In his Women as World Builders Floyd Dell said this: "Emma Goldman has become simply an advocate of freedom of every sort. She does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, and George Francis Train, that she is to be considered." I think, rather, that she is to be considered fundamentally as something more definite than that:--as a practical Nietzschean. I am incapable of listening, unaroused, to the person who believes something intensely, and who does intensely what she believes. What more simple--or more difficult? Most of us don't know what we believe, or, if we do, we have the most extraordinary time trying to live it. Emma Goldman is so bravely consistent--which to many people is a confession of limitations. But if one is going to criticise her there are more subtle grounds to do it on. One of her frequent assertions is that she has no use for religion. That is like saying that one has no use for poetry: religion isn't merely a matter of Christianity or Catholicism or Buddhism or any other classifiable quantity. Also, if it is true that the person to be distrusted is the one who has found an answer to the riddle, then Emma Goldman is to be discounted. Her convictions are presented with a sense of definite finality. But there's something splendidly uncautious, something irresistibly stirring, about such an attitude. And whatever one believes, of one thing I'm certain: whoever means to face the world and its problems intelligently must know something about Emma Goldman. Whether her philosophy will change the face of the earth isn't the supreme issue. As the enemy of all smug contentment, of all blind acquiescence in things as they are, and as the prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in wrong applications of values but in the values themselves, Emma Goldman is the most challenging spirit in America. No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this, too, will be swept away.... Observe always that everything is the result of a change, ... get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.--Marcus Aurelius. Chloroform MARY ALDIS AND ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE A sickening odour, treacherously sweet, Steals through my sense heavily. Above me leans an ominous shape, Fearful, white-robed, hooded and masked in white. The pits of his eyes Peer like the port-holes of an armoured ship, Merciless, keen, inhuman, dark. The hands alone are of my kindred; Their slender strength, that soon shall press the knife Silver and red, now lingers slowly above me, The last links with my human world ...