Here society is conceived of as merely a collection of egos. The world is a history of gods and of devils. All the evils of the time are embodied in individual tyrants. Some of these individuals control the social forces, others the political, still others the industrial forces. As individuals, they overpower and enslave their individual enemies. Remove a man and you destroy the source of tyranny. A judge commits a man to death, and the judge is dynamited. A Prime Minister sends the army to shoot down striking workmen and the Prime Minister is shot. A law is passed violating the rights of free speech, and, following that, an Emperor is shot. The rich exploit the poor, and a fanatic throws a bomb in the first cafe he passes to revenge the poor. Wicked and unjust laws are made, and Vaillant goes in person to the Chamber of Deputies to throw his bomb. The police of Chicago murder some hungry strikers, and an avenger goes to the Haymarket to murder the police. In all these acts we find a point of view in harmony with the dominant one of our day. It is the one taught in our schools, in our pulpits, on our political platforms, and in our press. It is the view, carried to an extreme, of that man or group of men who believes that the ideas of individuals determine social evolution. Nothing could be more logical to the revolutionist who holds this view than to seek to remove those individuals who are responsible for the existing order of society. As a rule, the socialist stands almost alone in combating this ideological interpretation of history and of social evolution. There is something in the nature of poetic irony in the fact that the anarchist should take the very ethics of capitalism and reduce them to an absurdity. It is something in the nature of a satire, sordid and terrible, which the realism of things has here written. The very most cherished ethical ideals of our society are used by the bitterest enemies of that society to arouse the wronged to individual acts of revenge. Quite a number of notable anarchists have been the product of misery and oppression. Their souls were warped, and their minds distorted in childhood by hunger and brutality. They were wronged terribly by the world, and anarchism came to them as a welcome spirit, breathing revenge. It taught that the world was wrong, that injustice rode over it like a nightmare, that misery flourished in the midst of abundance, that multitudes labored with bent backs to produce luxuries for the few. Their eyes were opened to the wrong of hunger, poverty, unemployment, of woman and child labor, and of all the miseries that press heavily upon human souls. And in their revolt they saw kings, judges, police officials, legislators, captains of industry, who were said to be directly responsible for these social ills. It was not society or a system or even a class that was to blame; it was McKinley, or Carnot, or Frick. And those whom some worshiped as heroes, these men loathed as tyrants.