we triumph or no, our life itself is a victory,
for it is a life lived in the spirit. To shatter material bonds that
we may bind closer the bonds of the soul, to slough dead husks that we
may liberate living forms, to abolish institutions that we may evoke
energies, to put off the material and put on the spiritual body, that,
whether we fight with the tongue or the sword, is the inspiration of
our movement, that, and that only, is the true and inner meaning of
anarchy.

"Anarchy is identified with violence; and I will not be so hypocritical
and base as to deny that violence must be one of our means of action.
Force is the midwife of society; and never has radical change been
accomplished without it. What came by the sword by the sword must be
destroyed: and only through violence can violence come to an end. Nay,
I will go further and confess, since here if anywhere we are candid,
that it is the way of violence to which I feel called myself, and that
I shall die as I have lived, an active revolutionary. But because
force is a way, is a necessary way, is my way, I do not imagine that
there is no other. Were it not idle to wish, I could rather wish that
I were a poet or a saint, to serve the same Lord by the gentler weapons
of the spirit. There are anarchists who never made a speech and never
carried a rifle, whom we know as our brothers, though perhaps they know
not us. Two I will name who live for ever, Shelley, the first of
poets, were it not that there is one greater than he, the mystic
William Blake. We are thought of as men of blood; we are hounded over
the face of the globe. And who of our persecutors would believe that
the song we bear in our hearts, some of us, I may speak at least for
one, is the most inspired, the most spiritual challenge ever flung to
your obtuse, flatulent, stertorous England:

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

"England! No, not England, but Europe, America, the world! Where is
Man, the new Man, there is our country. But the new Man is buried in
the old; and wherever he struggles in his tomb, wherever he knocks we
are there to help to deliver him. When the guards sleep, in the
silence of the dawn, rises the crucified Christ.