MR. ASQUITH AND THE ANARCHISTS.
MR. ASQUITH made a grave mistake on Tuesday. He may be perfectly right in his contempt for 4narchists, though every week brings new evidence of the danger they cause to the liberty of mankind, each crime they commit increasing the readiness to resort to repressive laws ; but no one was accusing him of timidity or of exaggerated apprehensions of evil from small bodies of fanatics. He may also be right—we think he is—in leaving Anarchists, as well as all other men of extreme opinions, to speak aloud if they please, and even to disseminate their speeches. Morally, society has a clear right to stop all utterances tending to produce crime or danger to itself ; but we agree with the Home Secretary that it is more expedient to punish acts than to suppress talk, however reprehensible. Violent speech does with some minds act as a relief to dangerous thoughts, and though the effect of such speech on the number of crypto-lunatics always abroad amongst us ought to be considered, still the English are not a people to take fire from blazing words. We cannot in this country shut the Post Office, and while we cannot, we see little use in closing little meetings, because those who attend them like their orators to rave. Guy Fawkes never attended a public meeting in his life, nor is there any, evidence that the author of the recent massacre in Barcelona, whom even Mr. Burns, in his strange speech of Tuesday, sternly denounced, had been previously inflamed by passionate oratory. But it is one thing to tolerate evil and 'smother to permit it. Mr. Asquith entirely forgot that every meeting in Trafalgar Square is sanctioned by the Home Secretary after its object has been carefully ascertained, and that in consequence the ignorant, at all events, believe the object of any permitted meeting to be permissible. Mr. Asquith knows perfectly well what the Anarchist doctrines are ; he knew that the speakers intended to denounce the just execution of the Chicago bomb-throwers, and yet he gave to the meeting his official sanction. That would have been a grave error even if the British Government stood alone in the world, for no Government has a right to permit the approval of murder, even if it thinks such approval will confine itself te empty, though violent words. The right to throw bombs for the destruction of innocent lives is not, as Mr. Balfour pointed out, an open question, nor one to be defended by any plea that society is badly organised. Murder is at least as bad as indecency, yet a meeting in defence of the doctrine that all citizens should go naked in order to establish their perfect equality—a doctrine once, at least, preached and acted upon—would be very soon interrupted by the police. Great Britain, however, is not an isolated State. She is surrounded by com- munities which regard Anarchist outrages with even exaggerated horror and apprehension ; and for a Govern- ment like ours formally to permit a meeting intended at all events to palliate them, is a breach of the comity of nations which, if Kings had been blown up, would never have been allowed. Suppose the Spanish Ambassador to complain to Lord Rosebery that the outrage at Barcelona had been declared in Trafalgar Square a deed necessarily arising from misery, where would the answer have been found ? Lord Rosebery would have said, of course, that the Government could not control evil tongues, and that would be true ; but the Ambassador would reply that it could avoid lending the Home Office to the owners of those evil tongues, and where is the rejoinder to that retort Mr. Asquith has just as much control over Trafalgar Square as over the Home Office, and admits that he ]as, and he used it to allow an Anarchist meet- ing which the fiery language he must have expected • was employed. What is that except to admit that active "Anarchy," otherwise the destruction of society and its component members by dynamite bombs, is a doctrine which may be legitimately defended in a Government hall Mr. Asquith will doubtless say, if he reads this article, what he said in Parliament : that we make too much of the violent language of a minute group, containing, in all probability, a great many semi-lunatics. We hardly think it is possible to make too much of it, and this for a reason widely different from the one pleaded by Mr. Balfour. The leader of the Opposition pointed out quite justly that the fewness of the Anarchists or Nihilists made no difference, for that science—benevolent science— had armed them with weapons which made them for- midable enemies of society, able, let us say, to destroy the present Government by killing all its Members. That is true, and, from its point of view, conclusive; but the anti-social fanatics may work worse mischief still, they may turn a whole generation of men into fierce Re- actionaries. It is part of the constitution of the human mind that all parties are judged more or less by their extreme wings, that Tories are believed to be undeveloped Lord Eldons, and Liberals to be men who are progressing towards-sympathy with Anarchy. An act like the Jewish expulsion casts a shadow not on Alexander III. alone, but on autocracy, and every Anarchist crime multiplies by thousands those who believe that Liberalism leads straight to the dissolution of human society. Mr. Asquith knows history well, and must know how terribly such reactionary fits have impeded the progress of human society ; what an amount of human misery, for example, was produced or protracted by the short-lived atrocities of the Reign of Terror. It was forty years before the Governments, and the classes which support them, got over the belief that popular suffrage meant the guillotine, and that all popular movement must be repressed with military energy and swiftness. The Anarchist outbreaks, if they continue, and especially if they continue in free countries, will have exactly the effect of the Reign of Terror. Lauthier, the man who has just tried to kill the Servian Minister in Paris, not because he was a Minister' but because he looked rich, has, we doubt not, turned 50,000 Parisian bourgeois into conservatives, and doubled the readiness of the Police and Army for violent acts of repression. Even words have often this effect. We venture to say that the angry speech of Mr. John Burns on Tuesday will cost the Government ten thousand votes. Mr. John Burns is a man whom in general we respect, for we believe him to be perfectly sincere, alike in his collectivism and in his abhorrence of violence, but he got so heated by the debate that the total impression of his speech is, that although murder is always both wrong and inexpedient, poverty is alike a cause for it and a palliative. Bomb-throwing is, at all events, no worse than war with savages. We quote the words from the Times' report. "He appealed to the House to pass over the foolish and criminal vapourings of a few men who were driven to utter them by poverty, which was the result of capitalism and commercialism. Hypocritical protests were raised against two or three men being killed by the Nihilists of Russia, or the Anarchists of Spain ; yet all the while they were themselves pursuing degraaled and ignoble ends abroad, in the furtherance of which they allowed two or three thousand savages to be shot down." Nothing more injudicious could possibly be sad. Poverty is not even an excuse for theft, nor would any human being be less poor if all the stall- takers at the opera-house were blown up to-morrow. As to the savage wars, they are at least wars, and the savages when shot are men endeavouring to kill. It may be—nay, is—most unjust to Mr. Burns, who is one of the best of the Labour Members, but thousands who read his words will say : "This is what Liberalism comes to in the end—it approves Anarchy—we will support it no more." It seems to us, who are Liberal-Unionists, not Tories, that a Liberal Minister should, of all men in our day, be most eager to express his horror of Anarchy, his resolution to do-what in him lies to dissociate his party utterly even from communication with so dangerous a faction. Mr. .Asquith, as Minister, has done so in action, steadily refusing to release all dynamiters, and he should not in words declare that his feeling is only contempt. That is the right feeling for those who hang him in effigy, which is only a concrete method of swearing ; but it is not the right feeling towards those who approve or even extenuate the deeds of the assassins of Barcelona. That it is a disinterested one7we admit, and so will Mr. Asquith, if he will just remember the storm of feeling which swept over the country after the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish. One death in that instance made all England for a moment Conservative, and it would not take many Anarchist crimes to make Liberalism impossible in Europe for twenty years, to the enormous impediment of human progress. Mr. Asquith may not care for the danger to persons involved in the Anarchist propaganda, but at least he should care for the danger to the ideas which he professes to consider, and probably does consider, semi- divine.
Previous page
