“Like the street vender drawing crude charcoal pictures on the sidewalk to attract the cockney crowd to which he means to offer an _article de Paris_ a little later, a primitive propagandist of anarchy has decided to force attention by the brutality of an act.
“Back of this act is the faith, so much tabooed, to which he has at last drawn fruitful discussion.
“And no one can deny it,—at the moment when, by favour of the excitement, the journals are giving their readers the very ‘_articles de Paris_’ which the terrible unknown dreamed of showing. Side by side with their invectives the _Figaro_, the _Eclair_, other sheets, print and expound theories which had not had the freedom of their columns before. These journals have become, in spite of their reserves, the propagators of the accursed Idea.
To _comprehend_ the foregoing manner of reasoning or, rather, point of view (the word “comprehend” is italicised lest any one confound inoffensive comprehension with dangerous approval), one must have had in some country or other some bitter experience—stinging rebuke or angering, insulting rebuff—with the vapid self-complacency, the dogmatic thick-wittedness, the dictatorial stubborness, and the cruel hard-heartedness of the bourgeois. One must have been shocked and sickened by his vulgar flaunting of a stupid—or wicked?—determination to persist in his denial that his fellow-men ever starve, unless he can see them, with his own eyes, throw up their hands dramatically, stagger, and fall around him.
If one has had this disillusionising experience with the bourgeois, he will _comprehend_—there will be no lapsing here into such atrociously bad form as hinting the possibility of acquiescence—that there are numerous poor devils who say, “Let the bourgeois have the dramatic demonstration of starvation, since he will credit no other!”
He will _comprehend_ that there are some, not poor devils, who think that a certain manifestation of the hungry in Trafalgar Square was a beautiful eye-opener for the British public; that there are others who look upon the march of Coxey’s grotesque army as anything but a ridiculous failure; and that there are still others who, recalling a memorable famine winter in Boston,—the shudderful winter when the authority of the state was invoked to disperse a peaceable assembling of the unemployed,—hold it a real pity that the assembling was quite so peaceable.