honorable, but afflicted with excessive sensibility.

It is the most extreme form of these politico-social questions which,
in each historical period, possesses the most intense suggestive power.
In Italy sixty years ago it was _Mazzinnianisme_ or _Carbonarisme_;
twenty years ago, it was _socialism_; now it is _anarchism_.

It is very easy to understand how there occurred in each period, in
accordance with their respective dominant tendencies, deeds of personal
violence.... Felice Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of the
Italian Revolution.

In each case of individual violence, unless one is content with the
necessarily erroneous judgments begotten by emotion to reach a correct
decision it is necessary to make a physio-psychical examination of the
perpetrator, just as it is in the case of any other crime.

Felice Orsini was a political criminal through _passion_. Among the
anarchist bomb-throwers or assassins of our day may be found the born
criminal--who simply colors his congenital lack of the moral or social
sense with a political varnish--; the insane-criminal or mattoid whose
mental deficiency becomes blended with the political ideas of the
period; and also the criminal through political _passion_, acting from
sincere conviction and mentally almost normal, in whom the criminal
action is determined (or caused) solely by the false idea (which
socialism combats) of the possibility of effecting a _social_
transformation by means of _individual_ violence.[71]

But no matter whether the particular crime is that of a congenital
criminal or of a madman or of a political criminal through passion, it
is none the less true that personal violence, as adopted by the
anarchist individualists, is simply the logical product of individualism
carried to extremes and, therefore, the natural product of the existing
economic organization--though its production is also favored by the
"delirium of hunger," acute or chronic; but it is also the least
efficacious and the most anti-human means of social transformation.[72]

But all anarchists are not individualists, _amorphists_ or autonomists;
there are also anarchist-communists.

The latter repudiates deeds of _personal violence_, as ordinary means of
social transformation (Merlino, for example has recently stated this in
his pamphlet: _Necessita e base di un accordo_, Prato, 1892), but even
these anarchist-communists cut themselves off from Marxian socialism,
both by their