An Anarchist Woman

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nd his judgment of it, are keen and impassioned, but, not fitting the actual facts, sometimes unjust and cruel. Tender and sensitive as a child, his indignation is so uncompromising that it often involves injustice and wrong. But the beauty in him is often startlingly pure, and revea

itless fields of Irish landlordism for the rickety and equally rack-rented tenements, with the checkerboard streets, where all must keep moving, is only adding sordidness t

k to pay for our passage in a sailing vessel to America. After being successfully landed, or stranded, on New York, my father, with the true instinct of the peasant, became a squatter on the prairies of Goose Island. Here we put up, in the year 1

wish, save

ut when we

aught but

t throbs with little things may finally throb for the world. And I learned nothing in these days except the lessons of the heart. The only necessary thing of which we had almost eno

ty at the pliable age of eight. My first job away from home was in a mattress factory. Ah, that first job! I was a triu

and when I lost faith I blindly followed the economists and philosophers who can never know the mystic power of work over the worker. And it may be that here

pacity. Even at an early age, I found that I had not the heart for the fray. Stamped on my narrow forehead, on my whole being, perhaps, so cl

were told to me, not read, and told in such a way that they led me to seek no individual foothold in a world at war with my heart: they helped to take away what the world calls personal ambition. They strengthened my natural quality as a dreamer, my tendency to care only for the welfare of the soul. If I could bring about no change in this world, it should effect no alteration in me.

pments of my experience. How often did I take my youthful oath that the day should never come when I w

I naturally sought solidarity with my fellows. Class feeling awoke in me, and voluntarily and enthusiastically I joined the union of my craft. Though I strained at its narrow confines, I was at one with my class. During the '70's and '80's the eight hour movement laid me off on several strikes, long and short. This enforced le

fellows-how well I understood it when, with nerves unstrung and muscles relaxed, after a tense twelve hours of toil, I fell asleep over my beloved books! And how well, too, I understood their amusement-the appeal of the poor man's club!-when in ga

m from their lethargy. How alert and cheerful we were on holidays, even the prolonged holiday of a strike brought its pinched joys. Quite a number of my ancient comrades of industry looked forward to the Poor House with a hopefulness

attle of the viaduct, when the mob, armed as in the bread riots, faced the federal troops and were shot down and dispersed. It was about this time, too, that I stood by as the 'Lehr und Wehr Verein' in the

the wall, thus: 'Come down, my sweet rifle, how brightly you shine! What tyrant dare stifle that sweet voice of thine.' But my fath

slavery, our sympathies were with the South. We were natural as well as political democrats, and even when the mob was in the wr

rit of sullen and smouldering rebellion in the minds of its less hardened inmates. From the domineering boss down to the smallest understrapper, the spirit of the jailer and turnkey is dominant. Much worse than solitary confinement is it to be

habit, among the older toilers, of the eye-opener, a gulp of rot-gut whiskey, taken to arouse the sleeping stomach and force sufficient food on it to last till noon. As a convalescent victim of this proletarian

ul comrades in many a brave strike, where starvation pressed hard, whence they had emerged with hollow cheeks and undaunted hearts. I soon came to know them all, personally, intimately, and liked them all, though I felt most strangely drawn to those who worked for one dollar a day. They all did t

eleased, and I held my mad balance on the crater's edge and gazed into it. Hereafter, I was to live on dangerous ground, at least in thought. No more doubt, no more shuffling now. I must try the chords of my heart, the sympathy of my soul,

n the ordeal of life. Ah, but this anonymous Avatar, this man with the bomb! His instinct was right, but how far short it fell, and must always fall. He had settled the strife within him and become definite to

toil, I stood forth without falsehood. I knew, if not what I was, at least

pt radical. Each morning on my way to Commercial Calvary I saw another sacrifice; I overtook small shrivelled forms, children they were, by the dim dawn. How their immature coughings racked my heart and ga

a child-which few can bear without flinching. I had no need to read Dante's imaginary 'Inferno.' I was living in a real one which made all imagination seem trivial. 'The short and simple a

d happen has happened to me, perhaps the worst that happened did not come from without, but from within. My family came off safely enough from the fray of th

specific instance of the kind of experience which disgusted the idealist with the imperfect world. He had been living against society, had foregathered with outcasts and had thrown down the gauntlet generally to organised society, for some years, but he still

defiance to a withered world. It was a happy time, looked back on now as a dream, in which, however, there was an undertone of nightmare. We had three little

day brought from him a telegraph money-order for twenty-five dollars, and soon afterward a letter asking me to go to Pittsburg and help him out. I had always been deemed an expert in the leather line, especially in locating anything w

nd with other marks of the proletarian on me, Mr. Kirkman, the millionaire tanner, showered me with every luxury-every luxury except that of thought and true emotion. Never before did

a flash of intuition, I located and showed the flaw

mentally, for a month. With unlimited money at my disposal, I had drawn only twenty dollars a

$7 to $8 a week. Furthermore, I said I would not stand for the discharge of any man for incompetency. I had never in the shop met any man I could not teach and learn something from in return; I had never discharged a man, and never would. The millio

my dear Rogues' Gallery, all was change and dispersion. No more happy times in our little balcony of fellowship, which had overlooked in its irresponsibility the jarring sects and insects of this world: the most del

ock, ten thousand of which he had offered me to stay. Mr. Kirkman thought all the world of Jim and could not run the shop without him. Nor could he recover from the blow, for he loved my brother, as everybody did. Mr. Kirkman died a few weeks afterward, and after a year or two the firm went into the hands o

r broke up his beautiful home. He and his whole-souled wife and charming children, into whose eyes it was an entrancing rapture for me to look, were a family withou

s half-orphans. You calling up our boyhood days in "Little Hell" makes me question still further if I have any right to deny those dear to me the delights that only the young can feel and enjoy. I made a great mistake in coming to this Ohio town. The chase for dollars which I am performing here seven days every week is very disgusting to me, and every day only adds to the pangs. I am out all day selling goods, pleading for trade and collecting for former weeks' business; and in the evening I must do the necessary office work. Every day

nurse proposed to send for a priest. Jim's soul must have made a last effort, for raising himself erect, he flung these words: 'I hire no spirit

social and individual honour and commercial integrity, he had the misfortune to find few like himself. He yearned for the ideal; and I am sure he went down with that hope for humanity. Let us trust that there is an ever increasing number of human beings who have Jim's malady-'seekers

TNO

, like Marie's, I