Part 52

At last, in the middle of January 1886, both Louise Michel and Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clairvaux, were set free.

We went to Paris and stayed there for a few weeks with our friend, Elie Reclus--a writer of great power in anthropology, who is often mistaken outside France for his younger brother, the geographer, Elisée. A close friendship has united the two brothers from early youth. When the time came for them to enter a university, they went from a small country place in the valley of the Gironde to Strasburg, making the journey on foot--accompanied, as true wandering students, by their dog; and when they stayed at some village it was the dog which got his bowl of soup, while the two brothers’ supper very often consisted of bread only, with a few apples. From Strasburg the younger brother went to Berlin, whereto he was attracted by the lectures of the great Ritter. Later on, in the forties, they were both at Paris. Elie Reclus became a convinced Fourierist, and both saw in the republic of 1848 the coming of a new era of social evolution. Consequently, after Napoleon III.’s coup d’état, they both had to leave France, and emigrated to England. When the amnesty was voted, and they returned to Paris, Elie edited there a Fourierist co-operative paper which was widely spread among the workers. It is not generally known, but may be interesting to note, that Napoleon III.--who played the part of a Cæsar, interested, as behoves a Cæsar, in the conditions of the working classes--used to send one of his aides-de-camp to the printing office of the paper, each time it was printed, to take to the Tuileries the first sheet issued from the press. He was, later on, even ready to patronize the International Workingmen’s Association, on the condition that it should put in one of its reports a few words of confidence in the great socialist plans of the Cæsar; and he ordered its prosecution when the Internationalists refused point-blank to do anything of the sort.

When the Commune was proclaimed, both brothers heartily joined it and Elie accepted the post of keeper of the National Library and the Louvre museum under Vaillant. It was, to a great extent, to his foresight and to his hard work that we owe the preservation of the invaluable treasures of human knowledge and art accumulated in these two institutions; otherwise they would have perished during the bombardment of Paris by the armies of Thiers, and the subsequent conflagration. A passionate lover of Greek art, and profoundly acquainted with it, he had had all the most precious statues and vases of the Louvre packed and stored in the caves, while the greatest precautions were taken to protect the building of the National Library from the conflagration which raged round it. His wife, a courageous, worthy companion of the philosopher, followed in the streets by her two little boys, organized in the meantime in her own quarter of the town the feeding of the population which had been reduced to sheer destitution by a second siege. During the final few weeks of its existence, the Commune at last realized that a supply of food to the population, which was deprived of the means of earning it for itself, ought to have been the Commune’s first duty, and volunteers organized the relief. It was by mere accident that Elie Reclus, who had kept to his post till the last moment, escaped being shot by the Versailles troops; and a sentence of deportation having been pronounced upon him--for having dared to accept so necessary a service under the Commune--he went with his family into exile. Now, on his return to Paris, he had resumed the work of his life--ethnology. What this work is may be judged from a few, very few, chapters of it published in book form under the title of ‘Primitive Folk’ and ‘The Australians,’ as well as from the history of the origin of religions, which he now lectures upon at the École des Hautes Études, at Brussels--a foundation of his brother. In the whole of the ethnological literature there are not many works imbued to the same extent with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the true nature of primitive man. As to his ‘Origin of Religions’ (which is being published in the review, ‘Société Nouvelle,’ and its continuation ‘Humanité Nouvelle’), it is, I venture to say, the best work on the subject that has been published--undoubtedly superior to Herbert Spencer’s attempt in the same direction, because Herbert Spencer, with all his immense intellect, does not possess that understanding of the artless and simple nature of the primitive man which Elie Reclus possesses to a rare perfection, and to which he has added an extremely wide knowledge of a rather underrated branch of folk-psychology--the evolution and transformation of beliefs. It is needless to speak of Elie Reclus’s infinite good nature and modesty, or of his superior intelligence and vast knowledge of all subjects relating to humanity; it is all comprehended in his style. With his unbounded modesty, his calm manner and his deep philosophical insight, he is the type of the Greek philosopher of antiquity. In a society less fond of patented tuition and of piecemeal instruction, and more appreciative of the development of wide humanitarian conceptions, he would be surrounded by flocks of pupils, like one of his Greek prototypes.

A very animated socialist and anarchist movement was going on at Paris while we stayed there. Louise Michel lectured every night, and aroused the enthusiasm of her audiences, whether they consisted of working men or were made up of middle-class people. Her already great popularity became still greater and spread even amongst the university students, who might hate advanced ideas but worshipped in her the ideal woman; so much so that a riot, caused by someone speaking disrespectfully of Louise Michel in the presence of students, took place one day in a café. The young people took up her defence and made a fearful uproar, smashing all the tables and glasses in the café. I also lectured once on anarchism, before an audience of several thousand people, and left Paris immediately after that lecture, before the government could obey the injunctions of the reactionary and the pro-Russian press, which insisted upon my being expelled from France.

From Paris we went to London, where I found once more my two old friends, Stepniák and Tchaykóvsky. The socialist movement was in full swing, and life in London was no more the dull, vegetating existence that it had been for me four years before.

We settled in a small cottage at Harrow. We cared little about the furniture of our cottage, a good part of which I made myself with the aid of Tchaykóvsky--he had been in the meantime in the United States and had learned some carpentering--but we rejoiced immensely at having a small plot of heavy Middlesex clay in our garden. My wife and myself went with much enthusiasm into small culture, the admirable results of which I began to realize after having made acquaintance with the writings of Toubeau, and some Paris maraîchers (gardeners), and after our own experiment in the prison garden at Clairvaux. As for my wife, who had typhoid fever soon after we settled at Harrow, the work in the garden during the period of convalescence was more completely restorative for her than a stay at the very best sanatorium.

* * * * *

By the end of the summer a heavy stroke fell upon us. We learned that my brother Alexander was no longer alive.

During the years that I had been abroad before my imprisonment in France, we had never corresponded with each other. In the eyes of the Russian government, to love a brother who is persecuted for his political opinions is in itself a sin. To maintain relations with him after he has become a refugee is a crime. A subject of the Tsar must hate all the rebels against the supreme ruler’s authority--and Alexander was in the clutches of the Russian police. I persistently refused therefore to write to him or to any of my relatives. After the Tsar had written on the petition of our sister Hélène, ‘Let him remain there,’ there was no hope of a speedy release for my brother. Two years after that, a committee was nominated to settle terms for those who had been exiled to Siberia without judgment for an undetermined time, and my brother got five years. That made seven with the two years he had already been kept there. Then a new committee was nominated under Lóris Mélikoff, and added another five years. My brother was thus to be liberated in October 1886. That made twelve years of exile, first in a tiny town of East Siberia, and afterwards at Tomsk--that is in the lowlands of West Siberia, where he had not even the dry and healthy climate of the high prairies farther East.

When I was imprisoned at Clairvaux, he wrote to me, and we exchanged a few letters. He wrote that as our letters would be read by the Russian police in Siberia and by the French prison authorities in France, we might as well write to each other under this double supervision. He spoke of his family life, of his three children whom he characterized admirably well, and of his work. He earnestly advised me to keep a watchful eye upon the development of science in Italy, where excellent and original researches are made, but remain unknown in the scientific world until they have been re-manufactured in Germany; and he gave me his opinions about the probable march of political life in Russia. He did not believe in the possibility with us in a near future, of constitutional rule on the pattern of the West European parliaments; but he looked forward--and found it quite sufficient for the moment--to the convocation of a sort of deliberative National Assembly (Zémskiy Sobór or Etats Généraux). It would not vote new laws, but would only work out the schemes of laws to which the imperial power and the Council of State would give their definitive form and the final sanction.

Above all he wrote to me about his scientific work. He always had a decided leaning towards astronomy, and when we were at St. Petersburg he had published in Russia an excellent summary of all our knowledge of the shooting stars. With his fine critical mind he soon saw the strong or the weak points of different hypotheses; and without sufficient knowledge of mathematics, but endowed with a powerful imagination, he succeeded in grasping the results of the most intricate mathematical researches. Living with his imagination amongst the moving celestial bodies, he realized their complex movements often better than some mathematicians--especially the pure algebraists--realize them, because they often lose sight of the realities of the physical world to see only the formulæ and their logical connections. Our St. Petersburg astronomers spoke to me with great appreciation of that work of my brother. Now he undertook to study the structure of the universe: to analyze the data and the hypotheses about the worlds of suns, star-clusters, and nebulæ in the infinite space, and to disentangle their probable grouping, their life, and the laws of their evolution and decay. The Púlkova astronomer, Gyldén, spoke highly of this new work of Alexander, and introduced him by correspondence to Mr. Holden in the United States, from whom I had lately the pleasure of hearing, at Washington, an appreciative estimate of my brother’s researches. Science is greatly in need, from time to time, of such scientific speculations of a higher standard, made by a scrupulously laborious, critical, and at the same time, imaginative mind.

But in a small town of Siberia, far away from all the libraries, unable to follow the progress of science, he had only succeeded in embodying in his work the researches which had been done up to the date of his exile. Some capital work had been done since--he knew it--but how could he get access to the necessary books so long as he remained in Siberia? The approach of the term of his liberation did not inspire him with hope either. He knew that he would not be allowed to stay in any of the university towns of Russia or of Western Europe, but that his exile to Siberia would be followed by a second exile, perhaps even worse than the first, to some hamlet of Eastern Russia.

Despair took possession of him. ‘A despair like Faust’s takes hold of me at times,’ he wrote to me. When the time of his liberation was coming, he sent his wife and children to Russia, taking advantage of one of the last steamers before the close of the navigation, and, on a gloomy night, the despair of Faust put an end to his life....

* * * * *

A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months--until a flash of light pierced it. It came next Spring, when a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and at whose helpless cry I overheard in my heart quite new chords vibrating.

XVI

In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups of workers going about in the streets singing ‘We’ve got no work to do,’ or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked at night into Trafalgar Square to sleep there in the open air, under the wind and rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd, after having listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and Champion, rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows in the great shops. Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent, was the spirit which prevailed amongst the poorer portion of the working population in the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the recent history of the labour movement in England, but the symptoms of which were very well marked in 1886, would have been developed, and would have impressed its stamp upon the subsequent movement for a long time to come. However, the middle classes seemed to have realized the danger. Considerable sums of money were immediately subscribed in the West End for the relief of misery in the East End--certainly quite inadequate to relieve a widely spread destitution, but sufficient to show, at least, good intentions. As to the sentences which were passed upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two and three months’ imprisonment.

The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society. Beginning with the autumn and throughout the winter, I was asked to lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland. As I had, as a rule, accepted the first invitation I received to stay the night after the lecture, it consequently happened that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next night in the narrow abode of a working family. Every night I saw considerable numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s small parlour, or in the reception-rooms of the wealthy, the most animated discussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late hour of the night--with hope in the workman’s home, with apprehension in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.

In the mansions, the main question was to know, ‘What do the socialists want? What do they intend to do?’ and next, ‘What are the concessions which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given moment in order to avoid serious conflicts?’ In these conversations I seldom heard the justice of the socialist contention merely denied, or described as sheer nonsense. But I found also a firm conviction that a revolution was impossible in England; that the claims of the mass of the workers had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less; so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working classes of England as a pledge in the meantime of still more in the future. ‘We are a left-centre country, we live by compromises,’ I was once told by an old member of Parliament, who had had a wide experience of the life of his mother country.

In workmen’s dwellings too, I noticed a difference in the questions which were addressed to me in England to those which I was asked on the Continent. General principles, of which the partial applications will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest the Latin workers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in support of a strike, or organizes the feeding of the children at the schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as a matter of fact. ‘Of course, a hungry child cannot learn,’ a French worker says. ‘It must be fed.’ ‘Of course, the employer was wrong in forcing the workers to strike.’ This is all that is said, and no praise is given on account of such minor concessions by the present individualist society to communist principles. The thought of the worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he asks whether it is the Commune, or the unions of workers, or the State which ought to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement alone will be sufficient to maintain Society in working order, and what would be the moral restraint if Society parted with its present repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic government would be capable of accomplishing serious changes in the socialist direction, and whether accomplished facts ought not to precede legislation? and so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions, gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid. But, on the other hand, the impossibility of state administration of industries seemed to have been settled long ago in the workers’ minds, and what chiefly interested most of them were matters of constructive realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make such a realization possible. ‘Well, Kropótkin, suppose that to-morrow we were to take possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea about how to manage them?’ I would, for instance, be asked as soon as we had sat down in a small workman’s parlour. Or, ‘We don’t like the idea of state management of railways, and the present management by private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers owned all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?’ The lack of general ideas was thus supplemented by a desire of going deeper into the details of the realities.

Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways, some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the outside. In France or in Switzerland, the two parties--the workers and the middle classes--not only stood arrayed against each other, but were sharply separated. So it was, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay in the country I was acquainted with none but workers--I hardly knew more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces, as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a movement, similar to what we had had in Russia in the early seventies, when our youth rushed ‘to the people,’ though by no means so intense, so full of self-sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of ‘charity.’ Here also, in England, a number of people went in all sorts of capacities to live near to the workers: in the slums, in people’s palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that a social revolution had commenced, like the hero of Morris’s comical play, ‘Tables Turned,’ who says that the revolution is not simply coming, but has already begun. As always happens however with such enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a long, tedious, preparatory, uphill work that had to be done, very many of them retired from active propaganda, and now stand outside of it as mere sympathetic onlookers.

XVII

I took a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades we started, in addition to the three socialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘Freedom,’ which continues to live up to the present day. At the same time I resumed my work on anarchism where I had had to interrupt it at the moment of my arrest. The critical part of it was published during my Clairvaux imprisonment by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’ Now I began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society--so far as it can now be forecast--in a series of articles published at Paris in ‘La Révolté.’ Our ‘boy,’ ‘Le Révolté,’ prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, was compelled to change its title-page and now appeared under a feminine name. Later on these articles were published in a more elaborate form in a book, ‘La Conquête du Pain.’

These researches caused me to study more thoroughly certain points of the economic life of our present civilized nations. Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all. It is only the distribution which is defective; and if a social revolution took place, nothing more would be required than for everyone to return to his factory or workshop, Society taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value’ or benefits which now go to the capitalist. I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, so as to neglect, and often to prevent, the production of the very necessaries for life on a sufficient scale. None of these are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means nothing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is now considered as necessary for a decent existence. But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at the same time both enjoyable manual work and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ which are now published as a book under the title of ‘Fields, Factories, and Workshops.’

Another great question also engrossed my attention. It is known to what conclusions Darwin’s formula, ‘The Struggle for Existence,’ had been developed by most of his followers, even the most intelligent of them, such as Huxley. There is no infamy in civilized society, or in the relations of the whites towards the so-called lower races, or of the ‘strong’ towards the ‘weak,’ which would not have found its excuse in this formula.

Already during my stay at Clairvaux I saw the necessity of completely revising the formula itself of ‘struggle for existence’ in the animal world, and its applications to human affairs. The attempts which had been made by a few socialists in this direction had not satisfied me, when I found in a lecture of a Russian zoologist, Prof. Kessler, a true expression of the law of struggle for life. ‘Mutual aid,’ he said in that lecture, ‘is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle; but for the progressive evolution of the species the former is far more important than the latter.’ These few words--confirmed unfortunately by only a couple of illustrations (to which Syévertsoff, the zoologist of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, added one or two more)--contained for me the key of the whole problem. When Huxley published in 1888 his atrocious article, ‘The Struggle for Existence: a Program,’ I decided to put in a readable form my objections to his way of understanding the struggle for life, among animals as well as among men, the materials for which I had accumulated during a couple of years. I spoke of it to my friends. However, I found that the comprehension of ‘struggle for life’ in the sense of a war-cry of ‘Woe to the weak,’ raised to the height of a commandment of nature revealed by science, was so deeply inrooted in this country that it had become almost a matter of religion. Two persons only supported me in my revolt against this misinterpretation of the facts of nature. The editor of the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Mr. James Knowles, with his admirable perspicacity, at once seized the gist of the matter, and with a truly youthful energy encouraged me to take it in hand. The other was H. W. Bates, whom Darwin has truly described in his autobiography as one of the most intelligent men whom he ever met. He was secretary of the Geographical Society, and I knew him. When I spoke to him of my intention he was delighted with it. ‘Yes, most assuredly write it,’ he said. ‘That is true Darwinism. It is a shame to think of what “they” have made of Darwin’s ideas. Write it, and when you have published it, I will write you a letter in that sense which you may publish.’ I could not have had better encouragement, and began the work which was published in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ under the titles of ‘Mutual Aid among Animals,’ ‘among Savages,’ ‘among Barbarians,’ ‘in the Mediæval City,’ and ‘among Ourselves.’ Unfortunately I neglected to submit to Bates the first two articles of this series, dealing with animals, which were published during his lifetime; I hoped to be soon ready with the second part of the work, ‘Mutual Aid among Men,’ but it took me several years before I completed it, and in the meantime Bates was no more among us.

The researches which I had to make during these studies in order to acquaint myself with the institutions of the barbarian period and with those of the mediæval free cities, led me to another important research--the part played in history by the state, since its last incarnation in Europe, during the last three centuries. And on the other side, the study of the mutual-support institutions at different stages of civilization, led me to examine the evolutionist bases of the sense of justice and of morality in man.

Within the last ten years the growth of socialism in England has taken a new aspect. Those who judge only by the numbers of socialist and anarchist meetings held in the country, and the audiences attracted by these meetings, are prone to conclude that socialist propaganda is now on the decline. And those who judge the progress of it by the numbers of votes that are given to those who claim to represent socialism in Parliament, jump to the conclusion that there is now hardly any socialist propaganda in England. But the depth and the penetration of the socialist ideas can nowhere be judged by the numbers of votes given in favour of those who bring more or less socialism into their electoral programmes. Still less so in England. The fact is, that out of the three directions of socialism which were formulated by Fourier, Saint Simon, and Robert Owen, it is the latter which prevails in England and Scotland. Consequently it is not so much by the numbers of meetings or socialist votes that the intensity of the movement must be judged, but by the infiltration of the socialist point of view into the trade unionist, the co-operative, and the so-called municipal socialist movements, as well as the general infiltration of socialist ideas all over the country. Under this aspect, the extent to which the socialist views have penetrated is vast in comparison to what it was in 1886; and I do not hesitate to say that it is simply immense in comparison to what it was in the years 1876-82. I may also add that the persevering endeavours of the tiny anarchist groups have contributed, to an extent which makes us feel that we have not wasted our time, to spread the ideas of No-Government, of the rights of the individual, of local action, and free agreement--as against those of State all-mightiness, centralization, and discipline, which were dominant twenty years ago.