ANARCHISM IN VICTORIA

 It is interesting to know that there is a little group of Anarchists among us who study the martyrology of their brotherhood at Chicago and in all other parts of the world where a brutal executive maintains order, and who sympathise profoundly with constitutional reform by dynamite. The interest, however, it must be admitted, is purely philosophical. No one feels his pulse quickened by a beat at the prospect that some attempt may be made to establish a millennium of universal chaos by force ; and Mr. Chomley's brigade undoubtedly honors the meanest pickpocket about our streets with more attention than it is disposed to lavish on the Head Centre of the Anarchists. The only quarrel these gentlemen can succeed in picking is with a section of the community that is held in quite as light account as themselves, and the spectacle of Secularist and Anarchist excommunicating one another is the last touch that was needed to make their joint existences supremely ridiculous. All the same, it is well to remember that the Anarchists of the Continent are not only formidable by their numbers, but in many instances respectable by the character and position of their leading men. The Commune of Paris, to quote an unfavorable instance, had several very blameless chiefs, such as Rossel and Flourens and Courbet; and the Nihilists of Russia have certainly had more than their fair share of intelligence and character among the youth of the last fifteen years. It may be said that the Carbonari of Italy were even richer in the quality of the men they recruited ; but then the Carbonari were really patriots, plotting for a distinct aim — the liberation of the country ; while the Anarchist as a rule, is independent of national sympathies, and proposes nothing more than to upset everything existing on the chance that it will then be possible to see clearly how a better order can be inaugurated. Now, to an outsider at least, it is possible to understand how a great many wild Utopias may be framed. The maxim of Proudhon, that property is theft, loses a good deal of its explosiveness if it merely means that all property is to be held in common, and that the State is to provide labor and assure a subsistence to every one. The doctrine of emancipated French women, that the law ought to forbid indissoluble contracts between husband and wife as it forbids them between employer and laborer, loses a great deal of its intensity when it is translated into a law making divorce possible for incompatibility of temper. The Anarchist, however, is by principle as much opposed to good as to bad laws. He wishes to make a clean sweep of everything, and to be thoroughly consistent ought to, and no doubt would, destroy every book and work of art that embodied a mischievous idea, as Courbet demolished the column in the Place Vendome because it was built to commemorate homicidal wars. We might therefore expect existing institutions in religion, law and education to be pitilessly doomed, as the French revolutionists destroyed everything connected with the idea of royalty, and the early Protestants everything connected with image worship. What does seem curious is that the men who intend all this, and who are undoubtedly working from definite principles, should not put forward some programme of a future government and of laws to provide for the security of the person. If Anarchy expects to disband the standing armies and the police of the civilised world, and to abolish property and afterwards to see the lives of its own adherents respected, it must be the creed of unusually sanguine men, unless it be the day dream of those who are so hopelessly crazed or brutalised that they cannot understand the world they are living in, or so desperate that they only wish to close with their oppressors.
Probably the last reasons are the true ones. The conditions of a belief in Anarchy appear to be that a society should be over-governed, or at least living at high pressure. We all have enough of the primæval savage about us to resent anything that seems like unnecessary restraint. Every now and again a peer divests himself of a rank which he finds cumbrous, and contracts the comparative liberty of a working man, or a millionaire sets the moral code of society at defiance, or a few thousands of men and women go out into the wilderness to practise polygamy. In England, however, the laws are lax, and restraints are mostly imposed by public opinion, which has not a throat to be cut or a house to be blown up. In Germany the citizen is branded and certificated and drilled and overlooked by the police till almost the idea of spontaneous action disappears. Were there not the outlet of emigration to America, it is certain that the Socialist movement in North Germany would be incomparably stronger than it is. Nevertheless, the German Government recommends itself by certain qualities of a very high kind. It is well meaning, it is intelligent, it has the prestige of success, and it is not corrupt. Naturally, where all these advantages are wanting, as in Russia, the feeling of desperation among all who are educated enough to resent tyranny, and who do not belong to the privileged class that is exempted from it, becomes intolerable and drives men upon extremities. Nevertheless, when we consider that Russia and North Germany possess everything that our wealthy classes and our religious leaders declare to be most desirable, it seems unaccountable that discontent should exist. In neither of those countries have the old landmarks been seriously unsettled. They have courts and aristocracies and a hierarchy of officials, and the people are taught religion in their daily schools, and are shot down or imprisoned if they meet and talk seditiously about the public policy, or try to raise the rate of their daily wage, or to abridge the hours of labor. The philosophical Conservative, who revolts against popular government, and who is never weary of caricaturing the working man for his self-assertion, will find it hard to explain how it is that the Anarchist seems to be the natural and rank product of despotisms. It is certainly curious in one way, because the tendency of men in the United States and the British colonies is not in any way to relax the obligations of law. Englishmen who crossed the seas to escape from feudalism, Irishmen who carried with them a burning hatred of their landlords and English law, unite with German Socialists in enlarging the sphere of the State and subordinating the rights of the individual to the common good. Nevertheless, Anarchists do not thrive either in America or Australia. The reason, surely, is that democratic institutions, by associating every man in the government of the country, deprive all who are commonly reasonable of a sense of injury when they are governed after a fashion which they do not approve. We have not even learned from the recent quarrel among themselves what it is the Victorian Anarchists wish to destroy, and whether they would begin with the Governor and the Houses of Parliament, or would level the churches or blow up the Stock Exchange. Our civilisation is very young, and many of us will admit that it is not yet very perfect. Nevertheless, it is curious to imagine what would become of us if the Anarchists succeeded in wiping out all that has been built up during the last fifty years, so that we were left with no property except what we carried about our persons, and no fruits of accumulated experience except in our minds. We can afford to dismiss the idea as a jest, but to several nations of the Continent it is an ever present possibility, haunting the dreams of statesmen, now and again paralysing the energies of the industrial classes and animating the dreams of fanatics. We may surely claim it as some gain for Liberalism that where it triumphs the Red Spectre cannot exist.

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 28 April 1888, page 8