I grew up under the hard hand of an alcoholic father. He meant well, but the demon drink caused him to beat my mother and then me when as a young man I tried to stop him. He always was contrite and tried to say he was so sorry when he became sober. But mom finally had to run away, not only for her safety but also for mine. Her sister had married a German, and as her only relative, she had nowhere else to turn. We fled to the continent at her offer of shelter. She eventually married a good man who took us both in, but since I was not his blood son, he was distant and untouchable. My experience with my ‘loving father’ and cold stepfather made me hate the term father. When I was in church and they told of a ‘loving heavenly father’, I had no desire to seek something I detested and feared, another ‘father’. Didn’t the writers of the Bible constantly talk about their fear of him? Why would I want a relationship with another harsh father who could slaughter thousands when they disrespected him? I grew up isolated and a stranger in a foreign land. I longed to find a place. I held tight to my British upbringing although I accepted my stepfather’s last name mainly to please my mother who thought it would make us a close family, and he would have it no other way. I became discipline in my habit and strong in character to make up for the shortcoming of my deceased father, I didn’t think of him as ‘dad’. My stepfather was not rich, but sufficiently well off in order to send me to university, at least for the three years before he died. When I lost my mother, shortly after my stepfather died, I was on my own. I had you, my Uncle and my mother’s sister, but you were in England, any my aunt had moved to a distant town around the same time my mother re-married. But I was ok with that. Without strings of attachment, the world was open to me, as I knew I was skilled, intelligent and could do whatever I set my mind to. After I had to leave school before completing a degree, I got a menial job in Berlin, then tried for a better job for a time in Paris. I had learned Russian from a fellow student at my school that was an immigrant to Germany as I was. We had struck up a friendship that gave me someone who was not really accepted by the local German boys as I had been shunned. I was able to secure a clerk position in a Paris bank that did business with Russian commercial houses. But I longed to return back to England my birthplace, for although I had a bad father, I had many happy memories of friends of my mother who consoled us when my father had succumbed to one of his drinking binges. I had always intended to look you up Uncle, but being the brother of my father, I was hesitant. I just wanted to avoid the bad memories, and you may have been too physically similar to my father to be comfortable for me. I found government work as a clerk in Scotland Yard. When an opportunity was circulated that a special occupation was opening up, that required experience in Europe, I felt it could be an advancement over the low and boring clerking job I had. It in fact it turned out to be a position as a British Intelligence agent on the continent. They were appreciative of my working experience in Berlin, Paris and connections with Russian businessmen. I was to investigate a growing anarchistic criminal movement. Individualist anarchism held that individual conscience and the pursuit of self-interest should not be inhibited by any communal body or public authority. The criminal elements were scheming this philosophy to minimize their culpability at breaking laws. Using this dodge they were gaining sympathy and support from pseudo-intellectuals and like minded political sympathizers in England. The support was is the form of aiding and abetting criminal activity in the name of political expediency. The main use to obtain property illicitly was to convince supporters that the state is an illegitimate institution. Max Stirner was an influence upon the anarchist tradition, claiming the amoral self-serving rationality of Egoism. What Stirner proposed was not that concepts should rule people, but that people should rule concepts. The denial of absolute truth is rooted in his "nothingness" of the self. This holds true for society's institutions, which claim authority over the individual, be it the state, legislation, the church. The French anarchists were collaborating with English political sympathizers and supporting illicit criminal activities. The Syndicalism movement has the avowed aim of transforming capitalist society through action by the working class on the industrial front. For syndicalists, labor unions are the potential means both of overcoming capitalism and of running society. Syndicalism is a French word meaning "trade unionism". This milder version of syndicalism was overshadowed by revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism. And this movement was what the British government was growing concerned about.