In the 1892 potboiler, The Anarchist: A Story of To-Day, Richard Henry Savage distinguished anarchism from Irish nationalism by portraying it as a politically unreadable phenomenon. Focusing on its foreignness, he blamed the ‘fleeing scoundrels’ of Europe for radicalising American industrial workers, provoking riots and masterminding strikes across the modern industrialised world (Vol. 2, p. 205). He observes that the ‘reasonably quiet’ Irish, on the other hand, avoid participating in the American class war and they are praised by the novel's hero, the tycoon, philanthropist and militia leader Philip Maitland, who advises his plutocratic colleagues: ‘Say what you will of the Irish, they are not anarchistic!’ (Vol. 2, p. 229). In contrast to militant Irish republicans, late nineteenth-century anarchists seemed completely pathological in the eyes of contemporary conservatives and, as a result, their perceived heinousness earned them a special place in the right-wing imagination. These ‘murderers of the State’ (Vol. 2, p. 28) who were dedicated to causing the downfall of existing political and economic systems were, according to Savage's bourgeois logic, the ‘mad apostles of Destruction’ (Vol. 2, p. 228) whose radical ideas were beyond the comprehension of the rationally minded. Yet as they described themselves as people who ‘no longer wish to obey the law’, it comes as no surprise that anarchists appeared so shocking to those with more mainstream political sensibilities.