THE ANARCHIST GOSPEL.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 78, 31 March 1908, Page 4

THE ANARCHIST GOSPEL.

A distinguished . criminologist has hazarded the opinion that Anarchism is a form of lunacy; and certainly the extraordinary conduct of professed Anarchists lends colo_r to the belief that the votaries of this remarkable creed are mentally unbalanced. The bomb outrage just reported from Mew York i 3 a striking case in point. Here we have a young Russian, who has just escaped from a country where his people live in hourly dread of robbery, outrage, and murder to a land where, whatever else can be said for or against it, the freedom of the individual is subject to fewer restrictions than in any other country on earth. In America, if anywhere, we might reasonably expect the victims of the autocratic tyranny that still holds its ground in Europe, to realise the benefits of Constitutional Government and the blessings of social and individual liberty. But this Russian exile, far from appreciating his advantages, conducts himself precisely as if he were still living under the shadow of the Kremlin, and resents any attempt at controlling him with a desperate outburst of homicidal fury. No doubt the unemployed workers who "demonstrated" in New York the other day had good ground for their grievance!.. But the nrtrusion of the Anarchist bomb into the argument certainly encourages the belief that Anarchism as a creed is an evidence of mental disease, and that the best way to deal with it is by the ordinary processes of coercion and restraint.

It is impossible to deny that many professed Anarchists have given proof of their devotion to the cause of Liberty by the most heroic acts of self-sacrifice, even to the surrender of life and everything that makes it worth living. But no sentimental consideration of this sort should blind us to the fact that the Anarchist is the confessed enemy of all that we mean hy social life and civilisation, and that his most striking mental characteristic is an incapacity to submit to any sort of authority, more especially any control that would prevent him from doing precisely as he pleases at other people's expense. In Dubois' " Anarchist Peril," and other works of the kind, can be found ample illustrations of this "Spirit of Revolt" and the terrible consequences that it may entail upon everybody who comes within range of the Anarchistfrenzy. It is characteristic of the mental aberration m which Anarchism seems to originate that the professed adherents of this cult should exaggerate their fervour into a sort of religious devotion and should even glorify those who have fallen victims to their zeal with a sort of mar-tyr-worship. Ravachoh Vaiilant and many other Anarchists who, apart from the extravagant doctrines they professed, were vulgar, common - place murderers, have been actually canonized by the Anarchists, and their fate is annually commemorated by solemn religious ceremonials performed in their honour. Surely we can hardly require more convincing proof of the close alliance between Anarchism and insanity than this perverted and distorted conception of professional murderers as martyrs and saints.