the pre-Revolutionary Encyclopedists (especially Diderot and Rousseau). I even pass by the far more pertinent teachings, systems, personalities, and careers of the admitted precursors of modern anarchism; of Max Stirner and Fourier, of Proudhon, the father of modern anarchist doctrine, and of “the mysterious Russian,” Bakounine, the father of the modern anarchist party. I also pass by the agrarian revolt of Gracchus Babœuf (guillotined by Barras in 1797); the emergence of the learned Russian Kropotkine, and of the Italians Cafiero and Malatesta; the relations between French anarchism and Russian nihilism; the struggle for Italian liberation; the founding of the _Internationale_ and of the _Fédération Jurasienne_; the epic struggle for the control of the _Internationale_ between Karl Marx, representing authoritative centralisation, and Bakounine, representing anti-authoritative federalism. I neglect, in a word, the more than interesting history of the slow evolution of modern anarchism, and coming directly, without further ado, to the France of to-day, attack the questions,—What is anarchy? What does the anarchist want? And how does he hope to get it? Of the contemporary French Encyclopedists who are preparing, or think they are preparing, the revolution of the twentieth century, three are eminently fitted by their learning, by their capacity for straight thinking and utterance, by their sense of historical perspective, their power of keen analysis and bold synthesis, by their breadth, their tolerance, their humanity, their integrity, and their consecration, to answer these questions. They are Pierre Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and Jean Grave. But Kropotkine, while the author of such epoch-making works as _La Conquête du Pain, L’Anarchie: son Idéal_, and _Les Paroles d’un Révolté_, is a Russian, not a Frenchman, by birth and breeding, and has been little in Paris of late; and Reclus[1] (one of the most learned geographers of his time), though never far away from the anarchist movement, is, by reason of his devotion to his specialty, rarely in the thick of it. Besides, he has made his home in Belgium for many years. It is to Jean Grave, therefore, the youngest of the three, the present editor of the journal _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and author of _La Société Mourante_, _La Société Future_, _La Société au Lendemain de la Révolution_, _L’Individu et la Société_, and _L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens_, that it seems best to confide the delicate task of presenting the French anarchistic idea and ideal; and, because I cannot trust myself to summarise without bias the _credo_ of a sect to which I do not belong, I quote in full the comprehensive first chapter of his important doctrinal volume, _L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens_:— “In spite of the fact that the idea of anarchy has emerged from the obscurity in which men have attempted to stifle it, in spite of the fact that to-day (thanks to persecution, thanks to laws of exception such as are made in the worst monarchies) the words ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchist’ are unfamiliar to none, there are not many who know exactly what anarchy is. “The intervention of the anarchists in the Dreyfus affair, where they were much in evidence, had the effect of bringing them into contact with bourgeois politicians, who knew absolutely nothing about them; but anarchy did not come out into a clearer light from this association. “Anarchy, in the eyes of some, is robbery, assassination, bombs, a return to savagery; anarchists are only house-breakers, loafers, who would divide all wealth in order to be able to amuse themselves with doing nothing. “In the eyes of others, anarchy is a sort of Utopia, of golden-age dream which they readily grant to be very beautiful, but a...