What We Mean.

 Our purpose is the abolition, not only of all existing States, but of the State itself. Is not this a straight-forward and well-defined purpose? There can be no mistaking it, and it admits of no equivocation. The least that our enemies can say of us is that we stand in the market-place of thought and action with a square protest and a square assertion.

And what is the State? It is not a thing that can be especially defined by Russia, Germany, Great Britain, or Massachusetts. The State is a principle, a philosophical error in social existence. The State is chaos, rioting under the guise of law, order, and morality. The State is a mob, posited on unscientific premises. We propose to supplant the mob by that true social order which is pivoted on the sovereignty of individualities associated for mutual well-being under the law of natural attraction and selection,— Liberty.

Under this formula we do not, in the best sense of the Word, discard government. On the contrary, it is government that we are after. The State is not government, since it denies Liberty. The State becomes impossible the moment you remove from it the element of compulsion. But it is exactly at this point that government begins. Where the State ceases government begins, and, conversely, where the State begins government ceases.

We often hear of a wise parent governing his children by love. Did anyone over hear of a monarch conducting a State by love? Did not the State originate in a distrust of love and natural selection as the true motors of government? Was not the very motive of the first rulers of peoples the abolition of government? Were they not designing conspirators, who saw that, under a system of natural association, there would be universal well-being and a just distribution of natural wealth and the rewards of labor? In order to enrich themselves and gratify their vanity and love of power at the expense of others, they took advantage of the superstitious element in man, and arected their thrones under cover of the divinity. Their purpose was to supplant government by force, and their machine they called the State.

Now, wherever force takes the place of natural selection and associative mutualism founded on consent, there a State is inaugurated. It may be in the church; it may be in the political State; it may be in the league, the club, the lyceum, the labor union, or the household. It is a State, in that it posits authority and supplements it by force, thus denying government and substituting despotism.

We assert that delegated authority assumed to be vested in any titled or elected person, not excepting God himself, is, in the very nature of the case, a lie, a fraud, and, moreover, a scientific impossibility, since the individual is the only source of authority, and, even if he would, could not alienate from his personality the control of himself by contract. Hence we regard all popes, kings, emperors, presidents, and persons in authority everywhere as impostors and usurpers, and the constitutions, “vested rights,” and other lying parchments under which they claim the right to rule as binding only on such as freely give their consent.

When we state as our purpose, then, the abolition of the State, the reader must not have in view a forcible raid upon the palace of some king, or a military expedition against some state house, parliament or arsenal, even though at some later day circumstances should give rise to such incidents in our warfare. What we mean by the abolition of the State is the abolition of a false philosophy, or, rather the overthrow of a gigantic fraud under which people consent to be coerced and restrained from minding their own business. The philosophy of Liberty can be applied everywhere, and he who successfully applies it in his family in the place of avenging Gods, arbitrary codes, threats, commands, and whips may easily have the satisfaction of abolishing at least one State. When we have substituted our philosophy in place of the old, then the palaces, cathedrals, and arsenals will naturally fall to pieces through neglect and the rust that is sure to corrupt tenantless and obsolete structures.

We should like to be able to better elucidate our philosophy in a larger and more frequently issued sheet. We do the best that we can in the little space at our command. Meanwhile, all the signs of times promise well, and we go on with our humble work rejoicing,— conquering and to conquer.

Organization, False and True.

The philosophy of Liberty is emphatically opposed to organization, as generally understood. We regard what is commonly recognized as organization as a great and serious obstacle in the way of true progress, and one which Liberty’s intelligent disciples should seek on every occasion to frustrate and oppose.

But we by no means would be understood as opposing any rational method by which large bodies of people, having a common purpose in a given sphere, may be brought to act in harmony. We are in perfect accord with the popular truism that “union is strength.” Our position is that the basis of popular organization is utterly unscientific, and is a certain source of disunion and weakness. We once heard a skilled parliamentarian, in the ante-room of a lyceum of trained debaters, offer a wager that he could step into that lyceum and break up an exciting debate, though every man on the floor wished to see the debate go on, and do it all under the sanction of “Cushing’s Manual,” with strict parliamentary rulings. His wager was accepted, and it took him just twenty minutes to accomplish the feat, in spite of the facts that the president of the lyceum was thoroughly conversant with parliamentary law and that the whole floor was united against the intruder.

The fact is that organization, as now conducted, is patterned after the State. The State is a conspiracy against Liberty and true social order, and the procedure which governs its representative bodies, known as parliamentary law, is simply an invented trick to enable the main conspirators to squelch damaging dissenters, and thus forestall the survival of the really fittest. We appeal to the common experience of our readers in asking if nine-tenths of the time and motive power of ordinary clubs, unions, leagues, and lyceums is not generally consumed in lumbering over parliamentary law and in getting out of the tangle of red tape.

The strike now going on in Lawrence presents a case where the friends of labor almost unanimously deplore the fact that there was no organization among the bewildered and undecided strikers. We also deplore the fact, if by organization is meant the presence of some master mind, or minds, to nerve the outraged operatives into intelligent unity of purpose. But if by organisation is meant the presence of a labor union, with an arbitrary code of principles, by-laws, rules of order, and all the paraphernalia of a legislative body,— the whole supplemented by threats, force, and compulsion,— then we say, No.

Now, there are doubtless master minds among the five thousand striking operatives of Lawrence. The “Irish World” alone has educated master minds on the land and labor questions in almost every community in America. But so enslaved are the people by organization that brave and level-headed men have come to think that they have no right to stand up and lead their fellows, unless authorized by some artificially equipped and officered machine. Authority, in some form or other, has its grip on everybody.

All organization which it is safe to countenance and defend rests on spontaneity, free agency, and choice. In the natural order of things the noble fellow who should post himself in the public square and there, in plain language, give his assembled fellow-workers sound advice as to ultimate ends and immediate measures, would do more effective work for Liberty and emancipation than the despotic fiat of a thousand labor organizations. That fellow is probably there, but, bright and brave as he is, still too servile to authority to feel that he has just as good a right to lead the people as has the grand master of the Knights of Labor, who boasts of his organized following of 250,000 strong. When men first learn to cast off the shackles of authority and office, then we shall see an organization, not founded on compulsion, red tape, and parliamentary hocus pocus, but on the irresistible inspiration that can alone come of intelligence and Liberty.

The Philosophy of Right and Wrong.

The most serious calamity attendant upon false premises in the realm of thought is that the avowed and conscientious enemies of despotism are made to be the persistent advocates and defenders of the pivotal agencies upon which it hinges. We do not make this assertion in a spirit of self-sufficiency and conceit, and are aware that those who differ from us will, of course, turn it against ourselves. Naturally, we feel very positive that the philosophy which shapes the teachings of Liberty is correct and unanswerable; but we are fallible, and, if the history of human opinions teaches anything, it is that nothing in this world is a finality.

But upon one thing all schools of sociology will agree,— namely, that the very first step in all reasoning looking to human well-being is to fix upon a correct scientific basis of right and wrong. These terms are upon everybody’s lips, from the prattling stripling to the hoary theologian and moralist, and yet the average man has no fixed conception of what it is that constitutes an action as right or wrong. At every step we find people disputing and arguing over the right and wrong of a thing, but arrest them in any instance, and ask them what constitutes right and wrong in nature and practice, and they are totally unable to answer. And yet the whole argument in every case is useless and worthless until this point is settled.

The chief mischief attending this lamentable absence of a true scientific standard of right grows out of the universally accepted inference that, as soon as one is convinced that a practice is what he calls wrong, it is his next and imperative duty to set about to interdict that practice by force. For instance, there is a very large constituency among the thinkers of to-day who are convinced that usury is wrong. The “Irish World” is the most conspicuous reservoir in America of the protests growing out of that conviction. Yet the burden of the song of every protestant is that usury ought to lie crushed out of existence by force. It has no right to live, it should be forbidden and punished, because it is wrong.

Now, assuming that the vague standard of right and wrong adopted by these people is a sort of utilitarian one, based in this instance on the theory that lending on usury in every case works more harm than good (i. e., more injury than benefit), they stand on untenable ground, and are liable to be dropped into a trap at any moment; for it would not be difficult to produce individual instances where the practice of lending on usury, so far from being an injury to anybody, is a practical benefit, not only to the individuals contracting, but to the community at large. By their own standard, then, lending on usury, in such a case, would not be wrong. But, if it be answered that, although lending on usury may often prove a mutual benefit to individuals, its ultimate results upon society at large are disastrous, and that therefore society at large should prevent individuals from doing what they can mutually agree to, then Liberty must, of course, demand an unconditional halt! For that is the very essence of despotism against which we protest,— namely, the right of society at large to interdict individuals by force.

And to fall back, in order to justify such a course, upon the phrase, “moral right,” is both unscientific and pernicious. For moral right has no authoritative interpreter, and therefore should not be made, as it so easily can be, a weapon of tyranny. A thing must be right or wrong in accordance with some correct analysis of the natural domain of individual and associative action. To say “moral right,” in the sense above referred to, is to lumber up our conceptions with a mischievous term which has no scientific status.

We sometimes wish that the very terms themselves, right and wrong, were abolished; for, until they are made to have a true scientific meaning, they are a perpetual source of mischief and misdirection. But, until somebody shall give the world a correct scientific terminology, we must tolerate them as best we can, while endeavoring at every opportunity to so direct their application as to make them count for Liberty, instead of for despotism, as they generally do in society as at present governed.

Right and wrong are principles that must ever be defined, qualified, and circumscribed by the individual, in his associative capacity: defined, by a correct analysis of the natural domain of individual action; qualified, by the natural reflex action of other individuals; circumscribed, by the inflexible law that all action, individual and associative, shall be at the sole cost of the party or parties acting.

Under this law all individuals have a right to do anything and everything which they may choose voluntarily to do at their own cost. Make this law universal, and keep the hands of Church, State, and every other arbitrary, coercive despot away from it, and perfect Liberty will result as naturally as all other things find their level in nature. The practice of usury is a sacred and inviolable prerogative of individuals who choose to contract for its payment. If the cost, in practice, ultimately falls upon the innocent and toiling masses, it is because this prerogative is forbidden to these proscribed slaves by the machine known as the State. Proudhon demonstrates as clearly as any theorem in mathematics could be demonstrated that, if the power to take usury were extended to all men, usury would devour itself, in its very nature. But this is exactly one of the chief purposes of the State,— namely, to cut off a great part of the race from the practice of usury, and confine it to the few, so that they may live in luxury on the toil of their artificially-created slaves.

The same is true of all the other prerogatives which attach to property. Whether property in land be, in itself, right or wrong, it is, in practice, a wrong only, because the State is designed chiefly to see to it that property in land shall be vested in a minority instead of all. If the State could be made to declare to-morrow that hereafter property in land should be extended to all, and that all landlords must, in future, secure their holdings on their own merits instead of by force, property in land would cease to be an evil. But the State that could be made to declare such a thing would cease to be the State.

We ask the reader to scrutinize carefully the law which we have italicized above, and then bear in mind the following melancholy facts which result from ignoring it, or not knowing it:—

1. Usury is practically wrong because the State creates and defends a monopoly in the practice of it.
2. Property in land is practically wrong because the State was created to defend a minority in the sole enjoyment of it.
3. Rent and interest (forms of usury) are practically wrong because the State necessarily confines the taking of rent and interest to the classes endowed with monopoly.

Finally, the whole range of transactions among individuals results in wrongs because the State assumes the right to stand despotically between individuals and their own mutual interests. The State is the chief curse of humanity, the mother of human wrongs.