The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 4

anarchy. This astonishing heresy was
not of indigenous growth: its seeds were imported from Europe by the
emigration or banishment thence of criminals congenitally incapable of
understanding and valuing the blessings of monarchical institutions,
and whose method of protest was murder. The governments against
which they conspired in their native lands were too strong in authority
and too enlightened in policy for them to overthrow. Hundreds of them
were put to death, thousands imprisoned and sent into exile. But in
America, whither those who escaped fled for safety, they found
conditions entirely favorable to the prosecution of their designs.
A revered fetish of the Americans was "freedom of speech": it was

believed that if bad men were permitted to proclaim their evil wishes
they would go no further in the direction of executing them--that if they
might say what they would like to do they would not care to do it. The
close relation between speech and action was not understood. Because
the Americans themselves had long been accustomed, in their own
political debates and discussions, to the use of unmeaning declamations
and threats which they had no intention of executing, they reasoned that
others were like them, and attributed to the menaces of these desperate
and earnest outcasts no greater importance than to their own. They
thought also that the foreign anarchists, having exchanged the tyranny
of kings for that of majorities, would be content with their new and
better lot and become in time good and law-abiding citizens.
The anarchist of that far day (thanks to the firm hands of our gracious
sovereigns the species is now extinct) was a very different person from
what our infatuated ancestors imagined him. He struck at government,
not because it was bad, but because it was government. He hated
authority, not for its tyranny, but for its power. And in order to make
this plain to observation he frequently chose his victim from amongst
those whose rule was most conspicuously benign.
Of the seven early Presidents of the American republic who perished by
assassination no fewer than four were slain by anarchists with no
personal wrongs to impel them to the deed--nothing but an implacable
hostility to law and authority. The fifth victim, indeed, was a notorious
demagogue who had pardoned the assassin of the fourth.
The field of the anarchist's greatest activity was always a republic, not
only to emphasize his impartial hatred of all government, but because
of the inherent feebleness of that form of government, its inability to
protect itself against any kind of aggression by any considerable
number of its people having a common malevolent purpose. In a
republic the crust that confined the fires of violence and sedition was
thinnest.
No improvement in the fortunes of the original anarchists through
immigration to what was then called the New World would have made
them good citizens. From centuries of secret war against particular
forms of authority in their own countries they had inherited a bitter
antagonism to all authority, even the most beneficent. In their new
home they were worse than in their old. In the sunshine of opportunity

the rank and sickly growth of their perverted natures became hardy,
vigorous, bore fruit. They surrounded themselves with proselytes from
the ranks of the idle, the vicious, the unsuccessful. They stimulated and
organized discontent. Every one of them became a center of moral and
political contagion. To those as yet unprepared to accept anarchy was
offered the milder dogma of Socialism, and to those even weaker in the
faith something vaguely called Reform. Each was initiated into that
degree to which the induration of his conscience and the character of
his discontent made him eligible, and in which he could be most
serviceable, the body of the people still cheating themselves with the
false sense of security begotten of the belief that they were somehow
exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to their national
welfare and integrity. Human nature, they thought, was different in the
West from what it was in the East: in the New World the old causes
would not have the old effects: a republic had some inherent vitality of
its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep it alive.
They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and
charmed themselves asleep by repeating "liberty," "all men equal
before the law," "dictates of conscience," "free speech" and all manner
of such incantation to exorcise the spirits of the night. And when they
could no longer close their eyes to the dangers environing them; when
they saw at last that what they had mistaken for the magic power of
their form of government and its assured security was really its radical
weakness and subjective peril--they found their laws inadequate to
repression of