"In this duel," said Vaillant, "I have only wounded
my adversary, it is now his turn to strike me."[7] It is tragic enough
that a poor and desperate soul, like Vaillant, should have felt himself
in deadly combat with society, but how much more tragic it is for
society to admit that fact, accept the challenge, and take that life!
"If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you," said Louis Lingg.[8] And
we answer, "If you dynamite us, we shall cannonade you." And in so far
as this is our sole attitude toward these rebels, wherein are we
superior? For Lingg to say that was at least heroic. For us so to answer
is not even heroic. Our paid men see to it. It is done as a matter of
course and forgotten.

These men say that justice exists only for the powerful, that the poor
are robbed, and that "the lamp of their soul" is put out. They beg us to
listen, and we will not. They ask us to read, and we will not. "It takes
a loud voice to make the deaf hear," said Vaillant. They then give all
they have to execute one dreadful deed of propaganda in order to awaken
us. Must even this fail? We can hang them, but can we forget them? After
every deed of the anarchists the press, the police, and the pulpit carry
on for weeks a frenzied discussion over their atrocities. The lives of
these Propagandists of the Deed are then crushed out, and in a few
months even their names are forgotten. There seems to be an innate dread
among us to seek the causes that lie at the bottom of these distressing
symptoms of our present social regime. We prefer, it seems, to become
like that we contemplate. We seek to terrorize them, as they seek to
terrorize us. As the anarchist believes that oppression may be ended by
the murder of the oppressor, so society cherishes the thought that
anarchism may be ended by the murder of the anarchist. Are not our
methods in truth the same, and can any man doubt that both are equally
futile and senseless? Both the anarchy of the powerful and the anarchy
of the weak are stupid and abortive, in that they lead to results
diametrically opposed to the ends sought. Tennyson was never nearer a
great social truth than when he wrote:

"He that roars for liberty
Faster binds a tyrant's power;
And the tyrant's cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour."[9]

No one perhaps is better qualified than Lombroso to speak on the present
punitive methods of society as a direct cause of terrorism.
"Punishment," he says, "far