Men are often what is described as 'born Socialists'—born, that is to say, with altruistic natures, abhorrent of all social wrong, and with minds easily attracted by Utopian ideas. Men are also often enough 'born individualists'—wholly obsessed, that is to say, with their own self-interests and desires. Men are never 'born Anarchists.' Anarchism is not an innate predisposition in man; it is an acquired state of mind, and a very unstable one usually. The Anarchist is either a Socialist who has got muddled with individualist ideas, or an individualist who has got muddled with Socialist ideas.
Undoubtedly the presence in the movement of a large element of foreign refugees, particularly from Russia and Poland and Spain, afforded Anarchism a stimulating soil for growth. These exiles, bred under Tsarist despotism, knowing government only as a machine of oppression, and possessing no attachment to British traditions of constitutional liberty, and often failing to acquire any deep sense of civic responsibility, were naturally disposed to favour 'autonomist' and insurrectionary ideas. It was amongst these people also that the police agents of foreign governments were for ever prowling for their victims.
And here, as events proved, we are near to the main source of the 'propaganda by deed' excitement which, under the name of Anarchism, so widely infected the movement at that period. That this Anarchist propaganda was organised and stimulated by police spies and agents provocateurs, admits of no doubt. The subsequent tragic incidents of the Walsall Anarchist bomb plot, and the revelations that then and afterwards ensued, especially in connection with the notorious Coulon, proved that for years the police had been at work devising Anarchist plots and inveigling dupes into their criminal net.
The Socialist League was, of course, particularly vulnerable to Anarchist propaganda, because of its avowedly revolutionary aims, and anti-parliamentary policy. Many of its members found it difficult to draw the line clearly
