Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [45]
Most of them were voiceless or could speak their protest only in the wail of a dispossessed Irish peasant spading his field for the last time, who was asked by a visitor what he wanted. “What is it I am wantin’?” cried the old man, shaking his fist at the sky. “I want the Day av Judgment!”
The poor lived in a society in which power, wealth and magnificent spending were never more opulent, in which the rich dined on fish, fowl and red meat at one meal, lived in houses of marble floors and damask walls and of thirty or forty or fifty rooms, wrapped themselves in furs in winter and were cared for by a retinue of servants who blacked their boots, arranged their hair, drew their baths and lit their fires. In this world, at a luncheon for Mme Nellie Melba at the Savoy, when perfect peaches, a delicacy of the season, were served up “fragrant and delicious in their cotton wool,” the surfeited guests made a game of throwing them at passers-by beneath the windows.
These were the rulers and men of property whose immense possessions could, it seemed, only be explained as having been accumulated out of the pockets of the exploited masses. “What is Property?” asked Proudhon in a famous question and answered, “Property is theft.” “Do you not know,” cried Enrico Malatesta in his Talk Between Two Workers, an Anarchist classic of the nineties, “that every bit of bread they eat is taken from your children, every fine present they give to their wives means the poverty, hunger, cold, even perhaps prostitution of yours?”
If in their economics the Anarchists were hazy, their hatred of the ruling class was strong and vibrant. They hated “all mankind’s tormentors,” as Bakunin called them, “priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, officials, financiers, capitalists, moneylenders, lawyers.” To the workers themselves it was not the faraway rich but their visible representatives, the landlord, the factory owner, the boss, the policeman, who were the Enemy.
They could hate but only a few were rebels. Most existed in apathy, stupefied by poverty. Some gave up. A woman with four children who made match boxes at 4½ cents a gross, and by working fourteen hours could make seven gross a day for a total of 31½ cents, threw herself out of the window one day and was carried from the street dead. She was “discouraged,” a neighbor said. A young man who had a sick mother and had lost his job was charged in magistrate’s court with attempted suicide. The lockkeeper’s wife who pulled him out of the river testified how “as fast as I pulled to get him out, he crawled back” until some workmen came to assist her. When the magistrate congratulated the woman on her muscular powers, the courtroom laughed, but an observer named Jack London wrote, “All I could see was a boy on the threshold of life passionately crawling to a muddy death.”
The failure of practical attempts at Anarchism in Bakunin’s period caused Anarchist theory and practice to veer off in a direction not toward the earth but toward the clouds. In the new period beginning in the nineties, its aims, always idyllic, became even more utopian and its deeds less than ever connected with reality. It became impatient. It despised the puny efforts of Socialists and trade unionists to achieve the eight-hour day. “Eight hours of work for the boss is eight hours too much,” proclaimed the Anarchist paper, La Révolte. “We know that what is wrong with our society is not that the worker works ten, twelve or fourteen hours, but that the boss exists.”
The most prominent among the new Anarchist leaders was Prince Peter Kropotkin, by birth an aristocrat, by profession a geographer, and by conviction a revolutionist. His sensational escape after two years’ imprisonment