Such is the tragic story of barely forty years of terrorism in Western Europe. It reads far more like lurid fiction than the cold facts of history. Yet these amazing irreconcilables actually lived--in our time--and fought, at the cost of their lives, the entire organization of society. Surely few other periods in history can show a series of characters so daring, so bitter, so bent on destruction and annihilation. Bakounin, Nechayeff, Most, Lingg, Duval, Decamps, Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio, and Luccheni--these bewildering rebels--individually waged their deadly conflict with the world. With the weakness of their one single life in revolt against society--protected as it is by countless thousands of police, millions of armed men, and all its machinery for defense--these amazing creatures fought their fight and wrote their page of protest in the world's history. Think of it as we will, this we know, that the world cannot utterly ignore men who lay down their lives for any cause. Men may write and agitate, they may scream never so shrilly about the wrongs of the world, but when they go forth to fight single-handed and to die for what they preach they have at least earned the right to demand of society an inquiry. What was it that drove these men to violence? Was it the teachings of Bakounin, of Nechayeff, and of Most? Their writings have been read and pondered over by thousands of yearning and impressionable minds. They have been drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Yet one anarchist at least denies that the writings of these terrorists have moved men to violence. "My contention is," says Emma Goldman, "that they were impelled, not by the teachings of anarchism, but by the tremendous pressure of conditions, making life unbearable to their sensitive natures."[1] Returning again to the same thought, she exclaims, "How utterly fallacious the stereotyped notion that the teachings of anarchism, or certain exponents of these teachings, are responsible for the acts of political violence."[2] To this indefatigable propagandist of anarchist doctrine, those who have been led into homicidal violence are "high strung, like a violin string." "They weep and moan for life, so relentless, so cruel, so terribly inhuman. In a desperate moment the string breaks."[3]