10c. A COPY $1 A YEAR

Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature

Published Every 15th of the Month

Emma Goldman, Publisher P.O. Box 217, Madison SQ Station, New York, N.Y.

Entered as second-class matter April 9, 1906, at the post office at New York, N.Y.,

under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

Vol.1 June, 1906, No. 4

MRS. GRUNDY.

By Viroqua Daniels.

Her will is law. She holds despotic sway.

Her wont has been to show the narrow way

Wherein must tread the world, the bright, the brave,

From infancy to dotard's gloomy grave.

"Obey! Obey!" with sternness she commands.

The high, the low, in great or little lands.

She folds us all within her ample gown.

A forward act is met with angry frown.

The lisping babes are taught her local speech;

Her gait to walk; her blessings to beseech.

They laugh or cry, as Mistress says they may,-

In everything the little tots obey.

The youth know naught save Mrs. Grundy's whims.

They play her games. They sing her holy hymns.

They question not; accept both truth and fiction,

(The OLD is right, within her jurisdiction!).

Maid, matron, man unto her meekly bow.

She with contempt or ridicule may cow.

They dare not speak, or dress, or love, or hate,

At variance with the programs on her slate.

Her subtle smile, e'en men to thinkers grown,

Are loath to lose; before its charm they're prone.

With great ado, they publicly conform-

Vain, cowards, vain; revolt MUST raise a storm!

The "indiscreet," when hidden from her sight,

Attempt to live as they consider "right."

Lo! Walls have ears! The loyal everywhere

The searchlight turn, and loudly shout, "Beware!"

In tyranny the Mistress is supreme.

"Obedience," that is her endless theme.

Al countries o'er, in city, town and glen,

Her aid is sought by bosses over men.

Of Greed, her brain is cunningly devised.

From Ignorance, her bulky body body's sized.

When at her ease, she acts as judge and jury.

But she's the Mob when 'roused to fighting fury.

Dame Grundy is, by far, the fiercest foe

To ev'ry kind of progress, that we know,

So Freedom is, to her, a poison thing.

Who heralds it, he must her death knell ring.

A GREETING.

By Alexander Berkman.

Dear Friends:-

I am happy, inexpressibly happy to be in your midst again, after an absence of four teen long years, passed amid the horrors and darkness of my Pennsylvania nightmare. * * * Methinks the days of miracles are not past. They say that nineteen hundred years ago a man was raised from the dead after having been buried for three days. They call it a great miracle. But I think the resurrection from the peaceful slumber of a three days grave is not nearly so miraculous as the actual coming back to life from a living death of fourteen years duration;-'tis the twentieth century resurrection, not based on ignorant credulity, nor assisted by any Oriental jugglery. No travelers ever return, the poets say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx-and may be it is a good thing for them that they don't-but you can see that there is an occasional exception even to that rule, for I have just returned from a hell, the like of which, for human brutality and fiendish barbarity, is not to be found even in the fire-and-brimstone creeds of our loving Christians.

It was a moment of supreme joy when I felt the heavy chains, that had bound me so long, give way with the final clang of the iron doors behind me and I suddenly found myself transported, as it were, from the dreary night of my prison-existence into the warm sunshine of the living day; and then, as I breathed the free air of the beautiful May morning-my first breath of freedom in fourteen years-it seemed to me as if a beautiful nature had waved her magic wand and marshalled her most alluring charms to welcome me into the world again; the sun, bathed in a sea of sapphire, seemed to shed his golden-winged caresses upon me; beautiful birds were intoning a sweet paean of joyful welcome; green-clad trees on the banks of the Allegheny were stretching out to me a hundred emerald arms, and every little blade of grass seemed to lift its head and nod to me, and all Nature whispered sweetly. "Welcome Home!" It was Nature's beautiful Springtime, the reawakening of Life, and Joy, and Hope, and the spirit of Springtime dwelt in my heart.

I had been told before I left the prison that the world had changed so much during my long confinement that I would practically come back into a new and different world. I hoped it were true. For at the time when I retired from the world, or rather when I was retired from the world-that was a hundred years ago, for it happened in the nineteenth century-at that time, I say, the footsteps of the world were faltering under the heavy cross of oppression, injustice and misery, and I could hear the anguish-cry of the suffering multitudes, even above the clanking of my own heavy chains. * * * But all that, is different now-I thought as I left the prison-for have I not been told that the world had changed, changed so much that, as they put it, "its own mother wouldn't know it again." And that -thought made me doubly happy: happy at the recovery of my own liberty, and happy in, the fond hope that I should find my own great joy mirrored in, and heightened by the happiness of my fellowmen.

Then I began to look around, and indeed, I found the world changed; so changed, in fact, that I am now afraid to cross the street, lest lightning, in the shape of a horseless car, overtake me and strike me down; I also found a new race of beings, a race of red devils-automobiles you call them-and I have been told about the winged children of thought flying above our heads-talking through the air, you know, and sometimes also through the hat, perhaps-and here in New York you can ride on the ground, overground, above ground, underground, and without any -ground at all.

These and a thousand and one other inventions and discoveries have considerably changed the face of the world. But alas! its face only. For as I looked further, past the outer trappings,. down into the heart of the world, I beheld the old, familiar, yet no less revolting sight of Mammon, enthroned upon a dias of bleeding hearts, and I saw the ruthless wheels of the social Juggernaut slowly crushing the beautiful form of liberty lying prostrate on the ground. * * * I saw men, women and children, without number, sacrificed on the altar of the capitalistic Moloch, and I beheld a race of pitiful creatures, stricken with the modern St. Vitus's dance at the shrine of the Golden Calf.

With an aching heart I realized what I had been told in prison about the changed condition of the world was but a miserable myth, and my fond hope of returning, into a new, regenerated world lay shattered at my feet. . . .

No, the world has not changed during my absence; I can find no improvement in the twentieth-century society over that of the nineteenth, and in truth, it is not capable of any real. improvement, for this society is the product of a civilization so self-contradictory in its essential qualities, so stupendously absurd in its results, that the more we advance in this would-be civilization the less rationel, the less human we become. Your twentieth-century civilization is fitly characterized by the fact that that, paradoxical as it may seem, the more we produce, the less we have, and the richer we get, the poorer we are. Your pseudo-civilization is of that quality which defeats its own ends, so that notwithstanding the prodigious mechanical aids we possess in the production of all forms of wealth, the struggle for existence is more savage, more ferocious to-day than it has been ever since the dawn of our civilization.

But what is the cause of all this, what is wrong with our society and our civilization?

Simply this:-a lie can not prosper. Our whole social fabric, our boasted civilization rests on the foundations of a lie, a most gigantic lie-the religious, political and economic lie, a triune lie, from whose fertile womb has issued a world of corruption, evils, shams und unnameable able crimes. There, denuded of its tinsel trappings, your civilization stands revealed in all the evil reality of its unadorned shame; and 'tis a ghastly sight, a mass of corruption, an ever-spreading cancer. Your false civilization is a disease, and capitalism is its most malignant form; 'tis the acute stage which is breeding into the world a race of cowards, weaklings and imbeciles; a race of mannikins, lacking the physical courage and mental initiative to think the thought and do the deed not inscribed in the book, of practice; a race of pigmies, slaves to tradition and superstitiion, lacking all force of individuality and rushing, like wild maniacs, toward the treacherous eddies of that social cataclysm which has swallowed the far mighter and greater nation of the ancient world.

It is because of these thing that I address myself to you, fellow-men. Society has not changed during my absence, and yet, to be saved, it needs to be changed. It needs, above all, real men, men and women of originality and individuality; men and women, not afraid to brave the scornful contempt of the conventional mob, men and women brave enough to break from the ranks of custom and lead into new paths, men and women strong enough to smash the fatal social lock-step and lead us into new and happier ways.

And because society has not changed, neither will I. Though the bloodthirsty hyena of the law has, in its wild revenge, despoiled me of the fourteen most precious blossoms in the garden of my life, yet I will, henceforth as heretofore, consecrate what days are left to me in the service of that grand ideal, the wonderful power of which has sustained me through those years of torture; and I will devote all my energies and whatever ability I may have to that nobelest of all causes of a new, regenerated and free humanity; and it shall be more than my sufficient reward to know that I have added, if ever so little, in breaking the shackles of superstition, ignorance and tradition, and helped to turn the tide of society from the narrow lane of its blind selfishness and self-sufficient arrogance into the broad, open road leading toward a true civilization, to be new and brighter day of Freedom in Brotherhood.

HENRIK IBSEN

M.B.

I SHALL not attempt to confine him within the rigid lines of any literary circle; nor shall I press him into the narrow frame of school or party; nor stamp upon him the distinctive label of any particular ism. He would break such fetters; his free spirit, his great individuality would overflow the arbitrary confines of "the sole Truth," "the only true principle." The waves of his sould would break down all artificial barriers and rush out to join the ever-moving currents of life.

[missing pages 7-14]

THE ANTICHRIST.

From "The Antichrist," by Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited by Alexander Title, translated by Thomas Common. Publishers: Macmillan & Co. New York.

I make war against this theological instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has thenlogical blood in his veins is from the very beginning ambiguous and disloyal with respect to everything. The pathos which develops therefrom calls itself belief: the closing of the eye once for all with respect to one's self, so as not to suffer from the sight-of incurable falsity. A person makes for himself a morality, a virtue, a sanctity out of this erroneous perspective towards all things, he unites the good conscience to the false mode of seeing,-he demands that no other mode of perspective be longer of sacrosanct any value, after he has made his own with the names of "God," "salvation," and "eternity." I have digged out the theologist-instinct everywhere; it is the most diffused, the most peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels as true, must needs be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth. It is his most fundamental self-preservative instinct which forbids reality to be held in honor, or even to find expression on any point. As far as theologist-influence extends, the judgment of value is turned right about, the concepts of "true" and "false" are necessarily reversed: what is most injurious to life is here called "true," what raises, elevates, affirms, justifies, and makes it triumph is called "false."

Let us not underestimate this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a "Transvaluation of all Values," an incarnate declaration of war against and triumph over all old concepts of "true" and "untrue." The most precious discernments into things are the latest discovered: the most precious discernments, however, are the methods. All methods, all presuppositions of our present-day science, have for millenniums been held in the most profound contempt: by reason of them a person was excluded from intercourse with "honest" men-he passed for an "enemy of God," a despiser of truth, a possessed" person. As a scientific man, a person was a Chandala . . . We have had the entire pathos of mankind against us-their concept of that which truth ought to be, which the service of truth ought to be: every thou shalt" has been hitherto directed against us. Our objects, our practices, our quiet, prudent mistrustful mode all appeared to mankind as absolutely unworthy and contemptible. -In the end one might, with some reasonableness, ask one's self if it was not really an esthetic taste which kept mankind in such long blindness: they wanted a picturesque effect from truth, they wanted in like manner the knowing ones to operate strongly on their senses. Our modesty was longest against the taste of mankind . . . Oh how they made that out, these turkey-cocks of God---.

The Christian concept of God-God as God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner, God as spirit-is one of the most corrupt concepts of God ever arrived at on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge of low water in the descending development of the God-type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and its eternal yea, In God, hostility announced to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every calumny of "this world," for every lie of "another world!" In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness declared holy!

That the strong races of Northern Europe have not thrust from themselves the Christian God, is verily no honor to their religious talent, not to speak of their taste. They ought to have. got the better of such a sickly and decrepit product of decadence. There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts-they have created no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum and maximum of the God-shaping force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotone-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all decadence instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have their sanction!

Has the celebrated story been really understood which stands at the commencement of the Bible-the story of God's mortal terror of science? It has not been understood. This priest-book par excellence begins appropriately with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he has only one great danger, consequently "God" has only one great danger.-

The old God, entire "spirit," entire high priest, entire perfection, promenades in his garden: he only wants pastime. Against tedium even Gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He contrives man-man is entertaining . . . But behold, man also wants pastime. The pity of God for the only distress which belongs to all paradises has no bounds: he forthwith created other animals besides. The first mistake of God: man did not find the animals entertaining-he ruled over them, but did not even want to be an "animal"-God consequently created woman. And, in fact, there was now an end of tedium-but of other things also! Woman was the second mistake of God.-"Woman is in her essence a serpent, Hera"-every priest knows that: "from woman comes all the mischief in the world"-every priest knows that likewise. Consequently, science also comes from her . . . Only through woman did man learn to taste of the tree of knowledge.-What had happened? The old God was seized by a mortal terror. Man himself had become his greatest mistake, he had created a rival, science makes godlike; it is at an end with priests and Gods, if man becomes scientific!-Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself-it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alone is morality.-"Thou shalt not know;"-the rest follows therefrom.-By his mortal terror God was not prevented from being shrewd. How does one defend one's self against science? That was for a long time his main problem. Answer: away with man, out of paradise! Happiness and leisure lead to thoughts,-thoughts are bad thoughts . . Man shall not think-and the "priest in himself'; contrives distress, death, the danger of life in pregnancy, every kind of misery, old age, weariness, and above all sickness,-nothing but expedients in the struggle against science! Distress does not permit man to think, . . . And nevertheless! frightful! the edifice of knowledge towers aloft, heaven-storming, dawning on the Gods,-what to do!The old God contrives war, he separates the peoples, he brings it about that men mutually annihilate one another (the priests have always had need of war . . . ).

War, among other things, a great disturber of science!-Incredible! Knowledge, the emancipation from the priest, augments even in spite of wars.-And a final resolution is arrived at by the old God: "man has become scientific,-- there is no help for it, he must be drowned!"

--I have been understood. The beginning of the Bible contains the entire psychology of the priest.-The priest knows only one great danger: that is science, -the sound concept of cause and effect. But science flourishes on the whole only under favorable circumstances,-one must have superfluous time, one must have superfluous intellect in order to "perceive" . . . Consequently man must be made unfortunate,-this has at all times been the logic of the priest. -One makes out what has only thereby come into the world in accordance with this logic:-"sin" . . . The concepts of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," have been devised in opposition to science, -in opposition to a severance of man from the priest . . . Man is not to look outwards, he is to look inwards into himself, he is not to look prudently and cautiously into things like a learner, he is not to look at all, he is to suffer . . . And he is so to suffer as to need the priest always. A Saviour is needed.-The concepts of guilt and punishment, inclusive of the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," and of "forgiveness"- lies through and through, and without any psychological reality-have been contrived to destroy the causal sense in man, they are an attack on the concepts of cause and effect!-And not an attack with the fists, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! But springing from the most cowardly, most deceitful, and most ignoble instincts! A priest's attack! A parasite's attack! A vampirism of pale, subterranean blood-suckers! When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer "natural," but are supposed to be brought about by the conseptual spectres of superstition, by "God," by "spirits," by "souls," as mere "moral" consequences, as reward, punishment, suggestion, or means of education, the pre-requisite of perception has been destroyed-the greatest crime against mankind has been committed. Sin, repeated once more, this form of human self-violation par excellence, has been invented for the purpose of making impossible science, culture, every kind of elevation and nobility of man; the priest rules by the invention of sin.

I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that ever an accuser has taken into his mouth. It is to me the greatest of all imaginable corruptions, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption that is at all possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched with its depravity, it has made a worthlessness out of every value, a lie out of every truth, a baseness of soul out of every straight-forwardness. Let a person still dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! To do away with any state of distress whatsoever was counter to its profoundest expediency, it lived by states of distress, it created states of distress in order to perpetuate itself eternally . . . The worm of sin for example; it is only the Church that has enriched mankind with this state, of distress! ...-"Humanitarian" blessings of Christianity! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to the lie at any price, a repugnance, a contempt for all good and straight-forward instincts! Those are for me blessing of Christianity! -Parasitism as the sole praxis of the Church; drinking out all blood, all love, all hope for life, with its anaemic ideal of holiness; the other world as the will to the negation of every reality; the cross as the rallying sign for the most subterranean conspiracy that has ever existed,-against healthiness, beauty, well-constitutedness, courage, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself . . .

This eternal accusation of Christianity I shall write on all walls, wherever there are walls,-I have letters for making even the blind see . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge for which no expedient is, sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, mean,-I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind!

BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK.

By PETER KROPOTKIN.

IN olden times men of science, and especially those who have done most to forward the growth of natural philosophy, did not despise manual work and handicraft. Galileo made his telescopes with his own hands. Newton learned in his boyhood the art of managing tools; he exercised his young mind in contriving most ingenious machines, and when he began his researches in optics he was able himself to grind the lenses for his instruments, and himself to make the well-known telescope, which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship. Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations. Linnaeus became a botanist while helping his father-a practical gardener-in his daily work. In short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract researches-it rather favored them. On the other hand, if the workers of old found but few opportunities for mastering science, many of them had, at least, their intelligences stimulated by the very variety of work which was performed in the then unspecialized workshops; and some of them had the benefit of familiar intercourse with men of science. Watt and Rennie were friends with Professor Robinson; Brindley, the road-maker, despite his fourteen-pence-a-day wages, enjoyed intercourse with educated men, and thus developed his remarkable engineering faculties; the son of a well-to-do family could "idle" at a wheelwright's shop, so as to be come later on a Smeaton or a Stephenson.

We have changed all that. Under the pretext of division of labor, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a mine or a factory from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the men of science, they despise manual labor. How few of them would be able to make a telescope, or even a plainer instrument? Most of them are not capable of even designing a scientific instrument, and when they have given a vague suggestion to the instrument-maker they leave it with him to invent the apparatus they need. Nay, they have raised the contempt of manual labor to the height of a theory. "The man of science," they say, "must discover the laws of nature, the civil engineer must apply them, and the worker must execute in steel or wood, in iron or stone, the patterns devised by the engineer. He must work with machines invented for him, not by him. No matter if he does not understand them and cannot improve them: the scientific man and the scientific engineer will take care of the progress of science and industry."

It may be objected that nevertheless There is a class of men who belong to none of the above three divisions. When young they have been manual workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing to some happy circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some scientific knowledge, and thus they have combined science with handicraft. Surely there are such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialization of labor, and it is precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions. But in old Europe at least, they are the exceptions; they are the irregulars-the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced the screens so carefully erected between the classes. And they are so few, in comparison with the ever-growing requirements of industry-and of science as well, as I am about to prove-that all over the world we hear complaint about the scarcity of precisely such men.

What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education which has been raised at one and the same time in England, in France, in Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a general dissatisfaction with the present division into scientists, scientific engineers, and workers? Listen to those who know industry, and you will see that the substance of their complaint is this: "The worker whose task has been specialized by the permanent division of labor has lost the intellectual interest in his labor, and it is especially so in the great industries: he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he invented very much. Manual workers-not men of science nor trained engineers-have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of machinery which has revolutionized industry for the last hundred years. But since the great factory has been enthroned, the worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more. What can a weaver invent who merely supervises four looms, without knowing anything either about their complicated movements or how the machines grew to be what they are? What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?

"At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers have invented; now they cease to do so. As to the inventions of the engineers, specially trained for devising machines, they are either devoid of genius or not practical enough. Those "nearly to nothings," of which Sir Frederick Bramwell spoke once at Bath, are missing in their inventions-those nothings which can be learned in the workshop only, and which permitted a Murdoch and the Soho workers to make a practical engine of Watt's schemes. None but he who knows the machine-not in its drawings and models only, but in its breathing and throbbings- who unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really improve it. Smeaton and Newcomen surely were excellent engineers; but in their engines a boy had to open the steam valve at each stroke of the piston; and it was one of those boys who once managed to connect the valve with the remainder of the machine, so as to make it open automatically, while he ran away to play with other boys. But in the modern machinery there is no room left for naive improvements of that kind. Scientific education on a wide scale has become necessary for further inventions, and that education is refused to the workers. So that there is no issue out of the difficulty unless scientific education and handicraft are combined together-unless integration of knowledge takes the place of the present divisions." Such is the real substance of the present movement in favor of technical education. But, instead of bringing to public consciousness the, perhaps, unconscious motives of the present discontent, instead of widening the views of the discontented and discussing the problem to its full extent, the mouth-pieces of the movement do not mostly rise above the shopkeeper's view of the question. Some of them indulge in jingo talk about crushing all foreign industries out of competition, while the others see in technical education nothing but a means of somewhat improving the flesh-machine of the factory and of transferring a few workers into the upper class of trained engineers.

Such an ideal may satisfy them, but it cannot satisfy those who keep in view the combined interests of science and industry, and consider both as a means for raising humanity to a higher level. We maintain that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth, ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to combine a thorough knowledge of science with a thorough knowledge of handicraft. We fully recognize the necessity of specialization of knowledge, but we maintain that specialization must follow general education, and that general education must be given in science and handicraft alike. To the division of society into brain-workers and manual workers we oppose the combination, of both kinds of activities; and instead of "technical education," which means the maintenance of the present division between brain work and manual work, we advocate the education integrale, or complete education, which means the disappearance of that pernicious distinction. Plainly stated, the aims of the school under this system ought to be the following: To give such an education that, on leaving school at the age of eighteen or twenty, each boy and each girl should be endowed with a thorough knowledge of science--such a knowledge as might enable them to be useful workers in science-and, at the same time, to give them a general knowledge of what constitutes the bases of technical training, and such a skill in some special trade as would enable each of them to take his or her place in the grand world of the manuel production of wealth. I know that many will find that aim too large, or even impossible to attain, but I hope that if they have the patience to read the following pages, they will see that we require nothing beyond what can be easily attained. In fact, it has been attained; and what has been done on a small scale could be done on a wider scale, were it not for the economical and social causes which prevent any serious reform from being -accomplished in our miserably organized society. . .

The experiment has been made at the Moscow Technical School for twenty consecutive years with many hundreds of boys; and, according to the testimonies of the most competent judges at the exhibitions of Brussels, Philadelphia, Vienna and Paris, the experiment has been a success. The Moscow school admits boys not older than fifteen, and it requires from boys of that age nothing but a substantial knowledge of geometry and algebra, together with the usual knowledge of their mother tongue; younger pupils are received in the preparatory classes. The school is divided into two sections-the mechanical and the chemical; but as I personally know better the former, and as it is also the more important with reference to the question before us, so I shall limit my remarks to the education given in the mechanical seetion. After a five or six years' stay at the school, the students leave it with a thorough knowledge, of higher mathematics, physics, mechanics, and connected sciences -so thorough, indeed, that it is not second to that acquired in the best mathematical faculties of the most eminent European universities. When myself a student of the mathematical faculty of the St. Petersburg University, I had the opportunity of comparing the knowledge of the students at the Moscow Technical School with our own. I saw the courses of higher geometry some of them had compiled for the use of their comrades; I admired the facility with which they applied the integral calculus to dynamical problems, and I came to the conclusion that while we, University students, had more knowledge of a general character, they, the students of the Technical School, were much more advanced in higher geometry, and especially in the applications of higher mathematics to the most intricate problems of dynamics, the theories of heat and elasticity. But while we, the students of the University, hardly knew the use of our hands, the students of the Technical School fabricated with their own hands , and without the help of professional workmen, fine steam-engines, from the heavy boiler to the last finely turned screw, agricultural machinery, and scientific apparatus-all for the trade-and they received the highest awards for the work of their hands at the international exhibitions. They were scientifically educated skilled workers-workers with university education -highly appreciated even by the Russian manufacturers who so much distrust science.

Now, the methods by which these wonderful results were achieved were these: In science, learning from memory was not in honor, while independent research was favored by all means. Science was taught hand in hand with its applications, and what was learned in the schoolroom was applied in the workshop. Great attention was paid to the highest abstractions of geometry as a means for developing imagination and research. As to the teaching of handicraft, the methods were quite different from those which proved a failure at the Cornell University, and differed, in fact, from those used in most technical schools. The student was not sent to a workshop to learn some special handicraft and to earn his existence as soon as possible, but the teaching of technical skill was prosecuted-according to a scheme elaborated by the founder of the school, M. Dellavos, and now applied also at Chicago and Boston-in the same systematical way as laboratory work is taught in the universities. It is evident that drawing was considered as the first step in technical education. Then the student was brought, first, to the carpenter's workshop, or rather laboratory, and there he was thoroughly taught to execute all kinds of carpentry and joinery. No efforts were spared in order to bring the pupil to a certain perfection in that branch-the real basis of all trades. Later on, he was transferred to the turner's workshop, where he was taught to make in wood the patterns of those things which he would have to make in metal in the following workshops. The foundry followed, and there he was taught to cast those parts of machines which he had prepared in wood; and it was only after he had gone through the first three stages that he was admitted to the smith's and engineering workshops. As for the perfection of the mechanical work of the students I cannot do better than refer to the reports of the juries at the above-named exhibitions.

In America the same system has - been introduced, in its technical part, first, in the Chicago Manual TrainingSchool, and later on in the Boston Technical School the best, I am told, of the sort; and in this country, or rather in Scotland, I found the system applied with full success, for some years, under the direction of Dr. Ogilvie at Gordon's College in Aberdeen. It is the Moscow or Chicago system on a limited scale. While receiving substantial scientific education, the pupils are also trained in the workshops-but not for one special trade, as it unhappily too often is the case. They pass through the carpenter's workshop, the casting in metals, and the engineering workshop; and in each of these they learn the foundations of each of the three trades sufficiently well for supplying the school itself with a number of useful things. Besides, as far as I could ascertain from what I saw in the geographical and physical classes, as also in the chemical laboratory, the system of "through the hand to the brain," and vice versa, is in full swing, and it is attended with the best success. The boys work with the physical instruments, and they study geography in the field, instruments in hands, as well as in the class-room, Some of their surveys filled my heart, as an old geographer, with joy. It is evident that the Gordon's College industrial department is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I cannot help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools.

The Moscow Technical School surely is not an ideal school. 1 It totally neglects the humanitarian education of the young men. But we must recognize that the Moscow experiment-not to speak of hundreds of other partial experiments-has perfectly well proved the possibility of combining a scientific education of a very high standard with the education which is necessary for becoming an excellent skiled laborer. It has proved, moreover, that the best means for producing really good skilled laborers is to seize the bull by the horns, and to grasp the educational problem in its great features, instead of trying to give some special skill in some handicraft, together with a few scraps of knowledge in a certain branch of some science. And it has shown also what can be obtained, without over-pressure, if a rational economy of the scholar's time is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice. Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem extraordinary at all, and still better results may be expected if the same principles are applied from the earliest years of education. Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible. Our present methods of teaching originate from a time when the accomplishments required from an educated person were extremely limited; and they have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense increase of knowledge which must be conveyed to the scholar's mind since science has so much widened its former limits. Hence the over-pressure in schools, and hence, also, the urgent necessity of totally revising both the subjects and the methods of teaching, according to the new wants and to the examples already given here and there, by separate schools and separate teachers.

It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent so uselessly as they are now. German teachers have shown how the very plays of children can be made instrumental in conveying to the childish mind some concrete knowledge in both geometry and mathematics. The children who have made the squares of the theorem of Pythagoras out of pieces of colored cardboard, will not took at the theorem, when it comes in geometry, as on a mere instrument of torture devised by the teachers; and the less so if they apply it as the carpenters do. Complicated problems of arithmetic, which so much harassed us in our boyhood, are easily solved by children seven and eight years old if they are put in the shape of interesting puzzles. And if the Kindergarten--German teachers often make of it a kind of barrack in which each movement of the child is regulated beforehand-has often become a small prison for the little ones, the idea which presided at its foundation is nevertheless true. In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine, without having tried it, how many sound notions of nature, habits of classification, and taste for natural sciences can be conveyed to the children's minds; and, if a series of concentric courses adapted to the various phases of development of the human being were generally accepted in education, the first series in all sciences, save sociology, could be taught before the age of ten or twelve, so as to give a general idea of the universe, the earth and its inhabitants, the chief physical, chemical, zoological, and botanical phenomena, leaving the discovery of the laws of those phenomena to the next series of deeper and more specialised studies. On the other side, we all know how children like to make toys themselves how they gladly imitate the work of full-grown people if they see them at work in the workshop or the building-yard. But the parents either stupidly paralyze that passion, or do not know I-low to utilize it. Most of them despise manual work and prefer sending their children to the study of Roman history, or of Franklin's teachings about saving money, to seeing them at a work which is good for the "lower classes only." They thus do their best to render subsequent learning the more difficult.

    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

The so-called division of labor has grown under a system which condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the same wearisome kind of labor. But if we take into account how few are the real producers of wealth in our present society, and how squandered is their labor, we must recognize that Franklin was right in saying that to work five hours a clay would generally do for supplying each member of a civilized nation with the comfort now accessible for the few only, provided everybody took his due share in production. But we have made some progress since Franklin's times. More than one-half of the working day would thus remain to every one for the pursuit of art, or any hobby he might prefer; and his work in those fields would be the more profitable if he spent the other half of the day in productive work-if art and science were followed from mere inclination, not for mercantile purposes. Moreover, a community organized on the principles of all being workers would be rich enough to conclude that every man and woman, after having reached a certain age-say of forty or more-ought to be relieved from the moral obligation of taking a direct part in the performance of the necessary manual work, so as to be able entirely to devote himself or herself to whatever he or she chooses in the domain of art, or science, or any kind of work. Free pursuit in new branches of art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed. And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth. It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our life and stifles every noble effort. It would freely take its flight towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.

Footnote

1. What this school is now, I don't know. In the last years of Alexander II.'s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good institutions of the early part of his reign.

Go to Volume 1, Number 5

Return to Emma Goldman's Collected Works

Return to Anarchy Archives