The anarchist of that far day (thanks to the firm hands of our gracious sovereigns the species is now extinct) was a very different person from what our infatuated ancestors imagined him.  He struck at government, not because it was bad, but because it was government.  He hated authority, not for its tyranny, but for its power.  And in order to make this plain to observation he frequently chose his victim from amongst those whose rule was most conspicuously benign.

Of the seven early Presidents of the American republic who perished by assassination no fewer than four were slain by anarchists with no personal wrongs to impel them to the deed—­nothing but an implacable hostility to law and authority.  The fifth victim, indeed, was a notorious demagogue who had pardoned the assassin of the fourth.

The field of the anarchist’s greatest activity was always a republic, not only to emphasize his impartial hatred of all government, but because of the inherent feebleness of that form of government, its inability to protect itself against any kind of aggression by any considerable number of its people having a common malevolent purpose.  In a republic the crust that confined the fires of violence and sedition was thinnest.

No improvement in the fortunes of the original anarchists through immigration to what was then called the New World would have made them good citizens.  From centuries of secret war against particular forms of authority in their own countries they had inherited a bitter antagonism to all authority, even the most beneficent.  In their new home they were worse than in their old.  In the sunshine of opportunity the rank and sickly growth of their perverted natures became hardy, vigorous, bore fruit.  They surrounded themselves with proselytes from the ranks of the idle, the vicious, the unsuccessful.  They stimulated and organized discontent.  Every one of them became a center of moral and political contagion.  To those as yet unprepared to accept anarchy was offered the milder dogma of Socialism, and to those even weaker in the faith something vaguely called Reform.  Each was initiated into that degree to which the induration of his conscience and the character of his discontent made him eligible, and in which he could be most serviceable, the body of the people still cheating themselves with the false sense of security begotten of the belief that they were somehow exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to their national welfare and integrity.  Human nature, they thought, was different in the West from what it was in the East:  in the New World the old causes would not have the old effects:  a republic had some inherent vitality of its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep it alive.  They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and charmed themselves asleep by repeating “liberty,” “all men equal before the law,” “dictates of conscience,” “free speech” and all manner of such incantation