A GIRL AMONG THE ANARCHISTS

By Isabel Meredith




PREFACE


In spite of the fact that there are certain highly respectable
individualists of a rabid type who prefer to call themselves Anarchists,
it must be owned that it requires some courage to write about Anarchism
even with the sympathy befitting a clinical physician or the scientific
detachment of a pathologist. And yet it is certain that Anarchists are
curiously interesting, and not the less in need of observation from the
fact that apparently none of the social quacks who prescribe seriously in
leading articles has the faintest insight into them as a phenomenon, a
portent, or a disease. This book, if it is read with understanding, will,
I feel assured, do not a little to show how it comes about that Anarchism
is as truly endemic in Western Civilisations as cholera is in India.
Isabel Meredith, whom I had the pleasure of knowing when she was a more
humble member of the staff of the _Tocsin_ than the editor, occupies,
to my knowledge, a very curious and unique position in the history of
English Anarchism. There is nothing whatever in "A Girl among the
Anarchists" which is invented, the whole thing is an experience told very
simply, but I think convincingly. Nevertheless as such a human document
must seem incredible to the ordinary reader, I have no little pleasure in
saying that I know what she has written to be true. I was myself a
contributor to the paper which is here known as the _Tocsin_. I have