The field of the anarchist's greatest activity was always a republic, not
only to emphasize his impartial hatred of all government, but because of
the inherent feebleness of that form of government, its inability to
protect itself against any kind of aggression by any considerable number
of its people having a common malevolent purpose. In a republic the crust
that confined the fires of violence and sedition was thinnest.

No improvement in the fortunes of the original anarchists through
immigration to what was then called the New World would have made them
good citizens. From centuries of secret war against particular forms of
authority in their own countries they had inherited a bitter antagonism to
all authority, even the most beneficent. In their new home they were worse
than in their old. In the sunshine of opportunity the rank and sickly
growth of their perverted natures became hardy, vigorous, bore fruit. They
surrounded themselves with proselytes from the ranks of the idle, the
vicious, the unsuccessful. They stimulated and organized discontent. Every
one of them became a center of moral and political contagion. To those as
yet unprepared to accept anarchy was offered the milder dogma of
Socialism, and to those even weaker in the faith something vaguely called
Reform. Each was initiated into that degree to which the induration of his
conscience and the character of his discontent made him eligible, and in
which he could be most serviceable, the body of the people still cheating
themselves with the false sense of security begotten of the belief that
they were somehow exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to
their national welfare and integrity. Human nature, they thought, was
different in the West from what it was in the East: in the New World the
old causes would not have the old effects: a republic had some inherent
vitality of its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep
it alive. They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and
charmed themselves asleep by repeating "liberty," "all men equal before