“I am an anarchist because I love individual freedom, and I will not surrender that freedom. A leader must sooner or later be the victim of the masses he thinks he controls. When I definitely entered the work I gave myself a solemn pledge that I would study, that I would make passion bow to reason, that I would not be carried away from the truth by sentiment. I soon saw that the safest and wisest way to keep myself free was not to be a leader. That is why I am connected with no party. I am a member of no group. Individual freedom and responsibility—there is the basis of true anarchy.
“No, I have never advocated violence, nor do I know a single truly great anarchist leader who ever did advocate violence. Where violence comes with anarchy it is a result of the conditions, not of anarchy. The biggest fallacy going is the idea that anarchists as a body band together and order violence, assassinations of rulers and all that. I ought to know something about anarchy, and I tell you that is false—absolutely false.
“There is ignorance, cruelty, starvation, poverty, suffering, and some victim grows tired of waiting. He believes a decisive blow will call public attention to the wrongs of his country, and may hasten the remedy. He and perhaps one or two intimate friends or relatives make a plan. They do not have orders. They do not consult other anarchists.
“Perhaps under the same conditions I would do the same. If I had been starving in Milan, and had raised my starving baby in the air as an appeal for justice, and had that baby shot in my arms by a brutal soldiery, who knows what I might have done? I might have changed from a philosophical anarchist to a fighting anarchist. Do you suppose if Santo Caserio had had anarchist organization back of him he would have tramped all the weary way to Paris, without money, in order to kill Carnot? If Bresci had been sent out from us, would he have had to scrape together every cent he could, even forcing one of his anarchist friends to pawn some of his clothes in order to repay a loan Bresci had made him? The friend curses Bresci for a hardhearted creditor, but Bresci never told why he needed the money so desperately.
“Anarchy’s best future lies in America. We in America haven’t yet reached conditions—economic conditions, I mean—that necessarily breed violence. I am thankful for that; but we are much nearer such conditions than the old-time American ever dreamed we would be, and unless something is done to stop it, the time will come.