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.

Crumbs from Liberty’s Table.

As civilization advances, the necessity of law diminishes. — Bullion.

Men, in a free country, have the right not to work if the terms offered by their employers do not suit them. The condition of being employed is as voluntary as the condition of employing. The right to strike is just as sacred to the laborer as the right of suddenly discharging a thousand men is to the capitalist. The military force is not maintained for the purpose of destroying either right. — New York Sun.

It is a mistake to suppose that by an equal distribution of wealth is meant equality in quantity. The question, “Who is the Somebody?” is not based upon the fact that some people have more wealth than others, but upon the fact that Somebody has the wealth which somebody else has produced, and consequently ought to own. An equal distribution of wealth means such a distribution as will give to each producer his equitable proportion of what he has assisted to produce. If one man creates $100 worth of wealth in a day and another $10, it would not be equitable to give each half of the whole — i.e. $55. But neither is it equitable to give one $105 and the other only $5. But it is equitable to give $10 to the one who produced $10 and $100 to the one who produced $100, loss their fair proportion of taxes. — New York Truth.

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.

An Unexpected Compliment.

[From the Detroit “Labor Review.”]

While we belong to exactly the opposite school of social philosophy as does our friend Liberty, yet we cannot but admire its consistency and bold and aggressive attitude. It is refreshing to read a paper that says what it knows and it wants. It is so unlike the thousand and one paper that do not or cannot distinguish between the philosophies of communism and individualism, and who adhere to that bastard political economy that breed monopolies and corruption. We earnestly wish Liberty success, so that the people can readily learn the legitimate and logical conclusions of the two different schools.

St. James on Liberty.

[From the Memphis “Free Trader.”]

“But whoso looketh into the perfect Law of Liberty and continueth therein, he being, not a forgetful bearer, but a doer the work, this men shall be blessed in his deed.” — General Epistle of St. James.

When the people of the earth are sufficiently Christianized to adopt that “perfect law of liberty and continue therein,” two-thirds of all the sorrow and suffering that afflict humanity will end. It is a melancholy reflection, it is a dark and depressing reflection, that all the blood ever shed on earth, every war, every battle, every murder, every civil wrong, came from that desire which the devil puts into the souls of men, to hold rule over their fellow mortals. This devilish desire to rule others is directly contrary to the “perfect law of liberty” taught by St. James.