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of Barcelona and foredoom any revolt by that chronically rebellious city. So full were the cells that new prisoners had to be kept shackled in warships anchored below. There being in this case no one to admit to the guilt of so many deaths, torture was applied mercilessly to extract a confession. Prisoners were burned with irons or forced with whips to keep walking thirty, forty, or fifty hours at a time and subjected to other procedures indigenous to the country of the Inquisition. By these means information was extorted that led to the arrest in January, 1894, of an Anarchist named Santiago Salvador who admitted to the crime in the Opera House as an act of revenge for Pallas. His arrest was immediately answered by his fellow Anarchists of Barcelona with another bombing, which killed two innocent persons. The government replied with six death sentences carried out in April upon prisoners from whom some form of confession had been extracted by torture. Salvador, who had attempted ineffectively to kill himself by revolver and poison, was tried separately in July and executed in November.

The ghastly tale of the Opera House explosion in Spain excited the nerves of authorities everywhere and caused even the English to question whether allowing Anarchists to preach their doctrines openly was advisable. When, three days later, the Anarchists held their traditional memorial meeting for the Haymarket martyrs, questions were put in Parliament about the conduct of the Liberal Home Secretary, Mr. Asquith, in permitting it, since such meetings required specific approval by the Home Office in advance. Mr. Asquith endeavored to shrug the matter aside as insignificant but was “crushed,” according to a reporter, by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Balfour, who in his languid way suggested that the right to throw bombs was not an open question for public meetings nor defensible on the ground that society was badly organized. Whether convinced by Balfour or by second thoughts about the Spanish deaths, Asquith in any event reversed himself and announced a few days later that, as “the propagation of Anarchist doctrine was dangerous to the social order,” no further open meetings of Anarchists would be permitted.

London’s Anarchists at this time were mostly Russians, Poles, Italians and other exiles who centered around the “Autonomie,” an Anarchist club, and a second group among Jewish immigrants who lived and worked in desperate poverty in the East End, published a Yiddish-language paper, Der Arbeiter-Fraint, and gathered at a club called the “International,” in Whitechapel. The English working class, to whom acts of individual violence came less naturally than to Slavs and Latins, was on the whole not interested. An occasional intellectual like William Morris was a torch-bearer; but he was mainly interested in his personal version of a utopian state, and his influence having waned by the end of the eighties, he lost control of Commonweal, the journal he had founded and edited, to more militant, plebeian and orthodox Anarchists. Another journal, Freedom, was the organ of an active group whose mentor was Kropotkin, and a third, called The Torch—edited by the two daughters of William Rossetti—published the voices of Malatesta, Faure and other French and Italian Anarchists.

In 1891 with the appearance of The Soul of Man Under Socialism a strange recruit alighted briefly on the movement like a gorgeous butterfly and then flew off. The author of the essay was Oscar Wilde. He had been much moved by the personality of Kropotkin and saw true freedom for the Artist in a society in which, “of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.” Despite his title he objected to Socialism on the same ground as the orthodox Anarchist, namely, that it was “authoritarian.” If governments are to be armed with economic power, “if in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” Wilde’s vision was of Socialism founded upon Individualism, and when this had set free the true personality of man,