PRESIDENT Carnot was not the last head of state to fall victim to an anarchist outrage, but by the mid-1890s the tide was beginning to turn against the faction favouring propaganda by the deed. The future, it seemed, belonged to the collectivist vision advocated a generation earlier by the First International anarchists: ‘monster unions embracing millions of proletarians’. Although this new syndicalist vision had the advantage of positioning anarchism within the emerging political movement of the industrial working class, it also meant anarchists were forced to compete with the much better organized and better funded parties of reformist socialism.

The anarchist colony in London was increasingly coming under the sway of people like Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, Rudolf Rocker and other avowed communists, leaving the advocates of ‘individual will’ in an increasingly uncertain minority. With the exception of Rocker's organizing of East End Jewish sweatshop workers along anarcho-syndicalist lines, however, the communists were themselves shut out of the enfeebled British trade union movement and the reformist late-Victorian socialist revival (embodied by the Independent Labour Party and, to a lesser extent, by the SDF). Consequently, the anarchist movement in Britain had, as a whole, become ‘very dull and sluggish’ by the end of 1895.

Although there is no indication that British police knew anything about – or were even interested in – the ongoing ontological crisis of emigre anarchism, they must have nonetheless perceived and welcomed the change of pace it gradually brought about. Special Branch had just been strengthened by the addition of four constables to ‘meet the emergency’ which 1894 had seemed to promise, but a couple of months into the new year, the only cases Melville and his men had to work on involved only the quiet shadowing of recent arrivals, usually on behalf of foreign governments.

Such missions were not, in fact, entirely legitimate, despite being tacitly condoned by the Home Secretary. Just how tacitly is revealed by the reaction of Harry Butler Simpson, a Home Office clerk, to the 1897 request by Spanish authorities for information on the movements of a Cuban revolutionary exiled in Britain.