This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into jail, deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that is ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting. But it takes education to produce such awakenings, and there is no immediate hope of such a general enlightenment. The stupidity of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that other prophets have raised their spears to the same heights and have been misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the peculiar ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or to denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too, would have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a president’s assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that she has so much work to do which so many people need, and that she cannot break through the prejudice and the superstition surrounding her to get at those dulled ones who need it most. Ten years ago she was preaching, under the most absurd persecution, ideas which thinking people accept as a matter of course today. Now the ignorant public still shudders at her name; the “intellectuals”—especially those of the Greenwich Village radical type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good Christian—one not to be taken too seriously: there are so many more daring revolutionists among their own ranks that they can’t understand why Emma Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the Socialists concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach herself to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish itself. “Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism is a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely, that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and—this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur. How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have happened that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have grown up about a personality whose mere presence is a benediction and whose friendship compels you toward high goals you had thought unattainable? There is no use asking how or why it happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to have happened, for it happens to everyone, in greater or less degree, who strives for a new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the people who are unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and _force_ them to listen to her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh, but she’s wonderful!”