l8 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



"Oh!" he broke out, "if I could but get you to see that this whole order under 

 which you live is artificial and unnecessary! But we are befogged by the systems 

 we impose upon our imagination and call science. We have been taught to regard his- 

 tory as a necessary process, until we come to think it must also be a good one; that 

 all that has ever happened ought to have happened just so and no otherwise. And 

 thus we justify everything past and present, however palpably in contradiction with 

 our own intuitions. But these are mere figments of the brain. History, for the 

 most part, believe me, is one gigantic error and crime. It ought to have been other 

 than it was; and we ought to be other than we are. There is no natural and inevi- 

 table evolution towards good; no co-operating with the universe, other than by 

 connivance at its crimes. That little house the brain builds to shelter its own weak- 

 ness must be torn down if we would face the truth and pursue the good. Then we 

 shall see amid what blinding storms of wind and rain, what darkness of elements 

 hostile or indifferent, our road lies across the mountains towards the city of our 

 desire. Then and then only shall we understand the spirit of revolution. That 

 there are things so bad that they can only be burnt up by fire; that there are obstruc- 

 tions so immense that they can only be exploded by dynamite; that the work of 

 destruction is a necessary preliminary to the work of creation, for it is the destruction 

 of the prison walls wherein the spirit is confined; and that in that work the spirit 

 itself is the only agent, imhelped by powers of nature or powers of a world beyond — 

 that is the creed — no, I will not say the creed, that is the insight and vision by which 

 we of the Revolution live. By that I believe we shall triumph. But whether we 

 triumph or no, our life itself is a victory, for it is a life lived in the spirit. To shatter 

 material bonds that we may bind the closer the bonds of the soul, to slough dead 

 husks that we may liberate living forms, to abolish institutions that we may evoke 

 energies, to put off the material and put on the spiritual body, that, whether we 

 fight with the tongue or the sword, is the inspiration of our movement, that, and that 

 only, is the true ai^d inner meaning of anarchy." 



How many of us ever dreamed of anarchy voiced in words like these ? 

 And yet MacCarthy is possibly the speaker with whom the master of the 

 banquet (who is, of course, Mr. Dickinson in propria persona) has least 

 sympathy. In our own experience, each new page left us more convinced 

 that we were deahng with a man who had seen the whole in its parts 

 and the parts in the whole, who had kept his feet upon soUd earth while 

 his eyes were turned to the signals from the heights, so that with each 

 step we found ourselves more wiUing to follow his upward leadership. 

 And the heights to which he leads us, or rather to which he invites us 

 to. cHmb by his side, are always beautiful, albeit occasionally dimly 

 descried by myopic eyes or not quite to be scaled by the wayfaring man. 



