Joseph Conrad wrote this brief spy story about 20 years into his literary career, after publishing the novels, drawn from his early experiences at sea, that would make his reputation. The Secret Agent can still be fruitfully read for the elegance of its language alone. (Whenever my lack of success in some endeavor seems irreversible, I recall Conrad learning English in his 20s and still becoming one of our language’s most splendid stylists.) Perhaps a still more compelling reason to read it is for its brilliant portrait of the insanity of revolutionary leftist radicalism.

The revolutionaries’ plot is classic anarchist propaganda. Their goal is to carry out an act so spectacularly atrocious that it will excite massive police reaction, which will hasten the final Armageddon of total class war. Political assassination, though, is old hat, as are attacks on the Church. Science itself must be the target, and the revolutionaries plan to bomb the Royal
Observatory in London. 

“The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy,” one of the planners says. “It would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.” In depicting reason and logic as the enemies of the radical left, Conrad wrote with astounding prescience nearly a century before academic programs that would condemn science as a colonialist, patriarchal, and white
supremacist endeavor. 

Conrad is contemptous of these anarchists. “The majority of revolutionists,” the novel’s narrator reports, “are the enemies of discipline and fatigue.” This early 20th-century skewering of the leftist radical’s allergy to work is just as accurate when applied to the current generation of grown-up children, with soft hands and gender studies degrees, composing utopian manifestos on Reddit when they’re not playing video games in their mother’s basement. The anarchist impulse is largely “accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.”

The chief antagonist is the Professor, a lunatic who walks around the city wearing a bomb, its detonator in his hand, prepared to blow himself to smithereens. When Chief Inspector Heat confronts him, he asks, “What are you after, then?” Tellingly, the madman has no answer. He merely smiles satanically and grips the trigger of his bomb more securely.

One of Conrad’s anarchists is so depraved that he uses his wife’s mentally challenged brother as the unwitting means for a terrorist attack. Conrad’s meticulous depiction of the wife’s transformation from loving spouse to merciless agent of justice against her murderous, amoral revolutionary husband is intensely gratifying.

—Alexander Riley

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The author of The Itching Palm so loathed the practice of tipping, which was still new when he wrote in 1916, that he felt compelled to publish this treatise. Tipping only arrived in America after the Civil War, when Americans who had visited Europe brought the “sophisticated” practice back home. It was immediately opposed as exploitative and servile by many prominent Americans, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and William Howard Taft. Leon Trotsky refused to tip waiters during his sojourn in the Bronx and had soup spilled over him in consequence. There was a high-level national campaign against it by the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, and seven states passed or tried to pass anti-tipping legislation. All these laws would be repealed by 1926, as tipping ensconced itself in the economy and everyday culture. 

Tipping’s crassness offended William R. Scott’s Christian Scientist sensibilities. He saw it as a “moral miasma,” like drinking alcohol or slavery, citing the books of  Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, and Job to make his case. It seemed to him akin to a bribe or a shakedown. It encouraged insincerity; the restaurant waiter “plays as consciously upon the patron’s fear of social usage as the musician … upon his violin.” He gave tipping a formula: “To one-quarter part of generosity add two parts of pride and one of fear.” Companies would pay staff less if they were allowed to accept tips, he and others could see—especially on the railroad and in restaurants, where staff were expected to make up measly wages through gratuities, or even rely on them completely. 

Tipping’s implications of inequality went against the grain of democracy, against human dignity, Scott alleged, and its practitioners bolstered un-American flunkeyism. Scott patriotically contrasted the tolerance of tipping with Jefferson’s proud 1801 rejection of the Barbary corsairs’ levy on American vessels passing their coast. For him, it was about national as well as personal self-respect: “When a tip is given, not only is an individual wrong done, but a blow is struck at republican government.” He looked forward to a time when “spurious and specious arguments” would yield to a “robust and elemental Americanism.” Scott must have died disappointed, but here he flickers back into fretful life—a crank of a kind, but also a provoker of thought of things we too often take on faith.

—Derek Turner