Peter Kropotkin art by Fabrizio Cassetta
A speech delivered by Peter Kropotkin at the meeting held at South Place, November 29, to bid farewell to Lucy E. Parsons, printed in ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism’, December 1888, London, UK
I think I cannot address better farewell words to our friend Mrs. Parsons than to ask her to transmit to our American friends the impression under which we, the advanced parties of the Socialist movement, are now living in Europe.
When Arthur Young, the great English agriculturist, was travelling in France, exactly one hundred years ago, on the eve of the great Revolution, he often heard misery-stricken peasant-women saying: “Something will happen some time very soon to improve our condition. What it may be we don’t know, but something will happen.” Exactly the same feeling exists now all over Europe. If our friend had had the time to go over to the Continent, or to travel in this country, she would have heard the same feeling continually expressed among the sufferers from the present system. Everybody expresses it in France and Spain, very many in Italy, many in Germany, Austria, and this country, and almost everybody-peasants and educated men as well-in my mother country Russia.
And the richer classes know that. They also frankly recognise in private that something is going to happen, that great changes are pending. In France they openly recognise it in the press. “Something will happen; it cannot last as it is” such is the opinion growing all over the civilised nations of Europe amidst the poorer and the richer classes alike.
Now, the student of human societies will understand what that growing feeling means. As long as there is in the masses mere discontent, that feeling can last for years and years, without being manifested otherwise than by individual acts of revolt. But when the feeling of discontent becomes associated with hopes of a near change, then the change must come; the revolt of the masses is near at hand.
What will be this “something” nobody can foretell. It may be the Communist Commune in some larger cities of France. It may be the Federative Republic and the Commune in Spain and Italy, and the Unitarian Democratic Republic in Germany. It most probably will be a peasants outbreak in Russia and a consequent abolition of absolute rule there. It may be land nationalisation in this country, or some wider attempt at social reorganisation.
But, whatever it may be, tell to our American friends that two ideas are sure to come out of the change. One of them will be a very wide extension of Home Rule, and, in the more advanced countries, a disintegration, a disjunction of the present governments, so as to take from their hands the numberless functions which they have concentrated now. More free understanding, more free association for achieving the ends now monopolised by the municipalities and the parliaments are sure to come out of the change. The centralised governments which gather in their hands all functions of human life — the defence of society, its education, its economical life, and so on — have been rendered an impossibility, disintegration of those functions must follow both in the state and the free commune.
And the other idea which is sure to come out of the change, will be the disappearance of many a monopoly, the socialisation of, at least, the first necessaries of life and production.
Two grand ideas which will revolutionise society. the whole life of our present society.
Now as to the question how this change will occur, we cannot answer it. It will not depend upon us; it will depend upon the privileged classes. If they understand the necessity of the change, and make timely and substantial concessions, and do not conspire to overthrow the work of the revolution as they did a hundred years ago in France, then civil war may be avoided. If not, it will break out.
The masses will not insist on civil war, but they will not be satisfied with mere sham reforms. They will fight, if necessary, in order to obtain substantial changes.
Which of the two courses will events take! We cannot foretell. But we must say that the lessons now given to the masses by their educated rulers are working precisely in the direction of preparing war. These rulers teach us cold contempt and disdain of humanity. To speak of humanity, to preach loftier ideas, is considered by them as wicked sentimentalism.
The other day the President of the Bristol Association was reviewing the recent achievements of engineering. Do you think he dwelt upon the St. Gothard tunnel, the canal of of Panama, or the proposed tunnel across the Channel! No, he became really eloquent just when he began to speak of the art of killing men. He spoke without disgust, nay, with the enthusiasm of an artist, of a gun which could be put at Richmond and so pointed as to throw shells, weighing 380 pounds, and charged with dynamite, into a space 200 yards square around the Royal Exchange, where these shells would be “vomiting fire and scattering their walls in hundreds of pieces with terrific violence,” thus killing the passers by.
What a grand idea! What a grand lesson to gloat over the possibility of throwing these hundreds of pounds of dynamite from a distance of twelve miles into the midst of the crowd of men, women and children! But such are the lessons given by the upper classes. “No sentimentalism in warfare,” they say; “cold contempt for human life!”
“If you can, bombard peaceful cities,” so they taught us during the last naval manoeuvres. “Vomit death amidst the crowds and into the houses. No matter if you kill women and children. No sentimentalism in warfare!”
Bombard Alexandria, if by this means you can get possession of a new market! Such are the lessons given by the upper classes.
Again, suppose a country, like Ireland, longs for Home Rule. Home Rule for Ireland menaces the interests of Birmingham manufacturers, of English landlords, and, especially, of the London money lenders and the English insurance companies to whom the mortgaged lands of Ireland really belong. Therefore the ruling classes throw the advocates of Home Rule into prison, turn the peasants who have made the soil out of their houses into the mud and snow of the ford, men, women and children; and, when it serves their purpose drive them to despair, provoke an insurrection and then crush it in blood! Such are again the lessons we are taught by the upper classes.
And if a workers’ movement menaces the interests of the rich, as it did at Chicago, slaughter the workers, pick out a few energetic men and hang them without much caring what is the truth about the crimes imputed to them; hang them to terrorise the masses!
Such are the lessons given by the upper classes.
Well, let us hope that the workers will be better than their teachers. Let us hope that the numbers of rebels will be so great and important and their leading ideas exercise so powerful an effect, that they will be strong enough not to resort to the wicked means now resorted to by a ruling minority which knows that its days are already numbered. Strength, force, can be generous; wicked feebleness never.
Such are the conditions in Europe.
And now, dear friend, tell to our American comrades that their heroes did not die in vain.
There is not a single city worth naming in Spain where the bloody anniversary was not commemorated by enthusiastic crowds of workers. Not one in Italy. Not one in Germany where the names of Parsons, Spies, Engel, Schwab, Fischer, Lingg, Neebe and Fielden were not invoked by workers who met in small groups, as they were not allowed to hold big meetings. The commemoration of the Chicago martyrs has almost acquired the same importance as the commemoration of the Paris Commune.
Many have already died for the grand cause of Freedom, but none of the martyrs of Freedom have been so enthusiastically adopted by the workers as their martyrs. And I will tell you why.
The workmen know that our Chicago brethren were thoroughly honest. Not one single black spot could be detected in their lives, even by their enemies. Not one single black spot! Mark that, young men and women who come to join the Socialist movement. The masses are honest and they ask the same from those who come to help them in their work. While a black past goes for nothing in the ranks of the politicians, the workers ask from their combatants to be pure of any reproach, to live in accordance with the grand principles they are preaching.
They were honest all their lives through, these martyrs of the labour cause, and once they had joined the Anarchist movement, they gave themselves to it, not by halves, but entirely, body and heart together.
And — they had no ambition. They were Anarchists and understood when they became Socialists, that it was not that they might climb themselves upon the shoulders of their fellow-workers. They did not ask from the masses a place in Parliament, in a Municipality, or on a School Board. They sought no power over the others, no place in the ranks of the ruling classes. They asked nothing but the right to fight in the ranks, at the post of danger. And there they died.
Only such men could die as they have died, without making the slightest concession to the enemy, loudly proclaiming their Anarchist principles before the judges who said that Anarchy is on trial, amidst the lawyers who whispered: “Renounce Anarchy, and you will be saved.”
They proclaimed their principles during the terrible year spent on the threshold of death; they proclaimed them on the scaffold, and they hailed the day on which they died for those principles as the happiest of their lives.
Such men can inspire the generations to come with the noblest feelings. And so they do, and will do. The idea which lives in such men will never die — it will conquer.
Also
Peter Kropotkin texts at the Anarchist Library
Lucy E. Parsons texts at the Anarchist Library
The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court
Autobiographies of the Haymarket martyrs
Plea for Anarchy, by Albert Parsons (1886)
The Philosophy of Anarchism, by Albert Parsons (1887)
Law vs Liberty, by Albert Parsons (1887)
Arrest of Mrs. Parsons and Children, by Lizzie M. Holmes (1887)
A Piece of History, by Lucy E. Parsons (1895)
For Candia, by Errico Malatesta / Kropotkin to Goldsmith on Crete and National Liberation (1897)
A Rebel May Day, from Industrial Worker (1909)
The Trial a Farce, by Lucy E. Parsons (1911)
A Correction, by Peter Kropotkin (1912)