The collection of quotations, which form three-fourths of the book both
in bulk and in importance, is as much the best part as it is the
biggest. Here the prime necessity is impartiality, and Eltzbacher has
attained this as perfectly as can be expected of any man. Positively,
one comes to the end of all this without feeling sure whether Eltzbacher
is himself an Anarchist or not; it is not until we come to the last
dozen pages of the book that he lets his opposition to Anarchism become
evident. To be sure, one feels that he is more journalistic than
scientific in selecting for special mention the more sensational points
of the schemes proposed (the journalistic temper certainly shows itself
in his habit of picking out for his German public the references to
Germany in Anarchist writers). Yet it is hard to deny that there is
legitimate scientific importance in ascertaining how much of the
sensational is involved in Anarchism; and, on the other hand, Eltzbacher
recognizes his duty to present the strongest points of the Anarchist
side, and does this so faithfully that one often wonders if the man can
repeat these words without feeling their cogency. So far as any bias is
really felt in this part of the book it is the bias of
over-methodicalness; now and then a quotation is made to go into the
classification at a place where it will not go in without forcing, and
perspective is distorted when some _obiter dictum_ that had never seemed
to its author to be worth repeating a second time is made to serve as
illuminant now for this division of the "teaching," now for that, till
it seems to the reader like a favorite topic of the Anarchist. However,
the bias of methodicalness is as nearly non-partisan as any bias can be,
and its effect is to put the matter into a most convenient form for
consultation and comparison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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