Anarchists and Nihilists [excerpt]

ANARCHISTS or Nihilists, call them which you will, have earned an unenviable reputation throughout the world. More especially to the English-speaking nations are they repugnant, not because they have suffered more from their nefarious practices, but from the fact that liberty and law being their birthright, and as necessary to them as the air they breathe, the Anglo-Saxons can find no language strong enough to condemn those who would demolish their most cherished institutions and make the liberty of the subject an impossibility. Such crimes as the assassination of the Empress of Austria, or of King Humbert of Italy, or of President McKinley are indefensible by any man with a spark of decency or of social instinct. Those who perpetrate such enormities are rightly the outcasts of humanity. They have forfeited their inheritance in it, and must rank henceforth with the wild beasts who are a danger to mankind, and must, therefore, be exterminated. Such cases of perverted instincts are fortunately rare; but society is heir to them as flesh is heir to cancer or consumption or any other plague.