124 



such as to immediately become adult.* 

 It is easy to understand how the man with- 

 out work, in the horrors of hunger, his brain 

 exhausted from want of nourishment, can 

 imagine that by stabbing a policeman, by 

 throwing a bomb, by making a barricade, or 

 by taking part in a rising, he is hastening the 

 realisation of a social ideal in which iniquity 

 will have disappeared. 



And even without this case we can under- 

 stand that the impulsive force of sentiment 

 predominate with certain people, can drive 

 them by a generous impatience to some real 

 attempt and not imaginary like those which 

 the police of all times and countries submit 

 to the repression of courts to spread terror 

 among those who feel political or economic 

 power slipping from their hands. 



But scientific socialism, notably in Germany 

 under the direct influence of Marxism, has 

 completely abandoned these old methods of 

 revolutionary romanticism. Often used, they 

 have always miscarried, and for that very 

 reason the dominant classes fear them no 



* It is this lack of even elementary notions of geology, 

 of individual or collective biology, which causes many 

 men of the people with lively minds not disciplined in 

 scientific methods, to prefer to satisfy themselves with 

 the vagueness of the anarchical ideal even when they 

 repudiate the use of violent means. 



I shall always recall as a typical example, a printer of 

 Florence, gentle and intelligent, who, after having heard 

 one of my lectures on Marxian socialism, confessed to me 

 that he no longer clung so much to his anarchist ideas, 

 though he had accepted up till then this programme : 

 "to pass from monarchy to anarchy." 



Such is unfortunately the intellectual consistency of 

 many persons, who only call themselves anarchists 

 because the first ideas of social criticism have been 

 brought to them by some propagandist who fancies he is 



