their labour. But this end can never be attained by Governments, or through irresponsible deputies ; we propose, therefore, to put an end to both." How, in that case, would you protect the weak from the strong, how put down crime and punish criminals ; for the destruction of authority would imply the abolition of tribunals, police, and soldiers?' The man who commits a crime,' he said, interferes with my freedom, impedes my liberty of action. He would be brought before one of the groups into which society would spontaneously resolve itself, and—I do not say punished—restrained. But we should not require courts and policemen for that." The serious belief that all property is to be enjoyed in common, and that there will yet be no scramble for the enjoyment of it, limited as it is in quantity, or at least no scramble which "the groups into which society would spontaneously resolve itself" would not be able "to restrain" without "punishing," is one of those amazing states of mind which it takes a good deal of consideration to distinguish from sheer insanity. The man who said that he was the son of Apollo, and when reminded that he had formerly spoken of himself as the son of Jupiter, promptly replied, "So I am, but by a different mother," was hardly, to our conception, in a more hopeless condition of confusion than the man who at the same time regards all our existing in- stitutions as the mere result of artificially applied force, and yet refuses to see that the disposition to apply such artificial force must itself be natural, else Government could never have reached the dimensions it has. What M. Ells& Reclus and his friends virtually say is this,—' Society, as we have it, is the child of artifice ; our desire to return to a happier state of things is the child of Nature,' and when we turn upon them, and say, yet we thought you regarded your own violent and exceptional measures for producing anarchy as the children of artifice,' they reply virtually, like the lunatic,—' So we do, but by a different mother.'
Men who are driven into paradoxes of this fierce description cannot, of course, whatever their command of definite knowledge —and M. lisee Reclus's command of it is said to be absolutely enormous—be regarded as rational beings. It is not rational in any sense to talk of the groups into which society would resolve itself, as soon as existing institutions were dissolved, as having to commence anew the restraining functions of those institu- tions, and yet to arraign all our present arrangements of that kind as absolutely bad ; it is not rational, in any sense, to talk of the impossibility of making any equal division of property, and yet to represent it as the most natural thing in the world that all property and all work should be shared by all, without any arrangements for forcibly equalising the proportions. All this reminds us of the violent incongruity of which we have so much experience in dreams, and so little, as a rule, in waking hours. Bat, perhaps, the oddest thing of all is to note the highly artificial character of some of the moral obligations to which these Anarchists passionately cling, while they denounce courts of justice, marriage, punishment, police, all the ordinary out- come of our common life, with such unimaginable resent- ment. In the earlier part of his letter, the Daily News correspondent had explained that Prince Krapotkine is a foreigner who was never domiciled in France, that he might very likely have got his sentence declared void by appeal- ing to the highest Court on this question as to his liability to the provisions of the French law ; bat, said M. Eliseo Reclus, "he would rather die, than take advantage of an opportunity by which his companions in misfortune could not equally profit." And M. Elisee Reclus, it is declared, shares these highly honour- able prepossessions to the utmost point. "A few days ago, when in all earnestness he placed himself at the disposal of the Lyons examining Judge, he informed his mother that he might have to go to prison. Go,' she answered, if you consider it your duty.' He has further proved his willingness to enter the lion's den, by asking the Prefect of Lyons for an order to visit Prince Krapot- kine at the liaison d'ArrItt ; and if he receives the order, he will go." In other words, while all the ordinary bonds of society seem to these Anarchists bonds in the basest sense, the highly
complex instincts which go by the name of "honour," and which appear to impose on colleagues the duty of suffering simul- taneously in the same cause, even when they cannot alleviate each other's sufferings by so doing, except so far as the very thought that they are all suffering simultaneously, though not in any actual companionship, for the same cause, may perhaps constitute such an alleviation,—are glorified for them into almost religious impulses. Yet is it possible to conceive any instincts more subtly evolved from the very depth of that social life which produces all the conventions, than this delicate sense of esprit de corps which considers it almost disgraceful to live at ease while a friend who shares all your views is suffering for those views, and while you might, if you pleased, be suffering for them too ? There are plenty of primitive social conditions in which such a feeling as this would be simply nuintelligible,—in which men who would willingly go to the stake to save a friend, would be wholly unable to see any opportunity of easing his suffer- ings by merely bringing to his knowledge that another of his colleagues who might be comparatively happy and at rest, had voluntarily elected to be miserable too. Yet this highly artificial thread of honour apparently binds these men who are crying out for the immediate loosing of all the more ordinary bonds of social life.
Nevertheless, the explanation of the riddle—so far as it has an explanation—will probably be found in this highly ideal side of the Anarchists' feelings. The less compulsory, the more shadowy, is the thread which ties them, the more obedience they yield it. We are not quite sure, for instance, that if M. Elise's Resins could get Prince Krapotkine out of prison by simply offering to suffer for him, he would feel it half as much his day to do this, as he would to suffer simultaneously with the Prince, so that neither should get any advantage (except, perhaps, some vague sense of spiritual companion- ship) from the other's sufferings. The moment you render it possible for one of the comrades to think of the other as selfish for taking advantage of his friend's sacrifice, that moment probably you kill the desire in him thus to help his friend. Prince Krapotkine would not hear of availing himself of an excuse which would have rendered him more fortunate than his fellow-prisoners. M. Ells& Resists is quite eager to go to prison, also. But if either of them thought that the other was really gaining happiness at his expense, would not the shadowy sense of obligation die away in some feeling of re- proach? We conjecture that what the Anarchists feel so bitterly is the assumed selfishness of human institutions. Marriage, for instance, they say, is an attempt to supply the deficiencies of the obligations prompted by love and honour. And they de- clare that there ought to be no attempt to supply these deficiencies by any less delicate equivalent. Courts of justice and police are an attempt to make men do what they ought, for reasons which do not appeal to the consciences, but only to the fears, of men. Such attempts are looked upon as evil. Again, individual property is a sort of selfishness in itself, a desire to shut somebody out from enjoying, that you may your- self enjoy. Such a feeling is supposed to be detestable. The only answer we know to such ravings is that the provisions which make it impossible for two men to be nourished at the same time by the same food and the same drink, appear to involve the impossibility of a perfect communal life, and that the rest of our life is also modelled on lines in which the ex- clusiveness of various moral and spiritual feelings has an equally prominent share. What, however, the Anarchists appear to feel is the truth that there are certain parts of our human enjoy- ments which are not thus naturally exclusive of the joys of others, that these are some of the highest parts, and that the arrangements of human society often give an almost coarse prominence to those selfish feelings which assert themselves at the cost of others. That may be true, and it may do something to explain the astonishing paradox that learned and, in a sense, honourable men, indulge so passionate a disgust for society as they find it, that they wish to break down every existing institution, and to start de novo, with nothing but fine feelings for guides. But if it does something—a very little—to explain that enormous paradox, it leaves the greater part of it unexplained. It leaves quite unexplained how it is that these men ignore the fiercely competitive— the scrambling—side of human nature altogether, at the very time when they themselves are compelled to begin the scramble by throwing dynamite about amongst the help- less and innocent victims of their own destructive instincts. It is
strange indeed, that these men cannot see that the very im- periousness of their own desire to destroy all the powers that be,—reckless as they are of the consequences to numbers who ought to be as much regarded by them as their own political associates,—is the witness of that selfish fighting and scrambling instinct in themselves which they profess to hope that they maf supersede by their communal arrangements for the future. The party of Anarchy uses force to destroy government, in the hope of moulding everything to human good without any further use of force ; but in using that force, it betrays the secret of its own necessary failure. It is really appealing to the very instincts now properly organised in government, and appealing to them expressly for the purpose of bringing all government to an end ; and a more hopeless wild-goose chase than this, it is impossible for even human ingenuity to invent.
Previous page
