Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/438

414 so complicated and so wholly unnatural that we seem to stand in the presence of an insolvable psychological puzzle.

When we speak of the “anarchist” we mean to designate by that name a human being who is in a general way the enemy of all that exists, and who seeks to overthrow it by any means, however criminal and atrocious, but who has never been able to give an account in the slightest degree intelligible of the kind of society he thinks of putting in the place of that which he wants to destroy. We hear, indeed, some wild talk about the establishment of a social order, or disorder, without government and without laws and courts of justice, in which everybody can do what he or she pleases, and that when everybody can do what he or she pleases, everybody will do right, and have enough of the good things of the world, and be happy. But all this is so absolutely inconceivable to the human imagination, not to speak of human reason, that only insane people can be supposed to entertain it. The means by which the establishment of this social condition is to be accomplished are equally inexplicable as to their adaptation to the ulterior purpose. We have to draw our conclusions from things which have actually happened. A dynamite bomb is dropped by an anarchist into a church, or a theater or a public procession. A number of people, most of them entirely unknown to the anarchist, are killed or maimed by the explosion. The anarchist and his accomplices are caught, tried and executed as murderers. Another anarchist kills the chief of the state, or the minister, under whose government the trial and the executions have taken place. This anarchist, when caught, explains his crime by saying that he had to avenge the death of his executed, or, as he calls it, murdered friends. He leaves the inference that, if he is executed, one of his friends will in turn avenge his execution in the same way.