On Picket Duty.

Liberty, Boston Mass., Saturday, September 3, 1881.
Vol. 1, No. 3

Whatever is is natural; therefore, there can be nothing supernatural.

Wages is not slavery. Wages is a form of voluntary exchange, and voluntary exchange is a form of Liberty.

Henry Maret, the bravest and most consistent writer for the daily press of Paris, has started a daily journal of his own called the "Radical." Success to it.

Henry Ward Beecher says the great vice of politics are lying and whiskey. Judging by the Plymouth preacher, the great vice of religion are lying and "nest-hiding."

How grand a motto that inscribed upon the banner under which MM. Lacroix and Revillion fought against Gambetta for his seat in the chamber of deputies: "By Liberty towards Justice!"

The trembling tyrant, Alexnder III, immured in his winter palaces and Moscow fortresses, is beginning to realize the force of Damon's remark before execution: "Better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the government of men."

"The Church pronounces a thing right (or wrong); therefore it is right (or wrong)," says the religious fanatic. "The State pronounces a thing wrong (or right); therefore it is wrong (or right) says the political fanatic. Both agree in condemning as a blasphemer and enemy of order the atheist and anarchist who trusts in growing human reason and experience as the sole, though fallible, criteria of morality.

With that reformatory movement which calls for the abolition of the presidency and the senate we have no sympathy. German in its origin, we believe, it is at all events German in character. Its realization would be a long step in the centralization and strengthening of power. If there must be power, let us divide it; if there must be a State, let us cripple it all we can. The agencies of tyranny often obstruct one another. Until Liberty induces the people to abolish the house of representatives, let the president and senate be retained to keep it in check.

David Dudley Field, in the International Law Congress, offers a resolution the assassination of royal robbers and murderers shall not be included in political crimes, and that nations shall refuse asylum to those guilty of it; and it passed by acclamation. A guilty conscience makes cowards of our national thieves. The Field family may well tremble in fear of that day when the swindled toilers shall have nothing more - not even a vote - of which to be robbed. Mr. Field, the Working People's International Association will have something to say, authoritatively, about the comity of nations. It may reverse your decision, and where will your band of brothers be then? One Field upon the supreme bench to promulgate decisions formulated by another Field at the bar in the interest of still a third Field in copartnership with the Repubican swindlers who compose the rings and control the monopolies, is a very nice little family arrangement, certainly; but, when the great human family once fathoms the secret of its operations, the lesser will be speedily subordinated to the greater, and may thank its stars if it be not utterly crushed by the fall.

The shortest way to turn a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows. Witness the recent vote in the British Commons on the abolition of the death penalty. Under the administration of the Tories every member of the present ministry voted against the gallows. Under Gladstone's rule John Bright alone remains true to his record; while Sir William Harcourt, whose name stands on the lists of previous years in antagonism to capital punishment, went so far as to speak in its favor. Such is the effect of a little brief authority.

Our memory recalls no "give-away" so delightfully innocent as that of a Catholic bishop of Ohio, who, in a recent proclamation ordering a certain numbers of prayers per day in his diocese, for the recovery of President Garfield, gravely added that, "in case of the president's death, the prayers should be continued during the week following the event, for the welfare of the country." That is to say, having prayed the president to death, his priests must next try to pray the country to death. It is impossible to caricature the Christian system, there being a point beyond which absurdity cannot go.

"There will be no perfect government until men grow from the one-man idea to the all-man idea," says that ablest of Greenback papers, the "Chicago Express." Precisely so; because, the best government being that which governs least, the perfection of government is none at all, a result involved in the all-men idea. But Republicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, Greenbackers, Socialists, Eight-Hour men, and all governmental schools of reformers seem as yet to have got no further than the majority-of-man idea. The Woman-Suffragists, it is true, do a trifle better in standing for the majority-of-men-and-women idea; but up to present time Liberty and the Anarchists possess a monopoly of the all-men, or better, all-people idea. Possess, we were careful to say; not enjoy: for, being in this, as in all things, anti-monopolists, we should be only too glad to see it diffused throughout the world, to the achievement of which end we are doing our level best.

Europe is becoming thickly dotted with Anarchistic newspapers. Besides the appearance of the clandestine sheet, "Der Kampf," referred to by our foreign correspondent in another column, an announcment is made of the Italian journal, "L'Insurrezione," to be published weekly in London by the well-known Italian revolutionist, Enrico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, and Vito Solieri. While holding communism in anarchy as the social ideal and the free action of natural laws of man and society as the scientific method of its attainment, it looks upon the State as the supreme obstacle in the way of the application of this method, and therefore regards insurrection (its name) as the first of duties. It will undoubtedly render valuable aid to the revolutionary cause, and every one who read Italian should forward $1.60, plus foreign postage, for a year's subscription, to Vito Solieri, 8 Windmill Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, W, England.