Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/439

Rh Now, what can all this mean? The anarchist who kills a President or minister, on the pretense of avenging the execution of another anarchist murderer, may possibly imagine that if this process goes on with some regularity public officers will become afraid to hurt anarchists, and that the anarchists may then drop dynamite bombs wherever and whenever they please with impunity. This kind of reasoning is built upon the fantastic assumption that there is no courage left in human society except that of the anarchists. Still, however absurd the premise, there is a semblance of logic in it. But it does not explain the reason for their throwing dynamite bombs in to churches and theaters, among promiscuous gatherings of inoffensive people, to kill anybody that may be about. The only thing approximating an explanation that has been said is that the plan of the anarchists is to throw society, by these seemingly causeless murders, into a condition of abject terror, and thereby to create a general state of the intensest bewilderment and confusion, in which, everybody else having completely lost his head, the anarchists are the only people who have kept their five senses together and know what they want, and that then they can step in and regulate things according to their notions. The idea that by this sort of terrorism human society, as at present organized, could be moved to abdicate all its functions, and to deliver itself into the hands of an organization of murderers, is so absolutely preposterous that its serious conception can be attributed only to an utterly deranged state of mind.

There may be some persons sincerely cherishing such amazing fancies, and willing to live and die for them; but among the more active element of the anarchists characters of a very different kind have been discovered—persons too lazy to do any honest work, who found that they could get along without it by devoting themselves to the