Now the questions were being handed in, written on strips of paper, and at last that listener's difficulty cropped up.
"What's this?" said Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: "Why trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going to do it all for us?"
The veteran leader of the Social Democratic Federation paused only for a moment.
"Well, we've got to get _ready_ for it, you know," he said, rustling briskly with the folds of the question to follow--and with these words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic Marxism crumbled down to dust.
We _have_ got to get ready for it. Indeed, we have to make it--by education and intention and set resolve. Socialism is to be attained not by fate, but by will.
And here, as a sort of Eastern European gloss upon Marxist Socialism, as an extreme and indeed ultimate statement of this marriage of mystical democracy to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism. Anarchism carries the administrative _laissez faire_ of Marx to its logical extremity. "If the common, untutored man is right anyhow--why these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the shape of law and representative?"
That is the perfectly logical outcome of ignoring administration and reconstruction. The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme Individualist meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces of Evolution--which in this connection they deify with a capital letter. Organization, control, design, the disciplined will, these are evil, they declare--_the_ evil of life. So you come at the end of the process, if you are active-minded, to the bomb as the instrument of man's release to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in disposition to the Tolstoyan attitude of passive resistance to all rule and property.
Anarchism, then, is as it were a final perversion of the Socialist stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from vitalizing association with an active creative experience. Anarchism comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamentally adverse to the toil, to the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit of a complex ideal. So that it most flourishes eastwardly, where men, it would seem, are least energetic and constructive, and it explodes or dies on American soil.