Do Liberals Know Themselves?

Liberty not unfrequently receives the compliment of being considered the most radical and revolutionary sheet ever published in this country. So startling has seemed the project of abolishing the State to not a few radicals in the other reform spheres that they have hesitated to entertain this paper in their family circles and places of business, lest they might be ticketed by Mrs. Grundy and "good society" as Nihilists, enemies of law and order, and dangerous citizens generally.

Yet, after all, what is any radical, whose protest means anything, but a person who is attempting to abolish the State? Bear in mind that the State typifies any organized machine which attempts to enforce its measures and methods by other means than persuasion and consent and at other than its own cost. Messrs. Seaver and Mendum of the Boston "Investigator" are materialists. They see in the way of progress and organized machine presided over by ecclesiastic hierarchs. It attempts to saddle its theological constitution upon those who never subscribed to it. It's dogmas are crammed down the throats of the unthinking and gullible through authoritative posting of certain theological maxims. It erects an omnipotent God to suit its own despotic purposes, and saddles the expense of supporting him and his hierarchical retinue upon those who do not acknowledge allegiance.

Now, the thing that Messrs. Seaver and Mendum are endeavoring to abolish is this theological State, which, if they examine it is almost the exact counterpart of the political State, or, rather, is one phase of it. So true is this that to attempt to abolish the theological State without abolishing the political is as impossible as ridiculous. It is strange that religious liberals do not see this at a glance.

Take, again, the Free Religionists, with their famous "demands of liberalism." Many of their leading demands were simply attempts to abolish certain despotic appendages of the State. Those who initiated the movement, in calling it Free Religion, asked for the abolition of the State to that extent that they conceived the State to be the antipodes of Liberty. The movement promised well, and might accomplish much if it had sufficient sagacity and bravery in its constituency to pursue the State versus Free Religion far enough to see that the main purpose of the State is to deny freedom, whether in religion, morals, trade, or industry. The Free Religionists unfortunately have achieved little more than an exchange of the orthodox God for enforced "culture," "morality," "purity," and other undefined fictions - thus becoming more offensively bigoted in the eyes of true liberals than the Orthodox themselves.

But all religious liberals, to the extent that they institute effective protests against a real enemy, will find, upon knowing themselves better, that that enemy is the State in some of its allied forms, and that they are engaged in a movement to abolish it. There is a theological State, a social State, an industrial State. The pernicious element of them all is that species of organization which is based on compulsion and authority rather than upon reason and consent. Though our attitudes towards Spiritualism is a skeptical one, we nevertheless accord to its friends the credit of being, in one respect, the most sagacious body of liberals in the world, in that they largely discard organization and leave a wide latitude to individuality. The result is seen in the rapid and wonderful growth of their numbers.

The State is simply a mammoth organization, held together by usurpation and force. All minor organizations in society are modeled after it. Of this type of organization Liberty is the avowed enemy. It violated individual right. It is unscientific. It is the universal foe of progress. It must go. Curiously enough, some of our liberal friends, who, in all they effectively do for growth and emancipation, are fighting that same foe, have yet to learn the logic of their own dissent. But they, too, like the benighted bigots whose servility they deplore, are still bound in the shackles of custom and revered named. They, however, providentially persist in acting better than they know, and all we can do is invite them to patiently follow our method and logic till they know themselves better.