A HIGH PRIEST OF ANARCHY

Otago Witness, Issue 3304, 11 July 1917, Page 53

A HIGH PRIEST OF ANARCHY

By Jessie Mack at. Perhaps there are few names with bo bogey-iiice a sound as the name of Emma Goldman, the Russian Jewess, who for 31 years has been an American leader in the fight against all institutions. To most people she stands a petroleuse, a Moenad, a madwoman, whose red hand is against all men. Was a strike organised, Emma Goldman was at the bottom of it. Was a Pinkerton war in progress, Emma Goldman had stirred up the strife. Was a President assassinated, Emma Goldman instigated the deed. But, as time goes on, it has been realised in America that the bulk of these charges remain unproven, and that, though Emma Goldman is undoubtedly a foe to most of the institutions, sanctions, and beliefs of civilisation, she is not an enemy to humanity, not personally a thief, a fireraiser, or a murderess, and that she has a kind of gospel out of which she expects to evolve peace, equity and kindness, prosperity and freedom. Six years ago this ultra-radical thinker presented this gospel of hers in a powerfully written book, "Anarchism and Other Essays." A fellow Anarchist, Hippolyte Havel, writes a notice of her life as a preface. Through this sympathetic medium we catch the picture of a strong, kindly, idealistic little Jewish girL sent away by her comparatively prosperous parents from Cour'and to Konigsberg, in Eastern Prussia, where she stayed with relatives till her thirteenth year and obtained the foundation of a good education. Then she went to St. Petersburg with her family. The "good little Gretchen" stage of worshipping good Queen Louise soon passed am : d the terrible inequalities around her. Conscription, industrial slavery, Czarism, the tyranny of the Orthodox Church, all nressed in upon her, and it was a case of Siberia or America. To America, with one understanding sister, she went at 17, eager to breathe the air of freedom and worship the name of Washington. But the air of freedom was so thick with squalor, poverty, brutal exploitation, repression, " graft," and the drab aftermath of undigested Puritanism that Emma, point by point, dropped her search for political panaceas, and accepted the man's gospel of Anarchism offered her by the friends she found in that disillusioned underworld. Her " emancipation " was hastened by a youthful and uncongenial marriage. The young pair soon parted. From that time Emma Goldman lived and loved, wrought and taught, outside the common conventions and sanctions, yet not without the sanctions and standards of her own conscience and She exercised her remarkable intelligence for the common good as she saw it; hounded unjustly to the depths of misery and haunts of degradation, she posseted her soul and refused to go under. When her lectures on freethought and economic rebellion rrw.de her name notorious, sho quietly changed it to earn an honest living as nurse and as interpreter. Her intimates were rebels like herself, drawn from evcrv feudalised country in Europe, but not libertines, or in the common sense criminals, though the man with whom she appeared most closely associated, Alexander Berkman, •was sentenced to 22 vears' imnrisonment for attempting the life of Henrv Olav Friek. chairman of the Carnegie Steel Comn'-nv, during the Homestead strike In 1892, and held responsible for the dna+h of 11 men killed by Pinkerton*s pnMce. Tne act of Berkman. as well ft .* tho~e of other slayers or would-be "layers of the Oesslors of En rone and America, was not erartly defended by Emma Goldman : but the psvchology of the passion of conscious persona! wron? and unselfish pity leading up to such attempts was expounded by her in strong terms. Par-

ticularly she resented the imputation that these up boilings of outraged humanity were the result of Anarchism, and time bo far proved her contention as to show the police themselves to be often the doers of deeds attributed to Anarchists. A year in prison on the charge of inciting to riot; travels on the Continent ( bringing her into touch with th« rebel intelligentzia of all countries); studies of Whitman, Hardy, Thoreau, Grierson, [bsen, Zola, Tolstoy, Bjornson; friendly relations with people as far apart as the Rossettis, Prince Kropatkin, Tom Mann, Louise Michel, and Francisco Ferrer j quiet spells as nurse or interpreter after the lurid limelight of her lecturing tours —all these have gone to fill up a lifetime of 48 years more packed with experiences than any other -woman's one can recall.

Wha*. Emma Goldman is thinking of the war. of President Wilson, and of the world-situation to-day I do not know. It is certain to be unlike what every ordinary person is thinking, and certain to be no more than half right, if as much. Yet Emma Goldman, as revealed in this book of hers, is a force to be reckoned with—an irritant of undoubted value in civilisation's besetting diseases of inertia, and indifferentism, and a stimulus to healthy thought, even when her conclusions are essentially fallacious and out of perspective. One sees her as the earnest priestess of an impossible faith, an indefatigable seeker for some magic Isle of Bfmini never to be seen by mortal eyes, and the haughty, handsome, powerful face that fronts the reader is nowise mean or gross or degenerate. What is the Anarchy to which she was converted by the Russian knout and American caoitalism? It is not fire-raising or thievery or assa~sination, as she sees and preaches it. Here is her definition of it: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by manmade law: the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. Sne proceeds to argue that " Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Uovernment, ihe dominion of human conduct, repre-ent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails." And starting on this uncompromising basis, she raises a wonderful edifice of reasoning out of the scattered bricks of the disintegrated universe, and one has to read on and on through a series of fresh, crisp, informative pages before one definitely strikes the loose joist, the wind-crack in the wall, the warping of timber, that sets tiie whole awry. The things she relates against governments, institutions, creeds, and philosophies are so terribly and obviously true, the facts she produces are so well marshalled, the acumen that strips the veil from hj pocrisv and fatuity is so keen, and the forlorn hope that looks for something to grow where nothing was sown is so real that it takes the fair-minded reader quite a while to seo that the humanitarianism that condemns ever}' mass-grouping of humanity is Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out. Out of nothing nothing comes. If mankind can combino to no good purpo:e, what individual elements of social cohesion can possibly exist? Resoh-ed to its elements, Anarchism is the quintessence of intellectual oligarchy. Emma Goldman has a deeper contempt for Demos and his opinions than she has for the Czar:

Tiie majority, she says, represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him Avho minora its own soul and mind poverty. That accounts for the unprecedented rke of a man like Roosevelt, He embodies the very worst element of mob psychology. A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity; what it craves is display. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass. Thus, poor in ideals and vulgar in soul, Roosevelt continues to be the man of the hour. It is good that we should sometimes seo'the seamy side of the civilisation we live in as Einma Goldman sees penal system of America, with its police scandals, its jobbery, its tortures, and its bullyings. We need to see how Spain treated Ferrer, and to know the things that made Vaillaux throw the bomb that led first to his own death and then to the retributive assassination of President Oarnotj and why Santa Caserio shot King Humbert, the crown and head of the Italy he knew —Santa Caserio, whom his teacher, Ada Negri, the great woman poet of Italy, called "a sweet, tender plant, of too fine a texture to stand the cruel strain of the world." We are glad, however, that Emma Goldman has nothing to say for the murderer of Lincoln and the assassin of Elizabeth of Austria. But the American Sunday, and Prohibition, and Socialism are all attacked in the same trenchant style, and she is cold, sad; and cynical on the results, if not the principle, of woman suffrage. Here, indeed, we catch something tangible, standardising, in the midst of this froth of negation: The women of Australia and New Zealand can vote and help make the laws. Arc the labour conditions better there than they are m England, where the Suffragettes are making such an heroic struggle? Dora there exist a greater motherhood, happier and freer children than in England? Is woman th-ere no linger considered a mere sex commodity? Fas she emancipated herself from the Puritanical, double standard of morality for men and women? Yes, labour conditions are better here than in England. And a more honoured motherhood exists here, and a happier childhood. Women in New Zealand do think without blinkers on. and men regard them the more respectfully for doing so, and the double standard has a short shrift

in representative New Zealand circles. Since Emma Goldman condemns us thus unheard, it mavbe that she has condemned as hastily in nearer places. For the Anarchist view, like the ultraSocialist, takes in no lights and shades, no harmonising tones: its perspective runs down a ladder, like Chinese pictures. The Anarchist, intellectually, is without father or mother, without a country, without a past, and without a future. For out of the past he draws no possible prototype of the future Utopia in which he behoves; no State, no people ever held together without sanctions, prohibitions, sacrifices, supports—in brief, without a social order. The Anarchist is the product of a faulty social order and the lack of strong law. The tragedy of Emma Goldman is the seeing of half a world, of which she cannot by any imagination make wholeness.