The Anatomy of Liberty.

Nine-tenths of life is spent in complaining of wrongs and trying to abolish them. The average man or woman goes to bed with some wrong hanging on the eyelids. He or she awakes, and generally the first thought is of some wrong. The bed is wrong; the breakfast is wrong; somebody's talk or treatment is wrong; some law or custom is wrong; two-thirds of everything is wrong.

The great field of reform deals negatively with nothing but wrongs. The whole of Ireland today is a sad theatre of wrongs. The laborer is complaining of wrongs. The women suffragists are advertising wrongs all over the land. So is the prison reformer, the temperance advocate, the greenbacker, the infidel, and even the politician.

Yet summon the whole army of reformers together and ask them, individually, to define what a wrong is in its essence, and probably not one in a hundred would have an intelligent idea. Restricted suffrage, land monopoly, the wage system, and currency limitations, they say, are wrongs; but until they have analyzed the essential nature of a wrong, their efforts, as is the practical case, are as liable to be aimed against ultimate liberty as for it.

A re-former is one who proposes to construct a new form, or alter an old form, of social practice so as to make it better accord with the conditions of wellbeing. But the majority of reformers are utterly incapable of defining where the old form violates some immutable principle. The average standard of condemning a thing as wrong is that it works injustice to some class of individuals. But this is no valid scientific basis. For the class that is injured perhaps a much larger class is benefited by the social practice complained of. The bulk of reforms come to nothing simply because they represent nothing but wars of classes. It is selfishness in contact with itself. In Ireland they say: "Landlord rights means tenant wrongs." So everywhere capitalist rights means labors wrongs. The real thing that must yet be settled before there will ever be any logical and effectual basis of reform is this: What is a right and what is a wrong in human relations? There are no class rights and no class wrongs. A thing is right, now and forever, because it accords with the immutable law of our being. It is wrong now and forever, because it is opposed to that law. What is that law as it pertains to human relations? Is the problem of Liberty.

But the lamentable inability of reformers to define wrongs is an infinitely less serious matter than their methods of abolishing them. Every wrong, as the reader who follows us in succeeding numbers will discover, is the result of some violation of the law of true liberty, and can generally be directly traced to the said violation. The law of liberty is spontaneous association of natural selection. The first condition of its normal operation is that the basic factor of social existence, the individual, shall be left entirely and absolutely free to regulate his life as experimental contact with other equally free individuals may seem to direct.

Bear in mind that liberty does not preclude regulation. But regulation, under the law of liberty, comes of selection and voluntary assent. Under its operation, security of life and possession, that bogus pretext which is made the chief apology for so-called governments, is as much more firmly assured as are the normal process of Nature more effectual than the artificial expedience of man.

The antipode of liberty is artificial, arbitrary, forma intervention between individuals who are selecting the best results of experimental association. Its concrete expression is Authority. Its organized exercise is known as Government. Now, the most lamentable spectacle to-day, next to rampant despotism itself, is the short- sighted reformer attempting to secure more liberty by advocating the method of more authority, more intervention, more government, in case of Irish landlordism, the greenback movement, suffrage reform, and socialism, the wrong protested against is, in every case an actual one, and the motive of the protestants a noble one, but the method proposed in every case by which to abolish the wrong hinges upon the very despotic elements that created that wrong and perpetuates it. Landlordism in Ireland, so far from being voluntary regulation between the landlord and his victim, is an artificial contrivance of despotism, created by the few who magnates style themselves the government. Left to its merits as a voluntary arrangement of associative life, it could not stand an hour. It is forced upon five million of people by some two thousand absentee thieves. And yet the great deal of Irish land reformers seem to expect that, by a change of engineers, the machine of the future will be run for different and better purposes than the present one.

What is true of land reformers is equally true of the currency and suffrage reformers. And the worst spectacle of all is that of the socialists, who expect to mitigate the deadly power of the government machine by enlarging it and extending its capacity for despotism into the remotest concerns of life. All these misguided propagandists are yet blind to the main spring of the whole scheme of despotism. Curiously enough, the leaders, many of them, are aware of that mischief which that superstitious fiction, the "Government of God," has exercised in stultifying rational progress, but forget that the State is simply the old fiction arranged to play upon men in the practical economies of life.

Theocracy is the original machine invented to enslave the race. It set up a king in the person of God. Two thousand years ago it took on an heir-apparent in the form of Christ, a prince made more in conformity with the intelligence of the age. The powers were subsequently distributed into the hands of other agents, known as popes and graded ecclesiastics. The distributing, segregating process has gone on till we have modern republic. But all forms of government are radiatious from the parent trunk. The reformer who abolished the fiction of God as a factor of authority in human concerns can never stop, if he is logical, till the whole machine of government which grows out of it is also abolished. He then stands on a clean, rational basis. The man who clings to that superstition known as the State, and boasts of having flung away the fetters of theology and preistcraft, does not understand himself. The State is as much a theological superstition as the doctrine of atonement. It is simply the human side of theology. It is only another application of the idea of authority, which is the central idea of theological despotism. All this we propose to illustrate and amplify, as Liberty goes out upon its mission of enlightenment, from issue to issue.