This is no imaginative sketch,—so far from it that, if the police should take it into their heads, during one of the anarchist flurries which occur periodically, to make a descent upon the lodgings of the writer, who is anything but an anarchist, he would probably be imprisoned (or, at least, confined preventively) for the sole offence of having in his possession the numerous red-covered volumes, brochures, caricatures, placards, and _chansons_ which he has found it necessary to collect in the preparation of this book. If he were a Frenchman, he would certainly have much difficulty in avoiding temporary confinement under such circumstances. Being an American, he might escape with being courteously, but strenuously, requested to cross the border. This elaborate spy system, this shrewdness, chicanery, and, not to mince words, villany on the part of the police, is, after all, more or less futile. It serves no great purpose in the suppression of the _propagande par le fait_. It is well enough for a police prefect to boast publicly, as did M. Andrieux, back in the eighties, of the ease with which he penetrates the meetings of the groups, and recruits spies among the _camarades_,[39] and to shake his sides over the fine trick he plays on the _camarades_ in conducting a journal[40] for them with funds provided by the state. Such boasting and such self-gratulatory chuckling are well enough in their way; but they are rather idle in view of the looseness of organisation of the groups, which any one, if he dissemble ever so little, may frequent, and the insignificance and unreliability of the information obtained from such easily recruited spies. Besides, there is a class of anarchists who become police spies, nominally, for the express purpose of leading the police astray by false information. Controlling one journal is not controlling all, and a controlled journal is not less a propagandist force because the public money goes (however secretly) to the making of it. M. Andrieux’s _La Révolution Sociale_ not only preached anarchy, but preached it (here the police short-sightedness appears) very effectively. It converted some of those who have since become the most feared of militant propagandists, and goaded certain of the previously converted into action.