Count Tolstoy, it goes without saying, was in full sympathy with us; and so was that many-sided man of genius, M. Elisée Reclus. Famed as geographer, philosopher, and revolutionist, one is tempted to sum him up in the word “poet”; for though he did not write in verse, he was a great master of language, unsurpassed in lucidity of thought and serene beauty of style. He was a vegetarian, and the grounds of his faith are set forth in a luminous essay on that subject which he wrote for the Humanitarian League. Very beautiful, too, is his article on “The Great Kinship,” worthily translated by Edward Carpenter, in which he portrayed the primeval friendly relations of mankind with the lower races, and glanced at the still more wonderful possibilities of the future. His anarchist views prevented him from formally joining an association which aimed at legislative action; but his help was always freely given. “I send you my small subscription,” he wrote, “without any engagement for the future, not knowing beforehand if next year I will be penniless or not.” I only once saw Elisée Reclus; it was on the occasion of an anarchist meeting in which he took part, and he then impressed me as being the Grand Old Man without rival or peer; never elsewhere have I seen such magnificent energy and enthusiasm combined with such lofty intellectual gifts. Ernest Crosby, another philosophic anarchist, was perhaps as little known, in proportion to his great merits, as any writer of our time. Elected as a Republican to the Assembly of New York State, he had been appointed in 1889 to be a Judge of the International Court in Egypt; but after serving there five years, his whole life was suddenly changed, owing largely to a book of Tolstoy’s which fell into his hands: he resigned his post, and thenceforward passed judgment on no man but himself. A poet and thinker of high order, he stood up with unfailing courage against the brute force of “imperialism” in its every form--the exploitation of one race by another race, of one class by another class, of the lower animals by mankind. It is strange that his writings, especially the volume entitled _Swords and Plowshares_, should be almost unknown to English democrats, for they include many poems which touch a very high standard of artistic excellence, and a few that are gems of verse. “The Tyrant’s Song,” for instance, expresses in a few lines the strength of the Non-Resistant, and of the conscientious objector to military service (“the man with folded arms”); yet during all the long controversy on that subject I never once saw it quoted or mentioned. A superficial likeness between Crosby’s unrhymed poetry and that of Edward Carpenter led in one case to an odd error on the part of an American friend to whom I had vainly commended Carpenter’s writings; for in his joy over _Swords and Plowshares_ he rashly jumped to the conclusion that “Ernest Crosby” was a _nom de plume_ for the other E.C. “I owe you a confession,” he wrote.