 Anarchism and American Traditions American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions and hard pioneer life, grew during the colonization period of 170 years from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the revolution. This was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is well described by William Penn in speaking of the Charter for Pennsylvania. I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors to do mischief. The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions. They are allowed assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counterforce of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remoulding and regrapling the instruments of governmental power, that the revolution sought to shape and hold as defences of liberty. To the average American of today, the revolution means the series of battles fought by the Patriot army with the armies of England. The millions of schoolchildren who attend our public schools are taught to draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners of war surrendered with Burgoyne. They are required to remember the date when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice. They are told to remember Paoli, to repeat Molly Stark's a widow, to call General Wayne Matt Anthony Wayne, and to execrate Benedict Arnold. They know that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the 4th of July, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783. And then they think they have learned the revolution. Blessed be George Washington. They have no idea why it should have been called revolution, instead of the English War or any similar title. It's the name of it, that's all, and name worship both in child and man has acquired such mastery of them that the name American Revolution is held sacred, though it means to them nothing more than successful force. While the name revolution applied to a further possibility is a specter detested and abhorred. In neither case have they any idea of the content of the word saved that of armed force. That has already happened and long happened, which Jefferson force saw when he wrote. The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, ourselves united. On the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not be then necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. To the men of that time who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the revolution. They were the incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game they were playing. But the stake they had in view before, during, and after the war, the real revolution was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy, but never so much trusted as not to be continually watched. For the transaction of such business as was the common concern, and to set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man's liberty would encroach upon another's. They thus took their starting point for driving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern anarchist derives the no-government theory. These that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind. Which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election? And on the other hand, the belief that the majority rule is both impossible and undesirable, that any government, no matter what its form, will be manipulated by a very small minority as the development of the states and United States governments has strikingly proved, that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please, and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed. Among the fundamental likeness between the revolutionary republicans and the anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great, that the local must be the basis of the general, that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate, that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in the general congress, devoted themselves to their home localities, endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and fellow colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a church state, of a class divided people, even the institution of African slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we do retain and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who in the fall of 76 declined a reelection to congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local assembly. In arranging there for public education, which he justly considered a matter of common concern, said his advocacy of public schools was not with any view to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns to which it is equal. And in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he likewise said, Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage for themselves, and the general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very inexpensive one, a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. This, then, was the American tradition, that private enterprise manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances, education and commerce, which the governments of the states and of the United States have undertaken to manage and regulate as the very two, which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government a mighty engine of tyranny than any other cause saved the unforeseen developments of manufacture. It was the intention of the revolutionists to establish a system of common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its principal branches. Not with the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, not to make the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions. By what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental force, fraud and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government protected by the label homemade, but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action. This was the prime motive of the revolutionists in endeavoring to provide for common education. Confidence, said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky Resolutions, is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, not in confidence. It is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power. Our constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further our confidence may go. In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the alien laws by the monarchist's party during John Adams' administration, and were an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of the general government to assume undelegated powers. For, said they, to accept these laws would be to be bound by laws made, not with our consent, but by others against our consent. That is, to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority. Resolutions identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia the following month. In those days the States still considered themselves supreme. The general government subordinate. To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their governors was to be the purpose of public education. Pick up today any common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing, but the cheapest sort of patriotism. The inculcation of the most unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of rest, security, confidence, the doctrine that the law can do no wrong, a te idiom in praise of the continuous encroachments of the power of the general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the right and the rebels in the wrong. Pyrotechnic glorifications of union, power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-anarchist law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the alien and sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our all-seeing father in Washington. Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he knows about Shae's rebellion, and he will answer. Oh, some of the farmers couldn't pay their taxes, and Shae's led a rebellion against the courthouse at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds, and when Washington heard of it, he sent over an army quick and taught him a good lesson. And what was the result of it? The result? Why, why, the result was... Oh, yes, I remember. The result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts. Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story. Ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods, and their health, and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into a prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old. That their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer, no. Ask him if he ever read Jefferson's letter to Madison about it, in which he says, Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. One, without government, as among our Indians. Two, under government, where in the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one. Three, under government of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best, but I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. It has its evils, too, the principle of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Or to another correspondent. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms. The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Ask any schoolchild if he was ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair ahead. Ask him if he knows that this man also wrote, Government at best is a necessary evil. At worst, an intolerable one. And if he is a little better informed than the average, he will answer, Oh, well, he, Tom Paine, was an infidel. Chastise him about the merits of the Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a pole parrot and you will find his cheap conception is not of the powers withheld from Congress, but of the powers granted. Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the anarchists, point to them and say, if the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government. For the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of the governments of Europe, so say we of this government, also after a century and a quarter of independence. The blood of the people has become its inheritance and those who fatten on it will not relinquish it easily. Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding the course of a nation. But commerce, dealing as it does with material things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction and shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at the point where we, looking over the 125 years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a fordoomed failure. It was so because of, one, the essence of government itself, two, the essence of human nature, three, the essence of commerce and manufacture. Of the essence of government, I have already said it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it. All attempts to make it anything else fail. In this anarchists agree with the traditional enemies of the revolution, the monarchists, federalists, strong government believers, the Roosevelt's of today, the Jays, Marshals, and Hamilton's of then. That Hamilton, who is Secretary of the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky inheritors, and whose objects were twofold. Depuzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it, to serve as a machine for corrupting the legislatures. For he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by two motives only, force or interest. Forced being then out of the question, he laid hold of interest, the greed of the legislators, to set going an association of persons having an entirely separate welfare from the welfare of their electors, bound together by mutual corruption and mutual desire for plunder. The anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical and understood the core of government, the differences, that while strong governmentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion. No government whatsoever. As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied. We have gone downhill from the revolution until now. We are absorbed in mere money-getting. The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the spirit of 76. What was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they refused to import goods from England, when they preferred, and stood by it, to wear coarse, home-spun cloth, to drink the brew of their own growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry. Even within the lifetime of the revolutionists, the spirit decayed. The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the independence of their sex. Nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it. How many children are not willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a new dress? That it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society. That it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people. This it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the corruption of government easy. As to the essence of commerce and manufacture, it is this. To establish bonds between every corner of the earth's surface and every other corner, to multiply the needs of mankind and the desire for material possession and enjoyment. The American tradition was the isolation of the states as far as possible. Said they, we have won our liberties by hard sacrifice and struggle unto death. We wish now to be let alone, and to let others alone, that our principles may have time for trial, that we may become accustomed to the exercise of our rights, that we may be kept free from the contaminating influence of European gods, pageants, distinctions. So richly did they esteem the absence of these, that they could in all fervor write, we shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming to America, but no man living will ever see an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe and continuing there. Alas, in less than a hundred years the highest aim of a daughter of the revolution was, and is, to buy a castle, a title, a rotten lord, with the money rung from American servitude, and the commercial interests of America are seeking a world empire. In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence it appeared that the manifest destiny of America was to be an agricultural people, exchanging foodstuffs and raw materials for manufactured articles, and in those days it was written, we shall be virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there, which we are doing because of the inevitable development of commerce and manufacture, and the concomitant development of strong government, and the parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled. If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating. There is none so utterly venal. And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. It was made when the Constitution was made, and the Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of commerce. Thus it was at the outset a merchant's machine, which the other interests of the country, the land and labor interests, even then foreboded would destroy their liberties. In vain their jealousy of its central power made enact the first twelve amendments. In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which the federal power dare not trench. In vain they enacted into general law the freedom of speech, of the press, of assemblage and petition. All of these things we see ridden roughshot upon every day and have so seen with more or less intermission since the beginning of the 19th century. At this day every police lieutenant considers himself and rightly so as more powerful than the general law of the Union. And that one who told Robert Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger than the Constitution was perfectly correct. The right of assemblage is an American tradition which has gone out of fashion. The police club is now the mode, and it is so in the virtue of the people's indifference to liberty and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation towards the substance of imperial government. It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty. In Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to three thousand men. It is an American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is an American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan, and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men. It is an American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business. These, that debt is a bad thing, and demands for a surplus earning should be applied to his debts. That offices and office holders should be few. It is American practice that the general government should always have millions of dollars of debt. Even if a panic or a war has to be forced to prevent it being paid off, and as to the application of its income office holders come first. And within the last administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been created at an annual expense of $1,663 million. Shades of Jefferson. How are vacancies to be obtained? Those by deaths or few, by resignation, none. Roosevelt cuts the knot by making 99,000 new ones, and few will die, and none resign. They will beget sons and daughters, and Taft will have to create 99,000 more. Verily a simple and serviceable thing is our general government. It is an American tradition that the judiciary shall act as a check upon the impetuosity of legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the judiciary justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people, and nullifies every act of the legislature, by which the people seek to regain some measure of their freedom. Again in the words of Jefferson. The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape in any form they please. Truly if the men who fought the good fight for the triumph of simple, honest, free life in that day were now to look upon the scene of their labors, they would cry out together with him who said, I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifices of themselves by the generation of 76 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I shall not live to see it. And now what has anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be a necessary evil, and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck. Anarchism says, make no laws whatever concerning speech and speech will be free. So soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license, and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so, for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. The problem then becomes, is it possible to stir men from their indifference? We have said that the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life, that the elements of colonial life were the desire for sectarian independence, and the jealous watchfulness incident there too. The isolation of pioneer communities which threw each individual strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all around men, yet at the same time made very strong such social bonds as did exist, and lastly the comparative simplicity of small communities. All this has disappeared. As to sectarianism, it is only by dint of an occasional idiotic persecution that a sect becomes interesting. In the absence of this, outlandish sects play the fool's role, are anything but heroic, and have little to do with either the name or the substance of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have gradually become the pillars of society, their animosities have died out, their offensive peculiarities have been effaced, and they are as like one another as beans in a pod. They build churches and sleep in them. As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously diminishing proportion engaged in all around farming, and even these are slaves to mortgages. For our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned to last a week, and certainly there is none which would not be bankrupt with despair at the proposition that it produce its own food. In response to this condition and its correlative political tyranny, anarchism affirms the economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of the great communities, the use of the earth. I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this will take place, but I see clearly that this must take place if ever again men are to be free. I am so well satisfied that this mass of mankind prefer material possessions to liberty, that I have no hope that they will ever, by means of intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke of oppression fastened on them by the present economic system to institute free societies. My only hope is in the blind development of the economic system and political oppression itself. The great characteristic looming factor in this gigantic power is manufacture. The tendency of each nation is to become more and more a manufacturing one, an exporter of fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency follows its own logic, it must eventually circle round to each community producing for itself. What then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer shall have no foreign market? Why, then mankind must face the dilemma of sitting down and dying in the midst of it, or confiscating the goods. Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now, and so far we are sitting down and dying. I opine, however, that men will not do it forever, and when once, by an act of general expropriation, they have overcome the reverence and fear of property and their awe of government. They may waken to the consciousness that things are to be used, and therefore men are greater than things. This may rouse the spirit of liberty. If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent. For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals. Those may be free who are able to make their own living. In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of tyranny, the standing army and navy, it is clear that so long as men desire to fight, they will have armed force in one form or another. Our fathers thought they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the voluntary militia. In our day, we have lived to see this militia declared part of the regular military force of the United States and subject to the same demands as the regulars. Within another generation we shall probably see its members in the regular pay of the general government. Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization inevitably follows the same line of centralization. The logic of anarchism is that the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up voluntarily, like the minutemen of Massachusetts, and dispans as soon as the occasion which called it into existence is past. That the really desirable thing is that all men, not Americans only, should be at peace. And that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army and require that all who make war shall do so at their own cost and risk. That neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade. As to the American tradition of non-meddling, anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation. It knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible, but it teaches that by all men strictly minding their own business a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs wherein all the world shall belong to all men. As much as each has need or desire will result. And when modern revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world, if it ever shall be, as I hope it will, then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of man above the gods of wealth and class, and held that to be an American was greater than to be a king. In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans, only men over the whole earth. Men End of Anarchism and American Traditions Recording by Rhonda Federman Anarchism in Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Anarchism in Literature by Volterine DeClair In the long sweep of 1700 years, which witnessed the engulfment of a more abundant Roman civilization, together with its borrowed Greek ideals, under the red tide of a passionate barbarism that leaped to embrace the idea of triumph over death, and spat upon the Grecian joys of life with the superb contempt of the Norse savage. There was, for Europe and America, but one great animating word in art and literature. Christianity It boots not here to inquire how close or how remote the Christian ideal as it developed was, in comparison with the teachings of the Nazarene. Distorted, blackened, almost effaced, it was yet some faint echo from the hillsides of Olivet, some indistinct vision of the cross, some dull perception of the white glory of renunciation that shaped the dreams of the evolving barbarian and molded all his work, whether of stone or clay, upon canvas or parchment. Wherever we turn we find a general fix-up or cast, an immovable solidity of orders built upon orders, an unquestioning subordination of the individual, ruling every effort of genius. Aesthetic shadow upon all. Nowhere does a sun ray of self-expression creep, save us through water, thin and perturbed. The theologic pessimism which appealed to the fighting man has a proper extension of his own superstition. Perhaps hardly that, for heaven was but a change of name for Valhalla, fell heavily upon the man of dreams whose creations must come forth, lifeless, after the uniform model, who must bless and ban not as he saw before his eyes, but as the one eternal purpose demanded. At last the barbarian is civilized. He has accomplished his own refinement and his own rottenness. Still he preaches and practices contempt of death. When others do the dying, still he preaches submission to the will of God, but that others may submit to him. Still he proclaims the cross, but that others may bear it. Where Rome was in the glut of her vanity and her blood drunkenness, limbs wound in cloth of gold separating with crime, head boastfully nodding as jove and feet rocking upon slipping slime. There stand the empires and republics of those whose forefathers slew Rome. And now for these 300 years the men of dreams have been watching the Christian ideal go bankrupt. One by one as they have dared and each according to his mood they have spoken their minds. Some have reasoned and some have laughed and some have appealed. Logician, satirist and exhorter all feeling in their several ways that humanity stood in need of a new moral ideal, consciously or unconsciously, within the pale of the church or without. This has been the spirit moving upon the face of the waters within them. And at last the creation has come forth, the dream that is to touch the heartstrings of the world anew and make it sing a stronger song than any it has sung of old. Mark you, it must be stronger, wider, deeper, or it cannot be at all. It must sing all that has been sung and something more. Its mission is not to deny the past, but to reaffirm it and explain it, all of it, and today too and tomorrow too. And this ideal, the only one that has power to stir the moral pulses of the world, the only word that can quicken dead souls who wait this moral resurrection, the only word which can animate the dreamer, poet, sculptor, painter, musician, artist of chisel or pen, with power to fashion forth his dream, is anarchism. For anarchism means fullness of being. It means the return of Greek radiance of life, Greek love of beauty, without Greek indifference to the common man. It means Christian earnestness and Christian communism without Christian fanaticism and Christian gloom and tyranny. It means this because it means perfect freedom, material and spiritual freedom. The light of Greek idealism failed because with all its love of life and the infinite diversity of beauty and all the glory of its free intellect, it never conceived of material freedom. To it, the hell it was as eternal as the gods, therefore the gods passed away, and their eternity was as a little wave of time. The Christian ideal has failed because with all its sublime communism, its doctrine of universal equality, it was bound up with a spiritual tyranny seeking to mold into one pattern the thoughts of all humanity, stamping all men with the stamp of submission, throwing upon all the dark umber of life lived for the purpose of death, and fruitful of all other tyrannies. Anarchism will succeed because its message of freedom comes down to the rising wind of social revolt, first of all to the common man. The material slave and bids him know that he too should have an independent will and the free exercise thereof, that no philosophy and no achievement and no civilization is worth considering or achieving if it does not mean that he shall be free to labor at what he likes and when he likes and freely share all that free men choose to produce, that he, the drudge of all the ages, is the cornerstone of the building without whose sure and safe position no structure can nor should endure. And likewise it comes to him who sits in fear of himself and says, fear no more, neither what is without or within, search fully and freely yourself, harken to all the voices that rise from that abyss from which you have been commanded to shrink. Learn for yourself what these things are, be like what they have told you is good, is bad, and this cast mold of goodness a vile prison house. Learn to decide your own measure of restraint, value for yourself the merits of selfishness and unselfishness, and strike you the balance between these two, for if the first be all accredited, you make slaves of others, and if the second your own abasement raises tyrants over you, and none can decide the matter for you so well as you for yourself. For even if you air, you learn by it, while if he airs the blame is his, and if he advises well the credit is his, and you are nothing. Be yourself, and by self-expression learn self-restraint. The wisdom of the ages lies in the reassertion of all past positivisms, and the denial of all negations. That is, all that has been claimed by the individual for himself is good. Every denial of the freedom of another is bad. Whereby it will be seen that many things supposed to be claimed for oneself involve the freedom of others, and must be surrendered because they do not come within the sovereign limit while many things supposed to be evil, since they, in no wise, infringe upon the liberty of others, are wholly good. Bringing to dwarfed bodies and narrow souls the vigor and full growth of healthy exercise, and giving a rich glow to life that had else paled out like a lamp in a grave vault. To the cyber-ite it says, Learn to do your own share of hard work. You will gain by it. To the man with the hoe, think for yourself and boldly take your time for it. The division of labor which makes of one man a brain and of another a hand is evil. Away with it. This is the ethical gospel of anarchism to which these 300 years of intellectual ferment have been leading. He who will trace the course of literature for 300 years will find innumerable bits of drift here and there, indicative of the moral and intellectual revolt. Protestantism itself, in asserting the supremacy of the individual conscience, fired the long train of thought which inevitably leads to the explosion of all forms of authority. The great political writers of the 18th century, in asserting the right of self-government, carried the line of advance one step further. America had her Jefferson declaring, Societies exist under three forms. One, without government as among the Indians. Two, under governments wherein every one has a just influence. Three, under governments of force. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best. She had, or she and England together, had, her pain more mildly asserting. Governments are, at best, a necessary evil. And England had also Godwin, who though still milder in manner and consequently less effective during the troubleous period in which he lived, was nevertheless more deeply radical than either, presaging that application of the political ideal to economic concerns so distinctive of modern anarchism. My neighbor, says he, has just as much right to put an end to my existence with dagger or poison, as to deny me that pecuniary assistance, without which I must starve. Nor did he stop here. He carried the logic of individual sovereignty into the chiefest of social institutions, and declared that the sex relation was a matter concerning the individuals sharing it only. Thus, he says, The institution of marriage is a system of fraud. Marriage is law and the worst of all laws. Marriage is an affair of property and the worst of all properties. So long as two human beings are forbidden by positive institution to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice is alive and vigorous. The abolition of marriage will be attended with no evils. We are apt to consider it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust and depravity. But it really happens in this, as in other cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices irritate and multiply them. The grave and judicial style of political justice prevented its attaining the great popularity of the rights of man, but the indirect influence of its author bloomed in the rich profusion of Shellian fancy, and in all that coterie of young literatures who gathered about Godwin as their revered teacher. Nor was the principle of no government without its vindication from one who moved actively in official centers, and whose name has been alternatively quoted by conservatives and radicals, now with veneration, now with exertion, in his essay on government. Edmund Burke, the great political weathercock, aligned himself with the germinating movement toward anarchism when he exclaimed, they talk of the abuse of government, the thing, the thing itself is the abuse. This aphoristic utterance will go down in history on its own merits, as the sayings of great men often do, stripped of its accompanying explanations. Men have already forgotten to inquire how and why he said it. The words stand, and will continue a living message, long after the thousands of sheets of rhetoric, which won him the epithet of the dinner-bell of the house, have been relegated to the dust of museums. In later days, an essayist whose brilliancy of style and capacity for getting on all sides of a question connect him with Burke in some manner as his spiritual offspring, has furnished the anarchists with one of their most frequent quotations. In his essay on John Milton, Macaulay declares, The only cure for the evils of newly acquired liberty is more liberty. That he nevertheless possessed a strong vein of conservatism, sat in parliament and took part in legal measures, simply proves that he had his tether and could not go to the length of his own logic. That is no reason others should not. The anarchists accept this fundamental declaration and proceed to its consequence. But the world thought was making way, not only in England, where indeed constitutional phlegmatism, though stirred beyond its want by the events of the close of the last century, acted frigidly upon it, but throughout Europe. In France, Ravelay drew the idyllic picture of the Abbey of Tellems, a community of persons agreeing to practice complete individual freedom among themselves. Rousseau, however erroneous his basis for the social contract, moved all he touched with his belief that humanity was innately good and capable of so manifesting itself in the absence of restrictions. Furthermore, his confessions appear the most famous forerunner of the tendency now shaping itself in literature, that of the free expression of a whole man, not in his stage character only, but in his dressing room, not in his decent scrubbed and polished moral clothes alone, but in his vileness and his meanness and his folly too, these being indisputable factors in his moral life, and no solution but a false one to be obtained by hiding them and playing they are not there. This truth acknowledged in America, in our own times, by two powerful writers of very different castes, is being approached by all the manifold paths of the soul's travel. I have in me the capacity for every crime, says Emerson, the transcendentalist, and Whitman, the staunch proclamer of blood and sinew, and the gospel of the holiness of the body, makes himself one with the drunken revelers and the creatures of debauchery as well as with the anchorite and the Christ soul, that fullness of being may be declared. In the genesis of these declarations we shall find the confessions. It is not this social contract alone that is open to the criticism of having reasoned from false premises. All the early political writers we have named were equally mistaken, all suffering from a like insufficiency of facts. Partly this was the result of the habit of thought fostered by the church for seventeen hundred years, which habit was to accept by faith the sweeping generalization and fit all future discoveries of fact into it. But partly also it is in the nature of all idealism to offer itself, however vaguely in the midst of mind struggle, and to allow time to correct and sharpen the detail. Probably initial steps will always be taken with blunders, while those who are not imaginative enough to perceive the half-shape and figure will nevertheless accept it later and set it upon a firm foundation. This has been the task of the modern historian, who no less than the political writer, consciously or unconsciously, is swayed by the anarchistic ideal and bends his services towards it. It is understood that when we speak of history we do not allude to the unspeakable trash contained in public school textbooks, which in general resemble a cellar junk shop of chronologies, epaulettes, bad drawings, and silly tales, and are a striking instance of the corrupting influence of state management of education by which the mediocre, navy, absolutely empty, is made to survive, history which is undertaken with the purpose of discovering the real course of the development of human society. Among such efforts, the broken but splendid fragment of his stupendous project is Buckle's history of civilization, a work in which the author breaks away utterly from the old method of history-writing, is that of recording court intrigues, the doings of individuals in power as a matter of personal interest, the processions of military pageant, to inquire into the real lives and conditions of the people, to trace their great upheavals, and in what consisted of their progress. Germanus in Germany, who within only recent years drew upon himself a prosecution for treason, took a like method and declared that progress consists in a steady decline of centralized power and the development of local autonomy and the free federation. Supplementing the work of the historian proper, there has arisen a new class of literature, itself the creation of the spirit of free inquiry, since up till that had asserted itself, such writings were impossible. It embraces a wide range of studies into the conditions and psychology of prehistoric man, of which Sir John Lubbock's works will serve as the type. From these, dark as the subject yet is, we are learning the true sources of all authority and the agencies which are rendering it obsolete. Moreover, a curious cycle of developments reveals itself, namely that starting from the point of no authority unconsciously accepted, man, in the several manifestations of his activity, evolves through stages of belief in many authorities to one authority, and finally to no authority again, but this time conscious and reasoned. Crowning the work of historian and prehistorian comes the labor of the sociologist. Herbert Spencer, with infinite patience for detail and marvelous power of classification and generalization, takes up the facts of the others and deduces from them the great law of equal freedom. A man should have the freedom to do whatsoever he wills, provided that in doing thereof he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man. The early addition of social statics is a logical scientific and bold statement of the great fundamental freedoms which anarchists demand. From the rather taxing study of authors like these, it is a relief to turn to those intermediate writers who dwell between them and the pure fictionists, whose writings are occupied with the facts of life as related to the affections and aspirations of humanity, among whom representative men we immediately select, Emerson, Thoreau, Edward Carpenter. Now, indeed, we cease to reason upon the past evolution of liberty and begin to feel it, begin to reach out after what it shall mean. None who are familiar with the thought of Emerson can fail to recognize that it is spiritual anarchism from the serene heights of self-possession. The ego looks out upon its possibilities, unawed by ought without, and he who has dwelt in dream by Walden, charmed by that pure life he has not himself led but wished that, like Thoreau, he might lead, has felt that call of the anarchistic ideal which pleads with men to renounce the worthless luxuries which enslave them and those who work for them, that the buried soul which is doomed to mummy cloths by the rush and jangle of the chase for wealth may answer the still small voice of the resurrection, there in the silence, the solitude, the simplicity of the free life. A similar note is sounded in Carpenter's civilization, its cause and cure, a work which is likely to make the civilizer see himself in a very different light than that in which he usually beholds himself, and again the same vibration shudders through the city of dreadful night, the masterpiece of an obscure genius who was at once essayist and poet of too high and rare equality to catch the ear stunned by strident commonplaces but loved by all who seek the violets of the soul, one Thompson known to literature as B. V. Similarly obscure and similarly sympathetic is The English Peasant by Richard Heath, a collection of essays so redolent of a bounding love so overflowing with understanding for characters utterly contradictory, painted so tenderly and yet so strongly that none can read them without realizing that here is a man who whatever he believes he believes in reality desires freedom of expression for the whole human spirit which implies for every separate unit of it. Something of the Emersonian striving after individual attainment plus the passionate sympathy of Heath is found in a remarkable book which is too good to have obtained a popular hearing entitled The Story of My Heart. No more daring utterance was ever given voice than this. I pray to find the highest soul greater than deity, better than God. In the concluding pages of the tenth chapter of this wonderful little book occur the following lines that any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet of pauper is to me the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed. Each human being by mere birth has a birthright in this earth and all its productions and if they do not receive it then it is they who are injured and it is not the pauper, oh inexpressibly wicked world. It is the well to do who are the criminals. It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident, drunken or evil in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes are the inalienable right of every child born into the light if the world does not provide it freely not as a grudging gift but as a right as the son of the house sits down to breakfast then is the world mad but the world is not mad only in ignorance. In catholic sympathy like this in heart hunger after a wider righteousness a higher idea than God does the anarchistic ideal come to those who have lived through old phases of religious and social beliefs and found them wanting it is the Shelley in outburst more life and fuller life we want. He was the Prometheus of the movement he the wild bird of song who flew down into the heart of the storm and night singing unutterably sweet the song of the free man and woman as he passed poor Shelley happy Shelley he died not knowing the triumph of his genius but also he died while the white glow was yet shining higher higher in the light of it he smiled above the world had he lived he might have died alive as Swinburne and his Tennyson whose old days belie their early strength yet men will remember slowly conies a hungry people as a lion drawing nire glares at one who nods and winks beside a slowly dying fire and let the great world swing forever down the ringing grooves of change and glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things and while three men hold together the kingdoms are less by three until the end of kingdoms and of kings though their authors take refuge in the kingdom and quaver pulsed hymns to royalty with their cracked voices and broken lutes for this is the glory of the living ideal that all that is in accord with it lives whether the mouthpiece through which it spoke would recall it or not the manifold voice which is one speaks out through all the tongues of genius in its greatest moments whether it be a hyena writing in supreme contempt for the law has got long arms priests and parson's have long tongues and the people have long ears in a crass off cursing the railroad built of men a hugo painting the battle of the individual man with nature with the law with society a lowl crying law is holy a but what law is there nothing more divine than the patched up royals of congress venal full of meat and wine is there say you nothing high or not god save us that transcends laws of cotton texture wove by vulgar men for vulgar ends law is holy but not your law ye who keep the tablets whole while ye dash the law in pieces shatter it in life and soul and again one faith against a whole world's unbelief one soul against the flesh of all mankind nor do the master dramatists lag behind the lyric writers they too feel the intense pressure within which is quoting the death word of a man of far other stamp germinal ibsen's drama intensely real common accepting none of the received rules as to the conventional plot but having to do with serious questions of the lives of the plain people holds ever before us the supreme duty of truth to one's inner being in defiance of custom and law it is so adnora who renounces all notions of family duty to find herself it is so in dr stockman who maintains the rectitude of his own soul against the authorities and against the mob it should have been so in mrs alving who learns too late that her yielding to social custom has brought a forruined life into the world besides wrecking her own the master builder john gabriel borkman all his characters are created to vindicate the separate soul supreme within its sphere those that are miserable and in evil condition are so because they have not lived true to themselves but in obedience to some social hypocrisy gerhardt hopman likewise feels the new pulsation he has no hero no heroine no intrigue his picture is the image of the headless and tailless body of struggle the struggle of the common man it begins in the middle it ends in nothing as yet to end in defeat would be to premise surrender a surrender humanity does not intend to triumph would be to anticipate the future and paint life other than it is hence it ends where it began in murmurs thus his weavers octave mirbo likewise offers his criticism on a world of sheep in the bad shepherds and sarah bernhardt plays it in england and america we have another phase of the rebel drama the drama of the bad woman as a distinct figure in social creation with the right to be herself have we not the second mrs tankeray who comes to grief through an endeavor to conform to a moral standard that does not fit and have we not zaza who is worth a thousand of her respectable lover and his respectable wife and does not all the audience go home in love with her and begin to quest the libraries for literary justifications of their preference and these are not hard to find for it is in the novel particularly the novel which is the special creation of the last century that the new ideal is freest in a recent essay in reply to walter besant henry james pleads most anarchistically for his freedom in the novel all such pleas will always come as justifications for as to the freedom it is already one and all the formalists from besant to the end of days will never tempt the literatures into chains again but the essay is well worth reading as a specimen of right reasoning on art as in other modes of literary expression this tendency in the novel dates back and it is strange enough that out of the mouth of a toady like walter scott should have spoken the free devil may care outlaw spirit read notably quentin dirwood which is perhaps the first phase of self-assertion that has the initial strength to declare itself against the tyranny of custom this is why it happens that the forerunners of social change are often shocking in their rudeness and contempt of manners and in fact more or less uncomfortable persons to have to do with but they have their irresistible charm all the same and scott who was a true genius despite his toadism felt it and responded to it by always making us love his outlaws best no matter how gently he dealt with kings another phase of the free man appears in george borrows rollicking full-blooded out of door gypsies who do not take the trouble to despise law but simply ignore it live unconscious of it all together george meredith in another vein develops the strong soul overriding social barriers our own wharf on in his preface to the scarlet letter and still more in the marble fawn depicts the peculiarity of a life sucking a parasitic existence through government organization and asserts over and over that the only strength is in him or her and it is noteworthy that the strongest is in her who resolutely chooses and treads an unbeaten path from far away africa there speaks again the note of soul rebellion in the exquisite dreams of olive shriner where through the hunter walks alone grand alan too in numerous works especially the woman who did voices the demand for selfhood maras gives us his idyllic news from nowhere zola the fertile creator of dung heaps crowned with lilies whose pages reek with the stench of bodies laboring debauching rotting until the words of christ cry loud in the ears of him who would put the vision away whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness zola was more than an unconscious anarchist he is a conscious one did so proclaim himself and close beside him maxim gorky spokesman of the tramp visionary of the despised who whatever his personal political views may be and notwithstanding the condemnations he has visited upon the anarchist is still an anarchistic voice in literature and over against these austere simple but oh so loving the critic who shows the world its faults but does not condemn the man who first took the way of renunciation and then preached it the christian whom the church casts out the anarchist whom the worst government in the world dares not slay the author of resurrection and the slavery of our times they come together from the side of passionate hate and limitless love the volcano and the sea they come together in one demand freedom from this wicked and debasing tyranny called government which makes indescribable brutes of all who feel its touch but worse still of all who touch it as for contemporaneous light literature there are magazine articles and papers innumerable displaying here and there the grasp of the idea have we not the philistine and its witty editor boldly proclaiming in anarchistic spelling i am an anarchist by the way he may now expect a visitation of the criminal anarchy law and a few years since julian horthon writing in the denver post inquired did you ever notice that all the interesting people you meet are anarchists reason why there is no other living dream to him who has character enough to be interesting it is the uninteresting the dull the ready made minds who go on accepting dead limbs of gibbeted gods as they accept their dinner and their bed which someone else prepares let two names standing for strangely opposing appeals yet standing upon common ground close this sketch two strong flashes of the prismatic fires which blend together in the white ray of our ideal the first nichy he who proclaims the overmen the receiver of the mantle of max sterner the scintillant rhetorician the pride of young germany who would have the individual acknowledged nothing neither science nor logic nor any other creation of his thought as having authority over him its creator the last whitman the great sympathetic all inclusive quaker whose love knew no limits who said to society's most utterly despised outcast not until the sun excludes you will i exclude you and who whether he be called poet philosopher or peasant was supremely anarchist and in a moment of weariness with human slavery cried i think i could turn and live with animals they seem so placid and self-contained i stand and look at them long and long they do not sweat and whine about their conditions they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins they do not make me sick discussing their duty to god not one is dissatisfied not one is demented with the mania of owning things not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago so not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth end of anarchism in literature recording by ronda federman the making of an anarchist this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the making of an anarchist by valterine declare here was one guard and here was the other at this end i was here opposite the gate you know those problems and geometry of the hair and the hounds they never run straight but always in a curve so see and the guard was no smarter than the dogs if he had run straight he would have caught me it was peter kropotkin telling of his escape from the petropolovsky fortress three crumbs on the table marked the relative position of the outwitted guards and the fugitive prisoner the speaker had broken them from the bread on which he was lunching and dropped them on the table with an amused grin the suggested triangle had been the starting point of the lifelong exile of the greatest man save tolstoy alone that russia has produced from that moment began the many foreign wanderings and the taking of the simple love-given title comrade for which he had abandoned the prince which he despises we were three together in the plain little home of a london working man will wes a one-time shoemaker kropotkin and i we had our tea in homely english fashion with thin slices of buttered bread and we talked of things nearest our hearts which whenever two or three anarchists together together means present evidences of the growth of liberty and what our comrades are doing in all lands and as what they do and say often leads them into prisons the talk had naturally fallen upon kropotkin's experience and his daring escape for which the russian government is chagrined unto this day presently the old man glanced at the time and jumped briskly to his feet i'm late goodbye voltarene goodbye will is the way to the kitchen i must say goodbye to mrs. turner and lizzie and out to the kitchen he went unwilling late though he was to leave without a hand clasp to those who had so much as washed a dish for him such is kropotkin a man whose personality has felt more than any other in the anarchist movement at once the gentlest the most kindly and the most invincible of men communist as well as anarchist his very heartbeats are rhythmic with the great common pulse of work and life communist am not i though my father was and his father before him during the stirring times of forty-eight which is probably the remote reason for my opposition to things as they are at bottom convictions are mostly temperamental and if i sought to explain myself on other grounds i should be a bewildering error in logic for by early influences and education i should have been a nun and spent my life glorifying authority in its most concentrated form as some of my schoolmates are doing at this hour within the mission houses of the order of the holy names of jesus and mary but the old ancestral spirit of rebellion asserted itself while i was yet fourteen a schoolgirl at the convent of our lady of lake huron at sania ontario how i pity myself now when i remember it poor lonesome little soul battling solitary in the murk of religious superstition unable to believe and yet in hourly fear of damnation hot savage and eternal if i do not instantly confess and profess how well i recall the bitter energy with which i repelled my teachers in joineder when i told her that i did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault as i could not see that i had been wrong and would not feel my words it is not necessary said she that we should feel what we say but it is always necessary that we obey our superiors i will not lie i answered hotly and at the same time trembled lest my disobedience had finally consigned me to torment i struggled my way out at last and was a free thinker when i left the institution three years later though i'd never seen a book or heard a word to help me in my loneliness it had been like the valley of the shadow of death and there are white scars on my soul yet where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hellfire in those stifling days am i blasphemous it is their word not mine besides that battle of my young days all others have been easy for whatever was without within my own will was supreme it has owed no allegiance and never shall it has moved steadily in one direction the knowledge and the assertion of its own liberty with all the responsibility falling there on this i am sure is the ultimate reason for my acceptance of anarchism though the specific occasion which ripened tendencies to definition was the affair of 1886 to 87 when five innocent men were hanged in chicago for the act of one guilty who still remains unknown till then i believed in the essential justice of the american law and trial by jury after that i never could the infamy of that trial has passed into history and the question it awakened us of the possibility of justice under law has passed into clamorous crying across the world with this question fighting for a hearing at a time when young and ardent all questions were pressing with a force which later life would in vain here again i chance to hear a pain memorial convention in an out of the way corner of the earth among the mountains and the snow drifts of pennsylvania i was a free thought lecturer at the time and had spoken in the afternoon on the life work of pain in the evening i sat in the audience to hear clarence darrow deliver an address on socialism it was my first introduction to any plan for bettering the condition of the working classes which furnished some explanation of the course of economic development i ran to it as one who has been turning about in darkness runs to the light i smile now at how quickly i adopted the label socialist and how quickly i cast it aside let no one follow my example but i was young six weeks later i was punished for my rashness when i attempted to argue for my faith with a little russian jew named mezersky at a debating club in pitsburg he was an anarchist and a bit of a socrates he questioned me into all kinds of holes from which i extricated myself most awkwardly only to founder into others he had smilingly dug while i was getting out of the first ones the necessity of a better foundation became apparent hence began a course of study in the principles of sociology and of modern socialism and anarchism as presented in their regular journals it was benjamin tuckers liberty the exponent of individualist anarchism which finally convinced me that liberty is not the daughter but the mother of order and though i no longer hold the particular economic gospel advocated by tucker the doctrine of anarchism itself as then conceived has but broadened deepened and intensified itself with years to those unfamiliar with the movement the various terms are confusing anarchism is in truth a sort of Protestantism whose adherents are a unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority must disappear to be replaced by self-control only but variously divided in our conception of the form of future society individualism supposes private property to be the cornerstone of personal freedom asserts that such property should consist in the absolute possession of one's own product and of such share of the natural heritage of all as one may actually use communist anarchism on the other hand declares that such property is both unrealizable and undesirable that the common possession and use of all the natural sources and means of social production can alone guarantee the individual against a recurrence of inequality and its attendance government and slavery my personal conviction is that both forms of society as well as many intermediations would in the absence of government be tried in various localities according to the instincts and material condition of the people but that well-founded objections may be offered to both liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society therefore i no longer label myself otherwise than as anarchist simply i would not however have the world think that i am an anarchist by trade outsiders have some very curious notions about us one of them being that anarchists never work on the contrary anarchists are nearly always poor and it is only the rich who live without work not only this but it is our belief that every healthy human being will by the laws of his own activity choose to work though certainly not as now for at present there is little opportunity for one to find his true vocation thus i who in freedom would have selected otherwise i'm a teacher of language some twelve years since being in philadelphia and without employment i accepted the proposition of a small group of russian jewish factory workers to form an evening class in the form an evening class in the common english branches i know well enough that behind the desire to help me to make a living lay the wish that i might thus take part in the propaganda of our common cause but the incidental became once more the principal and a teacher of working men and women i've remained from that day in those twelve years that i have lived and loved and worked with foreign jews i have taught over a thousand and found them as a rule the brightest the most persistent and sacrificing students and in youth dreamers of social ideals while the intelligent american has been cursing him as the ignorant foreigner while the short-sighted working man has been making life for the sheenie as intolerable as possible silent and patient the despised man has worked his way against it all i have myself seen such genuine heroism in the cause of education practiced by girls and boys and even by men and women with families as would pass the limits of belief to the ordinary cold starvation self-isolation all endured for years in order to obtain the means for study and worse than all exhaustion of body even to emaciation this is common yet in the midst of all this so fervent is the imagination of the young that most of them find time besides to visit the various clubs and societies where radical thought is discussed and sooner or later ally themselves either with the socialist sections the liberal leagues the single tax clubs or the anarchist groups the greatest socialist daily in america is the jewish for vets and the most active and competent practical workers are jews so they are among the anarchists i am no propagandist at all costs or i would leave the story there but the truth compels me to add that as the years pass and the gradual filtration and absorption of successful professionals the golden mist of enthusiasm vanishes and the old teacher must turn for comradeship to the new youth who still press forward with burning eyes seeing what is lost forever to those whom common success has satisfied and stupefied it brings tears sometimes but as kropotkin says let them go we have had the best of them after all who are the really old those who wear out in faith and energy and take to easy chairs and soft living not kropotkin with his 60 years upon him who has bright eyes and the eager interest of a little child not fiery john most the old warhorse of the revolution unbroken after his 10 years of imprisonment in europe and america not gray haired louise michelle with the aura of the morning still shining in her keen look which peers from behind the barred memories of new caledonia not dire d-lum who still smiles in his grave i think nor tucker nor turner nor teresa clement nor genre of not these i have met them all and felt the springing life pulsating through heart and hand joyous ardent leaping into action not such are the old but your young heart that goes bankrupt in social hope dry rotting in this stale and purposeless society would you always be young then be an anarchist and live with the faith of hope though you be old i doubt if any other hope has the power to keep the fire alight as i saw it in 1897 when we met the spanish exiles released from the fortress of montjuic comparatively few persons in america ever knew the story of that torture though we distributed fifty thousand copies of the letters smuggled from the prison and some few newspapers did reprint them they were the letters of men incarcerated on mere suspicion for the crime of an unknown person and subjected to tortures the bare mention of which makes one shudder their nails were torn out their heads compressed in metal caps the most sensitive portions of the body twisted between guitar strings their flesh burned with red hot irons they had been fed on salt codfish after days of starvation and refused water chuan oh yeah a boy nineteen years old had gone mad another had confessed to something he had never done and knew nothing of this is no horrible imagination i who right have myself shaken some of those scarred hands indiscriminately four hundred people of all sorts of beliefs republicans trade unionists socialists freemasons as well as anarchists had been cast into dungeons and tortured in the infamous zero is it a wonder that most of them came out anarchists there were twenty eight in the first lot that we met at euston station that august afternoon homeless wanderers in the whirlpool of london released without trial after months of imprisonment and ordered to leave spain in forty eight hours they had left it singing their prison songs and still across their dark and sorrowful eyes one could see the eternal maytime bloom they drifted away to south america chiefly where four or five new anarchist papers have since arisen and several colonizing experiments along anarchist lines are being tried so tyranny defeats itself and the exile becomes the seed sower of the revolution and not only to the here to for unaroused does he bring awakening but the entire character of the world movement is modified by this circulation of the comrades of all nations among themselves originally the american movement the native creation which arose with joesire warren in eighteen twenty nine was purely individualist the student of economy will easily understand the material and historical cause for such development but within the last twenty years the communist ideas made great progress owing primarily to that concentration in capitalist production which has driven the american working men to grasp at the idea of solidarity and secondly the expulsion of active communist propagandists from europe again another change has come within the last ten years till then the application of the idea was chiefly narrowed to industrial matters and the economic schools mutually denounced each other today a large and genial tolerance is growing the young generation recognizes the immense sweep of the idea to all the realms of art science literature education sex relations and personal morality as well as social economy and welcomes the accession to the ranks of those who struggle to realize the free life no matter in what field for this is what anarchism finally means the whole unchaining of life after two thousand years of christian asceticism and hypocrisy apart from the question of ideals there is the question of method how do you propose to get all this is the question most frequently asked us the same modification has taken place here formerly there were quakers and revolutionists so there are still but while they neither thought well of the other now both have learned that each has his own use in the great play of world forces no man is in himself a unit and in every soul jove still makes war on christ nevertheless the spirit of peace grows and while it would be idle to say that anarchists in general believe that any of the great industrial problems will be solved without the use of force it would be equally idle to suppose that they consider force itself a desirable thing or that it furnishes a final solution to any problem from peaceful experiment alone can come final solution and that the advocates of force know and believe as well as the Tolstoyans only they think that the present tyrannies provoke resistance the spread of Tolstoy's war and peace and the slavery of our times and the growth of numerous Tolstoy clubs having for their purpose the dissemination of the literature of non-resistance it is an evidence that many receive the idea that it is easier to conquer war with peace I am one of these I can see no end of retaliation unless someone ceases to retaliate but let no one mistake this for servile submission or meek abnegation my right shall be asserted no matter at what cost to me and none shall trench upon it without my protest good natured satirists often remark that the best way to cure an anarchist is to give him a fortune substituting corrupt for cure I would subscribe to this and believing myself to be no better than the rest of men I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my lot to work and work hard and for no fortune so I may continue to the end for let me keep the intensity of my soul with all the limitations of my material conditions rather than become the spineless and idealist creation of material needs my reward is that I live with the young I keep step with my comrades I shall die in the harness with my face to the east the east and the light end of the making of an anarchist