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.

Construction and Destruction.

Almost without exception every new subscriber to Liberty to whom its purposes are disclosed and who has grown up under prevailing systems exclaims: “Ah! I see you are wonderfully expert as tearing down, but you don’t say what you propose to substitute. I am fully aware that our present governments are terribly rotten, but you don’t propose anything better.”

Dear friends: suppose the natural road-bed from Boston to Lowell were of the very best quality. Nature had made it most admirably adapted for travel and transportation. But, seeing a chance to put up a job and rob the public, certain designing rogues, hired by a few thieving contractors, have succeeded, through the vile arts of politics, in covering this natural pavement with a certain patent invention, gotten up by the political road-builders. You and we are located on this patent road. Every time that we put a spade into our ground we find that the natural bed is almost perfect. It is hard, yet elastic and absorptive, and in every way adapted for commerce and transportation, if it had only been left to the care of those who use it, and who have most at stake in its serviceability.

But the patent road we find to be a perfect nuisance. We are constantly being levied upon by force to support it and repair it. Every day we, or some of our neighbors, “get stuck” upon it and our property is ruined and disabled. It is hard to walk and ride upon. It is uneven. It is full of gullies and holes, and is in every way a constant source of damage to our lives and possessions.

But, whenever we complain and appeal to the political road-builders, they are very polite and sympathetic. They hear our grievances, and straightway the jobbing contractors behind them set about to repair the road at our expense in their own way. The taxes increase, but the road grows worse. Some of us begin to suspect that the whole scheme is a put-up job to rob us, but then the thought that it is the work of our legislative governors restrains us from wicked, anarchistic designs. And yet the thought that underneath their artificial patent road there is a perfect natural bod constantly haunts us. “if they had only let us alone,” some of us cry, “and not built up their artificial swindle over the natural bed in the first place, all would have been well.”

But by and by two or three resolute dwellers along the road begin to ask themselves: “By what right do these swindling political patent-road-builders meddle with the natural bed? By what sacred right are these robbers privileged to eternally impose upon us? Why should they have any authority above us in these matters?” etc.; and, upon looking into the matter deeply, they find that the robbers have no solid claim to authority in natural justice.

Now, then, for radical, heroic treatment! On some fine morning they start out with plow and pick and dynamite to “tear down” the useless and costly superstructure. But scarcely have their plows penetrated the patent road and touched hard-pan when the other plundered neighbors arrive upon the scene. “Hold on!” they cry with one accord; “you are wonderfully expert at tearing down, but you don’t say what you propose to substitute. We are aware that the patent-road-builders and their road are terribly rotten, but you don’t propose anything better.” The fact is that they have become so imbued with the idea that nothing can be properly done without resolutions, bills, committees, votes, and all the red-tape hocus-pocus of the State that these superstitious falsely educated, state-craft-ridden neighbors are ready to pounce upon their only true friends, who desire to go straight down to hard-pan and abolish the robbing swindlers.

The reply of the hard-pan men to their deluded neighbors is very simple. They are constructing something better in the very fact and act of tearing down. Removing the rotten superstructure is in and of itself building something better. While they are putting the plow down to hard-pan, they do not forbid these who choose from using the old superstructure till their work is done. They simply ask their neighbors to take hold and hasten its removal, instead of standing idle and finding fault, if not denouncing them in their righteous work. When the old rotten swindle is out of the way, then whatever new arrangements are necessary to complete the usefulness of the natural road can be easily fixed upon and executed by mutual consent.

But the old superstructure must come down before any construction is possible. The road of equitable commerce is already there, if the patent innovation can only be gotten out of the way. These political patent-road-builders are simply usurpers, who persistently block the way and tax their fellow men to sustain their nuisances. In waging war against natural equity and true government it is they who are the real de-structionists. If our friends will only wean themselves from the old delusion of confounding the cart with the horse, they will then easily see that the friends of Liberty are the only real constructionists. We hope we have made our point plain.

Liberty and Method.

The starting-point, from the standard of Liberty, of all sociological investigation is the Individual. How marked and infinite is the diversity of individualities becomes more and more apparent to every close and constant observer of men.

Even the best disciplined mind cannot escape seeing right, justice, and scientific method in reform largely from the standpoint of its own organization and environments. The man of theory and abstractions listens in semi-contempt to the elaborately contrived schemes of the practical man whose very purpose is to put the former’s own theories directly or indirectly into practice. “No,” says he; “you are simply lopping off the branches and wasting your time, and every blow that is not struck straight at the tap-roots is worse than useless. You must strike as I strike and where I strike, or your blow counts for nothing.”

A man may be gifted with giant intellect in certain lines of mental analysis, and yet be all the more prone to that species of mental limitation which, failing to understand an entirely different mental organization, rudely consigns its plans and specifications for the practical application of his own thought to the intellectual waste-basket as utterly useless.

The only man capable of understanding wherein every mind that is willing to work for justice is capable of efficient cooperation in reform is the philosopher, by which is meant that large and fully-rounded man who, having a little of all mental qualities in his composition, can appreciate all. But this rounded balance of qualities is always at the expense of the exceptional power of the specialist, all of whose forces are concentrated upon one method of analysis.

It is quite common to maintain that the well-balanced, rounded philosopher is the intellectually great man. No type of man, however, represents the great man,— not even that which combines to some extent all types. We wish it distinctly understood that, in the ethics and philosophy of Liberty, there is no provision for great men. The “great man” of history is a standing nuisance, and has no place in our system. There is no great nor small in true social economy. Every man is made for his work, and the only person whom it troubles us to dispose of is the man who, if ever designed for any manner or method of work, refuses to do it. But even the idler is neither great nor small. He goes out of the calculation as a nonentity.

At a recent gathering of thinkers in the line of Liberty this very matter of method came into prominence. There was the same purpose in every member of the company, but a marked mental organization in each differing from every other. One gentleman of excellent organizing capacity had a scheme on foot for gradually shaming and driving the State out of existence by absorbing its functions into practical cooperation among employers and their help, and thus finally worrying it out through indirect means. To the abstract thinker before whom the scheme was laid, and who, by the way, has perhaps the keenest intellect on this continent in his line, all this indirect circumvention of the State was utterly futile. The State must be openly attacked and defied at its very citadel. Its guns must be dismounted, and its offices, titles, pretensions, and paraphernalia utterly demolished and abolished, before any scheme can acquire Liberty enough to give it an effectual test.

Now, two such positive and diverse organizations as these minds can never be made to see alike through argument. True conviction is simply the result of seeing, and each man will always see through his own glass. All that argument can ever do is to clean the glasses. The fact is that both are right without mutually knowing it. And we say that, if any man has any practical scheme by which to push the State adrift through individual cooperation, his duty is simply to go straight about its realization. To him, as he is made up, it is the most effectual method. All that we demand is the inexorable condition that his scheme shall entertain no element of compulsion, and that the cost of executing it shall be thrown upon no unwilling shoulders.

As we are made up, we believe that the most manly and effectual method of dealing with the State is to demand its immediate and unconditional surrender as a usurper, and to flatly and openly challenge its assumed right to forestall and crush out the voluntary associative government and regulation of individuals by themselves in all things. But, if others think that indirect methods are preferable, all that they have to do is to set about asserting themselves, as we assert ourselves. By all means accept nobody as authority. All mental popery [sic] is impossible in the very essence of our philosophy. Let each man do his work as to him seems good, in right dead earnest. Then, later, as we come to compare notes, we may fairly judge one another by our fruits, and arrive at harmony through its only legitimate channel,— the largest Liberty of action and method.