considered, must appear, even to Europe’s most philosophical thinkers, the real source of all the misery of the modern world.  To set these destructive forces in action appeared to him the only object worthy of a sensible man’s activity. (Even while he was preaching these horrible doctrines, Bakunin, noticing that my eyes troubled me, shielded them with his outstretched hand from the naked light for a full hour, in spite of my protestations.) This annihilation of all civilisation was the goal upon which his heart was set.  Meanwhile it amused him to utilise every lever of political agitation he could lay hands on for the advancement of this aim, and in so doing he often found cause for ironical merriment.  In his retreat he received people belonging to every shade of revolutionary thought.  Nearest to him stood those of Slav nationality, because these, he thought, would be the most convenient and effective weapons he could use in the uprooting of Russian despotism.  In spite of their republic and their socialism a la Proudhon, he thought nothing of the French, and as for the Germans, he never mentioned them to me.  Democracy, republicanism, and anything else of the kind he regarded as unworthy of serious consideration.

Every objection raised by those who had the slightest wish to reconstruct what had been demolished, he met with overwhelming criticism.  I well remember on one occasion that a Pole, startled by his theories, maintained that there must be an organised state to guarantee the individual in the possession of the fields he had cultivated.  ‘What!’ he answered; ’would you carefully fence in your field to provide a livelihood for the police again!’ This shut the mouth of the terrified Pole.  He comforted himself by saying that the creators of the new order of things would arise of themselves, but that our sole business in the meantime was to find the power to destroy.  Was any one of us so mad as to fancy that he would survive the desired destruction?  We ought to imagine the whole of Europe with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London transformed into a vast rubbish-heap.  How could we expect the kindlers of such a fire to retain any consciousness after so vast a devastation?  He used to puzzle any who professed their readiness for self-sacrifice by telling them it was not the so-called tyrants who were so obnoxious, but the smug Philistines.  As a type of these he pointed to a Protestant parson, and declared that he would not believe he had really reached the full stature of a man until he saw him commit his own parsonage, with his wife and child, to the flames.