Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Yet not less than fifteen hundred persons were arrested during this hunt, and half of them were kept in prison for years.

But intercourse with men brought its sufferings as well as its joys.

Now, if solitary confinement without any sort of work is hard for educated men, it is infinitely harder for a peasant who is accustomed to physical work, and not at all wont to spend years in reading.

Gradually his thoughts grew more and more confused, and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became at last that of a lunatic.

Frightful noises and wild cries came next from the lower story; our neighbour was mad, but was still kept for several months in the casemate before he was removed to an asylum, from which he never emerged.

To witness the destruction of a man’s mind, under such conditions, was terrible.

To tell the emperor through the grand duke of the desolation of Russia, the ruin of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of the officials, the terrible famines in prospect?

To say that we wanted to help the peasants out of their desperate condition, to make them raise their heads--and by all this try to influence Alexander II.?

He was a bright, intelligent, aged general, who examined me in the most scrupulous manner, and concluded that I had no organic disease, but was suffering simply from a want of oxidation of the blood. ‘Air is all that you want,’ he said.

As soon as I was taken back to my cell I wrote to my friends to communicate to them the welcome news. ‘I feel well-nigh unable to use the cipher,’ I wrote with a tremulous hand, tracing almost illegible signs instead of figures. ‘This…

Common sense ought to have shown the authorities that a person who had officially visited me in prison would not be involved in such an affair.

As I went to the steamer I asked myself with anxiety, ‘Under which flag does she sail--Norwegian, German, English?’ Then I saw floating above the stern the Union Jack--the flag under which so many refugees, Russian, Italian, French…

I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart.

I was soon taken up by the wave of the anarchist movement, which was just then rising in Western Europe; and I felt that I should be more useful in helping that movement to find its proper expression than I could possibly be in Russia.

The editor wanted to increase the column of Notes, and found that I wrote them exactly as they were required.

As to my scruples, he remarked wisely that I need neither scold nor praise the author, but could simply tell the readers what the books were about.

It always happens that after a political party has set before itself a purpose, and has proclaimed that nothing short of the complete attainment of that aim will satisfy it, it divides into two fractions.

One of them remains what it was, while the other, although it professes not to have changed a word of its previous intentions, accepts some sort of compromise, and gradually, from compromise to compromise, is driven farther from its…

Nothing less than an expropriation of the present owners of land and capital, and a transmission of all that is necessary for the production of wealth to the producers themselves, was the avowed aim of the Association at the outset.

The Association had thus to be the means for preparing an immense revolution in men’s minds, and later on in the very forms of life--a revolution which would open to mankind a new era of progress based upon the solidarity of all.

That was the ideal which aroused from their slumber millions of European workers, and attracted to the Association its best intellectual forces.

To-day, in Switzerland, the efforts of the social democrats are directed in politics toward centralization as against federalism, and in the economic field to promoting the state management of railways and the state monopoly of banking and…

The state management of the land and of the leading industries, and even of the consumption of riches, would be the next step in a more or less distant future.

Every popular outbreak, every revolutionary agitation in any country of Europe, was received by the social democratic leaders with even more animosity than by the capitalist press.

Federalist by their history, hostile to the idea of a centralized state, and possessed of revolutionary traditions, the Latin workers could not follow the evolution of the Germans.