the evening to study
together."[81] It is hardly necessary to add that this group became
Anarchist.

That is how the trick is done. A working man, active and intelligent,
supports the programme of one or the other bourgeois party. The
bourgeois talk about the well-being of the people, the workers, but
betray them on the first opportunity. The working man who has believed
in the sincerity of these persons is indignant, wants to separate from
them, and decides to study seriously "economic questions." An Anarchist
comes along, and reminding him of the treachery of the bourgeois, and
the sabres of the gendarmes, assures him that the political struggle is
nothing but bourgeois nonsense, and that in order to emancipate the
workers political action must be given up, making the destruction of the
State the final aim. The working man who was only beginning to study the
situation thinks the "companion" is right, and so he becomes a convinced
and devoted Anarchist! What would happen, if pursuing his studies of the
social question further, he had understood that the "companion" was a
pretentious ignoramus, that he talked twaddle, that his "Ideal" is a
delusion and a snare, that outside bourgeois politics there is, opposed
to these, the political action of the proletariat, which will put an end
to the very existence of capitalist society? He would have become a
Social-Democrat.

Thus the more widely our ideas become known among the working classes,
and they are thus becoming more and more widely known, the less will
proletarians be inclined to follow the Anarchist. Anarchism, with the
exception of its "learned" housebreakers, will more and more transform
itself into a kind of bourgeois sport, for the purpose of providing
sensations for "individuals" who have indulged too freely in the
pleasures of the world, the flesh and the devil.

And when the proletariat are masters of the situation, they will only
need to look at the "companions," and even the "finest" of them will be
silenced; they will only have to breathe to disperse all the Anarchist
dust to the winds of heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] It is true that men like Reclus do not always approve of such
notions of the revolution. But again we ask, what is left of the
Anarchist when once he rejects the "propaganda of deed"? A sentimental,
visionary bourgeois--nothing more.

[80] In order to obtain some idea of the weakness of the bourgeois
theorists and politicians in their stru