#title Liberty Vol. V. No. 1.
#subtitle Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order
#author Benjamin Tucker
#LISTtitle Liberty Vol. 05. No. 01.
#date August 13, 1887
#source Retrieved on October 11, 2022 from [[http://www.readliberty.org/liberty/5/1][http://www.readliberty.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-10-10T22:51:24
#authors Benjamin Tucker; Victor Yarros; Gertrude B. Kelly; James L. Walker; Sidney H. Morse
#topics Liberty Vol. V.; egoism; morality
#notes Whole No. 105. — Many thanks to www.readliberty.org for the readily-available transcription and to [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/periodicals/liberty-1881-1908/][www.libertarian-labyrinth.org]] for the original scans.
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!
*** The Last Man.
***** [Read at the Subscription Dinner connected with the Scranton Meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers.]
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”
John Hay.
I am the famed New Zealander
*** On Picket Duty.
“John Swinton’s Paper,” after a four years’ struggle for existence and a lavish expenditure of money, has been obliged to suspend publication. One more number will be issued, on August 21, to review its work, and that will be the last. I am very, very sorry.
The poem, “The Last Man,” printed in another column, I found in the New York “Leader,” which published it as a sample of capitalistic doggerel used in the place of argument. It is certainly capital, whether capitalistic or not. I publish it because I consider it a bit of satire as effective as deserved. It should be added, however, that its point could be turned against the capitalists with even greater effect, and that therefore it ill becomes them to use it.
The “Workmen’s Advocate,” the official organ of the Socialistic Labor Party, declares that “in the Socialistic State alcohol will not find a place except for scientific purposes.” On the other hand, Laurence Gronlund, the star philosopher of the Socialistic Labor Party, affirms that the Socialistic State will run saloons,— undoubtedly meaning by saloons places where liquor can be procured as a beverage. In this difference between the doctors we get a foretaste of the circus which life will become when the Socialistic State goes into operation.
One of the most impudent falsehoods which I have met lately is told by Ralph Beaumont, chairman of the national legislative committee of the Knights of Labor, in an article in the official organ, the “Journal of United Labor.” Among the duties entrusted to this committee is that of lobbying at Washington to secure a monopoly of the telegraph system by the government. This project was criticised by the New York “World,” and Beaumont’s article is written in answer to its criticism. In support of government telegraphy he cites the government postal service, and about the latter he makes the following astounding statement:
“There was a time when the United States mail used to be transported by corporations and others, when it used to cost twenty-five cents to carry a letter three hundred miles. The government took hold of it and reduced the charge to twelve cents, then to five, then to three, end now the letter, instead of being carried three hundred miles for twenty-five cents, may be sent three thousand miles for two cents, and, if it is written on an open postal card, for one cent.” Of course this is intended to convey the idea that government reduced the rates of postage which otherwise private enterprise would have kept up. But the truth is just the opposite. Private enterprise compelled the government to reduce rates which the government otherwise would have kept up. The first great reduction from the government’s original rates to five cents was forced upon the government, against its will and after a severe struggle, by the private mail operated by Lysander Spooner. Elaborate and detailed proof of this assertion may be found in the pamphlet, “Who Caused the Reduction of Postage?” advertised among the Spooner pamphlets in another column. Evidently the State Socialists find it necessary to falsify in order to establish the superiority of governmental administration to private enterprise.
In answer to my paragraph in No. 103 E. C. Walker writes in “Lucifer” as follows: “It is to be presumed, judging by the way he argues concerning our case, that, if Mr. Tucker should be arrested on the charge of having sold a man a paper without paying a stamp tax upon it, he would not plead that such act was not illegal, for that would be a plea that it was legal, and he could not make that horrible averment because, forsooth, he is an Anarchist!” A very unwarrantable presumption! If I simply desired to get out of the State’s clutches as speedily and safely as possible, and the plea of legality seemed the easiest way to that end, I should make it. But I should not proclaim or imagine that, in doing so I had established my liberty to sell a paper untaxed, but should hold that, unless I explained at the first opportunity that my action was a makeshift of the moment, I had done what I could to establish the claim that I am not entitled to sell papers except under conditions imposed by the law. And this would be doubly the case if my plea of legality were made in good faith, not as a makeshift, but avowedly as an exemplification of my ideas, and involved a tacit acceptance by me of certain arbitrary privileges and obligations, justified intrinsically by no true principle, but granted to and laid upon all legal newsdealers by the State, including among these privileges and obligations not only those now existing, but whatever new ones the State in its good pleasure might create in relation to that special business. Now, that is exactly what Mr. Walker did in making his plea of legal marriage as a vindication of Anarchism in sexual relations. If he made it in good faith (and he declares that he did), he not only acknowledged statute law as superior to individual liberty, but he entered into a tacit compact with the State to observe all the obligations which it now lays, or may hereafter lay, upon legal husbands. This was the consideration upon the strength of which I accused him of abandoning Anarchistic ground, and this is the consideration which he never discusses in trying to refute my accusation. I hope not to be compelled to devote space again to a repetition of this point.
*** The Science of Society. By Stephen Pearl Andrews.
**** Part Second.
Of whom Macaulay wrote,
And I have cruised around the world
In my own private boat,
A-visiting of London Bridge
And other things remote.
’Twas after I had finished with
The rains of St. Paul’s,
I turned to cross the Atlantic Sea,
In spite of waves and squalls,
To study the traces of vanished races
And see Niagara Falls.
This was the land, you understand,
That once was owned in fee
By folks who worked, and never shirked,
And worshipped Liberty —
A nation that became extinct
In the twentieth century.
From time to time strange rumors came
About their wondrous doom,
Until at last we heard no more;
So I resolved to come
And with mine own eyes see the truth,
And tell the same at home.
I steered my vessel up the Bay,
Once famous, and still fair;
A prostrate statue barred the way
That erst a torch did bear.
Its torch was in the water, and
Its heels were in the air!
I floated slowly up beside
A long deserted pier,
When at the gangway I descried
A sign, as I drew near,
Upon a sign-board old and dried:
“Boycott! No landing here!”
“Boycott!” methought I knew the word;
It was some sort of pest
That in the past, as I had heard,
Went sweeping through the West,
Scaring one half its victims dead,
And starving all the rest.
No matter! Time will disinfect
The most contagious airs;
I put my respirator on,
And washed, and said my prayers,
And, boldly stepping to the pier,
Went up the rotten stairs.
An empty town, whose dreary wastes
At human grandeur scoff!
But stay! an aged figure hastes
With many a wheezy cough,
Waving its lean and withered arms.
And wildly warns me off!
My nerves are strong, yet I confess
It was a grewsome sight,
That visage gaunt, that tattered dress,
That fiercely brandished right,
Holding a can of some strange mess
That looked like dynamite.
“Art thou the sad survivor, then,
Of all thy nation’s fate?
And how didst thou escape it, when
The rest fell desolate?”
“I am,” quoth he (and coughed again),
“The Walking Delegate!
“My duty is to walk about
And see that things stand still;
I snap my fingers — men go out
From road and mine and mill.
At least they did; but now I’ve none
On whom to work my will.
“Gone are the days when tyrants shrank
And trembled at my talk;
The Boycott took them all away;
And now I sadly stalk,
A lonesome Walking Delegate,
With nought to do but walk!
“It was a glorious fight, I ween,
We Knights of Labor won!
We cut the hours of labor down
To eight, six, four, two, none.
Sometimes! wish it had not been
Quite so completely done!
“Our last great strike the continent
O’erspread from side to side;
We had to boycott everything
To gain the point denied;
And just as we were going to win,
All parties up and died!”
“But you survived,” I said: “what power
So safely brought you through?
When no one more did anything.
What could you find to do?
When all support for others failed,
Pray, what supported you?”
Oh, but he grinned a ghastly grin!
“What did I live upon?
Why, I’m a Walking Delegate.
And no mere myrmidon!
Though all the world beside should stop,
My salary goes on!”
Cost the Limit of Price: A Scientific Measure of Honesty in Trade As One of the Fundamental Principles in the Solution of the Social Problem.
Continued from No. 104.
Yet hitherto no one has thought of seriously questioning the principle,— namely, that “Value is the limit of Price,” or, in other words, that it is right to take for a thing what it is worth. It is upon this principle or maximum that all honorable trade professes now to be conducted, until instances arise in which its oppressive operation is so glaring and repugnant to the moral sense of mankind that those who carry it out are denounced as rogues and cheats. In this manner a sort of conventional limit is placed upon the application of a principle which is equally the principle of every swindling transaction, and of what is called legitimate commerce. The discovery has not hitherto been made that the principle itself is essentially vicious, and that in its infinite and all-pervading variety of applications this various principle is the source of the injustice, inequality of condition, and frightful pauperism and wretchedness which characterize the existing state of our so-called civilization. Still less has the discovery been made that there is another simple principle of traffic which, once understood and applied in practice, will effectually rectify all those monstrous evils, and introduce into human society the reign of absolute equity in all property relations, while it will lay the foundations of universal harmony in the social and moral relations as well.
144. II. — Suppose it costs me ten minutes’ labor to concoct a pill which will save your life when nothing else will; and suppose, at the same time, to render the case simple, that the knowledge of the ingredients came to me by accident, without labor or cost. It is clear that your life is worth to you more than your fortune. Am I, then, entitled to demand of you for the nostrum the whole of your property, more or less? Clearly so, if it is right to take for a thing what it is worth, which is theoretically the highest ethics of trade.
145. Forced, on the one hand, by the impossibility, existing in the nature of things, of ascertaining and measuring positive values, or of determining, in other words, what a thing is really worth, and rendered partially conscious by the obvious hardship and injustice of every unusual or extreme application of the principle that it is either no rule or a bad one, and not guided by the knowledge of any true principle out of the labyrinth of conflicting rights into which the false principle conducts, the world has practically abandoned the attempt to combine Equity with Commerce, and lowered its standard of morality to the inverse statement of the formula,— namely that “A thing is worth what it will bring,” or, in other words, that it is fitting and proper to take for a thing when sold whatever can be got for it. This, then, is what is denominated the Market Value of an article, as distinguished from its actual value. Without being more equitable as a measure of price, it certainly has a great practical advantage over the more decent theoretical statement, in the fact that it is possible to ascertain by experiment how much you can force people, through their necessities, to give. The principle, in this form, measures the price by the degree of want on the part of the purchaser,— that is, by the degree of want on the part of the purchaser,— that is, by what he supposes will provide to be the value or benefit to him of the commodity purchased, in comparison with that of the one with which he parts in the transaction. Hence it becomes immediately and continually the interest of the seller to place the purchaser in a condition of as much want as possible, to “corner” him, as the phrase is in Wall Street, and force him to buy at the dearest rate. If he is unable to increase his actual necessity, the resorts to every means of creating an imaginary want by false praises bestowed upon the qualities and uses of his goods. Hence the usages of forestalling the market, of confusing the public knowledge of Supply and Demand, of advertising and puffing worthless commodities, and the like, which constitute the existing commercial system,— a system which in our age, is ripening into putrefaction, and coming to offend the nostrils of good taste no less than the innate sense of right, which, dreadfully vitiating as it is, has failed wholly to extinguish.
146. The Value Principle in this form, as in the other, is therefore felt, without being distinctly understood, to be essentially diabolical, and hence it undergoes again a kind of sentimental modification wherever the sentiment for honesty is most potent. This last and highest expression of the doctrine of honesty, as now known in the world, may be stated in the form of the hortatory precept, “Don’t be too bad,” or “Don’t gouge too deep.” No Political Economist, Financier, Moralist or Religionist has any more definite standard of right in commercial transactions than that. It is not too much to affirm that neither Political Economist, Financier, Moralist, nor Religionist knows at this day, nor ever has known, what it is to be honest. The religious teacher, who exhorts his hearers from Sabbath to Sabbath to be fair in their dealings with each other and with the outside world, does not know, and could not for his life tell, how much he is, in fair dealing or equity, bound to pay his washerwoman or his housekeeper for any service whatever which they may render. The sentiment of honesty exists, but the science of honesty is wanting. The sentiment is first in order. The science must be an outgrowth, a consequential development, of the sentiment. The precepts of Christian Morality deal properly with that which is the soul of the other, leaving to intellectual investigation the discovery of its scientific complement.
147. It follows from what has been said that the Value Principle is the commercial embodiment of the essential element of conquest and war,— war transferred from the battlefield to the counter,— none the less opposed, however, to the spirit of Christian Morality or the sentiment of human brotherhood. In bodily conflict the physically strong conquer and subject the physically weak. In the conflict of trade the intellectually astute and powerful conquer and subject those who are intellectually feeble, or whose intellectual development is not of the precise kind to fit them for the conflict of wits in the matter of trade. With the progress of civilization and development we have ceased to think that superior physical strength gives the right of conquest and subjugation. We have graduated, in idea, out of the period of physical dominion. We remain, however, as yet in the period of intellectual conquest or plunder. It has not been questioned hitherto, as a general proposition, that the man who has superior intellectual endowments to others has a right resulting therefrom to profit thereby at the cost of others. In the extreme applications of the admission only is the conclusion ever denied. In the whole field of what are denominated the legitimate operations of trade there is no other law recognized than the relative “smartness” or shrewdness of the parties, modified at most by the sentimental precept stated above.
148. The intrinsic wrongfulness of the principal axioms and practice of existing commerce will appear to every reflecting mind from the preceding analysis. It will be proper, however, before dismissing the consideration of the Value Principle, to trace out a little more in detail some of its specific results.
The principle itself being essentially iniquitous, all the fruits of the principle are necessarily pernicious.
149. I. — It renders falsehood and hypocrisy a necessary concomitant of trade. Where the object is to by cheap and sell dear, the parties find their interest in mutual deception. It is taught, in theory, that “honesty is the best policy,” in the long run, but in practice the merchant discovers speedily that he must starve if he acts upon the precept — in the short run. Honesty — even as much honesty as can be arrived at — is not the best policy under the present unscientific system of commerce, if by the best policy is meant that which tends to success in business. Professional merchants know the fact well, and conscientious merchants deplore it; but they see no remedy. The theory of trade taught to innocent youths in the retired family, or the Sunday school, would ruin any clerk, if adhered to behind the counter, in a fortnight. Hence it is uniformly abandoned and a new system of morality acquired the moment a practical application is to be made of the instruction. A frank disclosure, by the merchant, of all the secret advantages in his possession would destroy his reputation for sagacity as effectually as it would that of the gambler among this associates. Both commerce and gambling, as professions, are systems of strategy. It is the business of both parties to a trade to overreach each other,— a fact which finds its unblushing announcement in the maxim of the Common Law, Caveat emptor (let the purchaser take care).
150. II. — It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer. Trade being, under this system, the intellectual correspondence to the occupation of the cut-throat or conqueror under the reign of physical force, the stronger consequently accumulating more than his share at the cost of the destruction of the weaker,— the consequence of the principle is that the occupation of trade, for those who possess intellectual superiority, with other favorable conditions, enables them to accumulate more than their share of wealth, while it reduces those whose intellectual development — of the precise kind requisite for this species of contest — and whose material conditions are less favorable, to wretchedness and poverty.
151. III. — It creates trade for trade’s sake, and augments the number of non-producers, whose support is chargeable upon Labor. As trade, under the operation of this principle, offers the temptation of illicit gains and rapid wealth at the expense of others, it creates trade where there is no necessity for trade,— not as a beneficent interchange of commodities between producers and consumers, but as a means of speculation. Hence thousands are withdrawn from actual production and thrust unnecessarily into the business of exchanging, mutually devouring each other by competition, and drawing their subsistence and their wealth from the producing classes, without rendering any equivalent service. Hence the interminable range of intermediates between the producer and consumer, the total defeat of organization and economy in the distribution of products, and the intolerable burden of the unproductive classes upon labor, together with a host of the frightful results of pauperism and crime.
152. IV. — It degrades the dignity of labor. Inasmuch as trade, under the operation of this principle, is more profitable or at any rate is liable to be, promises to be, and in a portion of cases is more profitable than productive labor, it follows that the road to wealth and social distinction lies in that direction. Hence “Commerce is King.” Hence, again, productive labor is depreciated and condemned. It holds the same relation to commerce in this age — under the reign of intellectual superiority — that commerce itself held a few generations since — under the reign of physical force — to military achievement, personal or hereditary. Thus the degradation of labor, and all the innumerable evils which follow in its train, in our existing civilization, find their efficient cause in this same false principle of exchanging products. The next stage of progress will be the inauguration of Equity,— equality in the results of every species of industry according to burdens and the consequent accession of labor to the highest rank of human estimation. Commerce will then sink to a mere brokerage, paid, like any other species of labor, according to its repugnance, as the army is now sinking to a mere police force. It will be reduced to the simplest and most direct methods of exchange, and made to be the merest servant of production, which will come, in its turn, to be regarded as conferring the only true patents of nobility.
153. V. — It prevents the possibility of a scientific Adjustment of Supply to Demand. It has been already shown that speculation is the cause why there has never been, and cannot now be, any scientific Adaptation of Supply to Demand. (35, 36.) It has also been partially shown, at various points, that speculation, or trading in chances and fluctuations in the market, has its root in the Value Principle, and that the Cost Principle extinguishes speculation. It will be proper, however, in this connection to define exactly the limits of speculation, and to point out more specifically how the Value Principle creates it, and how the Cost Principle extinguishes it.
154. By speculation is meant, in the ordinary language of trade, risky and unusual enterprises entered upon for the sake of more than ordinary profits, and in that sense there is attached to it, among merchants, a slight shade of imputation of dishonesty or disreputable conduct. As we are seeking now, however, to employ language in an exact and scientific way, we must find a more precise definition of the term. The line between ordinary and more than ordinary profits is too vague for a scientific treatise. At one extremity of the long succession of chance-dealing and advantage-taking transactions stands gambling, which is denounced by the common verdict of mankind as merely a more specious form of robbery. It holds the same relation to robbery itself that dueling holds to murder. Where is the other end of succession? At what point does a man begin to take an undue advantage of his fellow-man in a commercial transaction? It clearly appears, from all that has been shown, that he does so from the moment that he receives from him more than an exact equivalent of cost. But it is the constant endeavor of every trader, upon any other than the Cost Principle, to do that. The business of the merchant is profit-making. Profit signifies, etymologically, something made over and above,— that is, something beyond an equivalent, or, in its simplest expression, something for nothing.
155. It is clear, then, that there is no difference between profit-making in its mildest form, speculation in its opprobrious sense as the middle term, and gambling as the ultimate, except in degree. There is simply the bad gradation of rank which there is between the slaveholder, the driver on the slave plantation, and the slave dealer, or between the man of pleasure, the harlot, and the pimp.
156. The philanthropy of the age is moving heaven and earth to the overthrow of the institution of slavery. But slavery has no scientific definition. It is thought to consist in the feature of chattelism, but an ingenious lawyer would run his pen through every statute upon slavery in existence, and expunge that fiction of the law, and yet leave slavery, for all practical purposes, precisely what it is now. It needs only to appropriate the services of the man by operation of law, instead of the man himself. The only distinction, then, left between his condition and that of the laborer who is robbed by the operation of a false commercial principle would be in the fact of the oppression being more tangible and undisguisedly degrading to his manhood.
157. If, in any transaction, I get from you some portion of your earnings without an equivalent, I begin to make you my slave,— to confiscate you in my uses; if I get a larger portion of your services without an equivalent, I make you still further my slave; and, finally, I obtain the whole of your services without an equivalent,— except the means of keeping you in working condition for my sake,— I make you completely my slave. Slavery is merely one development of a general system of human oppression, for which we have no comprehensive term in English, but which the French Socialists denominate exploitation,— the abstraction, directly or indirectly, from the working classes of the fruits of their labor. In the case of the slave the instrument of that abstraction is force and legal enactment. In the case of the laborer, generally, it is speculation in the large sense, or profit-making. The slaveholder will be found, therefore, upon a scientific analysis, to hold the same relation to the trader, which the freebooter holds to the blackleg. It is a question of taste which to admire most, the dare-devil boldness of the one, or the oily and intriguing propensities and performances of the other.
158. But, you exclaim, why should I sell at cost? How am I to live as a merchant without profits? Never you mind. That is not the question now up. Perhaps the world has no particular use for you as a merchant. We will take care of all that by and by. Just now all that we are doing is to settle the nature of certain principles. We shall want some merchants after all, and will pay them just what they are equitably entitled to. Do you want more? I shall now be understood when I say that the Cost Principle is merely the mutual abandonment, on all hands, of every species of Profit-Making,— each contenting himself with simple Equivalents of Cost in every exchange. It will be perceived, too, that the term speculation is used as synonymous with profit-making, when it is affirmed that that has hitherto defeated the Adaptation of Supply to Demand. With the cessation of profit-making there is no longer any temptation to conceal from each other any species of knowledge bearing upon that subject. At that point gazetteers, catalogs, and statistical publications of all sorts spring into existence, giving exact information upon every point connected with the demand and supply of labor and commodities and the production and distribution of wealth.
159. VI. — The Value Principle renders Competition destructive and desperate. The general subject of Competition will be more fully considered under another head. (202.) The consequence here stated follows in part as a necessary result of the preceding one, the want of Adaptation of Supply to Demand, and in part from the robbery of labor by the system now in operation. In the existing state of things there is an apparent surplus of both commodities and laborers, and the result is that men and women who are able to work, and willing to work, are not able to find employment. Hence, to be thrown out of occupation by competition is a frightful calamity, always implying distress, frequently destitution and wretchedness, and sometimes absolute starvation, while the fear of such a catastrophe is a demon which haunts continually the imagination of the workingman, afflicting him with a misery hardly less real than the occurrence of the calamity itself. It is the tendency and direct effect of competition to throw out the inferior workman from every occupation, and to supply his place by the superior workman in that particular branch of industry. This tendency, direful as its consequences are in the existing state of things, is nevertheless a right tendency, and society ought to be organized upon such principles that it should have full pay — to an extent far beyond what it now has — with no other than beneficent results to all. It is perfectly right that the inferior workman should be thrown out of any employment to make room for the superior workman in that employment. To retain the inferior workman in any occupation, while there is in the whole world a superior workman for that occupation, who can do the same work at less cost, and therefore upon the Cost Principle at a less price, is bad economy of means,— as base as it is to employ an inferior machine or process after a superior machine or process has been discovered,— and any system or set of relations which works out bad results from such appropriate substitution of the superior for the inferior instrument must be itself essentially bad.
To be continued.
*** Ireland!
By Georges Sauton.
***** Translated from the French for Liberty by Sarah E. Holmes.
Continued from No. 104.
He interrupted his warm caresses only for demonstrations and to entreat her to return to life, which, in accordance with the wishes expressed by her, he would make sweet for her, reverential in the future of earthly pleasures filled with all the felicities of starry and seraphic dreams.
“Quite sure!” murmured the palpitating woman, as she revived, questioning him with her looks, which sparkled like the first stars of the evening.
And to prove to her the need of his promises, on his knees, wandering, embellishing with variations the old eternal expressions of love, he imposed a check on the increasing impetuosity of his ardor, he purchased, with a timid suitor’s courtship, the signs of favor which usually, without such long preambles, he took by assault cavalierly.
But their sham prudence, their hypocritical pretence of reserve, did not last long, and soon, electrified by the furtive touching of their cheeks, inflamed by the mingling of their breath and the meeting of their incandescent glances, they yielded entirely to their passionate desires.
For a fortnight after this violent reconciliation, their criminal love was perpetuated in a possession disturbed by no person and no event, but rather favored both by persons and by things.
Newington, summoned to the other end of the county with the troops for urgent operations, had left, refusing Bradwell the honor of accompanying him. He punished him thus for his scandalous conduct on the battle-field; and, if “the friend of Miss Marian” escaped a court-martial, Richard owed it to the implacability displayed by him at last, which atoned for his moment of sentimental aberration.
A fortnight followed of damnable delights, spiced, refined, extravagant, during which the thought of the Irish girl haunted Richard’s mind only at infinitely short and inappreciable intervals, in the fleeting shape of an effaced image, except once, when it was impressed upon him more distinctly, almost tangibly.
In view of the castle windows a convoy of emaciated prisoners, bent with fatigue and inanition, filed between ranks of soldiers; and Bradwell, who was roaming about the apartment in a frightfully enervated condition, gaping at the red rays of the setting sun, while Lady Ellen was dressing for dinner,— Bradwell, whose mind, broken like his body, moved in a sad, slow, and yet wandering way, thought he saw Treor’s granddaughter in the group which the guards were maltreating.
He restrained an exclamation of pity which would have been caught by the Duchess, who had noiselessly entered the room and advanced close to him without his perceiving the rustle of her dress. She had planned a surprise for her lover, to excite his admiration. He stared at her, and then broke out into applause and praise and thanks. She presented a divinely adorable appearance in a Louis XV. costume incomparably coquettish in style and cut outrageously low in the neck, and her satin skin was shown with great effect by numerous artificial marks placed upon her neck and face. She looked younger by ten years.
With her half-closed eyelids, accented with a pencil stroke, with her carmine, half-open, provoking lips, with her rows of teeth parting in a smile pointed like a rose-bud by the vermilion tip of her tongue, which lay like a serpent under roses, the irresistible Duchess eclipsed without difficulty the mournful and gloomy face of the prisoner marching below, bent like an octogenarian, and who, Richard convinced himself, gave simply an impression of Marian, but was not she, or anyone really resembling her.
And Lady Ellen kept daily in store for him these superb surprises, renewing herself by ingenious incarnations,— today a gallant Marquise Pompadour; yesterday a mystical silhouette caught sight of in the depths of a cloister, a Gothic figure taken from a window, an innocent lady of the ages of chivalry who delighted in the tales of the troubadours; tomorrow the formal face of the court of Elizabeth, with the stiff waist, and the form imprisoned in heavy and close folds, and perhaps in the same day the lively manola of the Prado, at ease in her loose-fitting bodice, a pomegranate or jasmine blossom in her hair, and a cigarette between her laughing lips.
Thus bewitched, if by chance,— a circumstance more and more rare,— at the suggestion of a fact or a word, the image of Marian outlined itself, a shadow hardly seizable by Bradwell but partially awakened from his dream, annoyed and disturbed, he straightway drove away the troublesome apparition, running, in case it persisted, to take refuge, like a frightened victim of hallucination, a cowardly deserter of the heart, in the atmosphere, in the lap, in the always open and always hospitable arms of the Duchess!
There he would forget both the abandoned girl and the Duke, though reminders of the latter nevertheless arose everywhere, in the high official portraits ornamenting the halls, in the title of Duchess with which Lady Ellen was daily saluted before him and which he himself gave to his mistress when he spoke of her to others.
Thus he lay, languishing and enervated, in the continuous moral torpor of drinkers who have plunged into a succession of intoxications, awaking suddenly only at the news that Sir Newington would return within a week. The forces of the rebels having been annihilated in the country under his orders, the Duke was returning to take up his winter quarters at Cumslen-Park, where he would reside without leaving again unless called away by new and unforeseen events.
Infatuated with his easy exploits, having had to subjugate only weak and demoralized bodies of men, he was looking forward to celebrating his laurels by the resumption of festivities, and especially to receiving from Lady Ellen “the crown to which he most aspired,” the highest reward which he coveted,— the marks of her wifely affection.
In his correspondence, entirely explicit on this point, he insisted on it from one end to the other with the heavy grace which characterized him, and, probably writing after drinking, in the fumes of the liquor which flowed at the triumphal banquets, he formulated his desires without disguise, without dissimulation, and with an uncouthness, assurance, and impropriety of expression which revolutionized Richard, stirred his gall, and poisoned his blood with a murderous rancor.
Returning the abhorred letter which Ellen had handed him to read, quivering under the outrage, really sickened in a sincere rebellion of his whole being, he showed a face so wild, which betrayed such a resentment of his rival in the past, such a hatred of him for the pretensions which he uttered concerning the future, that the Duchess, precipitating herself, blushing, on his breast, swore to him that never should the boor, the clumsy and brutal soldier, touch her, or even repeat to her in his moments of lust one of the infamous phrases there written!
No, he should breathe the subtle perfume of her hair only while imprinting a paternal kiss on her forehead, and he should be permitted no other liberty, she affirmed, than a commonplace kiss on her gloved hand.
But Richard considered even this embrace, this touch of the lips, as an invasion of his rights, and his jealousy was exasperated when his father, the moment of his arrival, paid ardent court to Ellen, twenty times more gallant than on his departure, put in a mood for conquest by his association with victory, over-excited by the superb and brilliant beauty of the Duchess, who was more charming and seductive than ever.
The neighbors of the castle were present at a military dinner given the same evening, at which, with animation, bluster, and swagger, they emptied as many bumpers as they had won victories over the enemy, whose forces consisted of a few small detachments remaining in the country and which they crushed, being ten or twenty to the enemy’s one. They proposed as many noisy toasts as each of these gilded officers ascribed to his comrade, in order that the comrade might recognize in turn an equal number to his credit, and the whole laced, bedizened company, clucking their war stories, showing off pompously, bursting with vain-glory, showed in regard to Sir Bradwell such an indifference, rendered more noticeable by the praises with which they overwhelmed Newington, that Richard, seized ten times with the sudden temptation to quarrel, restraining himself on account of the Duchess, who enjoined him to be calm, withdrew, after the repast, into the solitude of a disused hall, where he could, however, watch the Duke, following the play of his features as he talked with Lady Ellen.
Twenty times more he was about to rush forward to disturb their interview, because, in his view, Ellen did not close it soon enough, but rather endured it without the impatience which he supposed her to feel, or even, one would have said, with some satisfaction.
But suddenly her attitude became reserved instead of gracious, and she held herself upon her dignity, while the Duke, on the contrary, became more and more inflamed, as, looking out from under his bushy contracting eyebrows, he darted lustful glances at his wife, of which Ellen appeared brutally heedless.
Clenching his fists, Richard marched directly towards the group, reddening, the blood humming in his head, congested, and staggering, his legs as weak as a drunken man’s.
Although her back was towards him, the Duchess heard him coming, and to avoid the irreparable scandal of an inevitable scene between father and son, prompt, smiling, she turned directly round, and, leaning on the arm of her lover, led him into another room, leaving the Duke stupefied at this desertion, and appeasing Richard with these whispered words:
“You consent to his disappearance, do you not?”
“Yes!” said Bradwell, shuddering; and at that moment he would doubtless have killed the Duke with his own hand.
After some minutes, leaving Richard, whom she sent to his apartments, promising to join him there, the Duchess returned to Sir Newington, and, by a clever and plausible falsehood, similarly calmed the irritation excited in him and which was turning to suspicion.
“Thank me,” she said; “I do not know on the strength of what rumors Richard imagines that you have caused the execution of the troublesome Marian, with her sad heart, and he was hastening straight to you to heap the most virulent reproaches on you. I had been watching him for a moment.”
“That was the explanation, then,” interrupted the Duke joyfully, “of your sudden change toward me; the reason why, from being charming and delightful with me, you suddenly became more than cold, icy?”
“Frozen with fear, with apprehension of some deplorable affront, and of terror lest it should carry him to excess.”
“Oh! nonsense!”
“What will check madmen in their folly?”
“You believe that he would not have respected in me his commander and his father in one?”
“I tell you that his madness is extreme. During your absence, on several occasions, he wanted to kill himself. I have taken from his hands the dagger with which Treor’s granddaughter, as they have told you, tried to strike him on the battle-field.”
“Perhaps you did wrong! I do not speak of the danger to which, according to you, his mental derangement exposes me; but I would rather see him dead than dishonored by this imbecile and guilty passion which is a defection, a desertion to the enemy.”
“Oh! Duke, is it a father who speaks?”
“It is the indignant commander.”
“Whose rigor would warrant the rebellion and the ingratitude of the son and the subordinate, if he heard you.”
Bradwell returned a second before, devoured by irresistible jealousy, and had been listening at a distance, in the shadow of the tapestries; and Lady Ellen, who was aware of it, insisted at length on Sir Newington’s disposition in regard to his son.
She compared him to the Romans, capable of ordering themselves to inflict the punishment of Brutus on their own child for lack of discipline; and the proud and hard Englishman, flattered by the comparison, bristled up and confessed that he so comprehended his duty as the leader of the army.
“Oh! You fill me with horror!” protested the Duchess, energetically, inwardly applauding herself for her manoeuvre and for the avowal she had drawn out, which would intensify the virile resolution of Bradwell if he, perchance, was weakening and allowing himself to be moved by timid and foolish prejudices concerning family and a father’s sacred character, whatever it may be!
But in vain she awaited the wrath which, at the same time, she tried to provoke in order to free herself from the gallantries of the soldier, whose desire was increased, on the contrary, by her generous anger, which set her off and rendered her superb, and she could not get away from him.
By good fortune, in an adjoining hall, where they were serving drinks of all kinds to the guests, growing more and more thirsty, loud and noisy calls arose for the Duke to join in new toasts, and all tongues, growing more free in speech, although physically more tied, soon decreed that Sir Newington belonged, for this night, to his companions in arms, for a last bout with the bottles, and, willy-nilly, joining with the others in this drunkards’ task, priding himself on his work, ridiculously vain of this vile business, the general, surpassing his lieutenants, swallowed such quantities of liquor that at last, having put his guests under the table where they were snoring like cocks, he ended by rolling into the heap himself, completely drunk.
When he awoke, his body benumbed with cold, his temples on fire, in broad daylight, licked by his little Myrrha who, according to her habit on such occasions, refreshed his face, the first idea in his stony brain was to resume the conversation with the Duchess interrupted the previous evening, and still hiccoughing, gaping wide enough to dislocate his jaws, his eyes ridiculously swollen and not at all seductive, his palate so clammy that the words adhered to it, his beard stiff and his hair bushy, he started for Lady Ellen’s apartments.
But as he stopped on the way in front of a sideboard, to pour a tumblerful of water to cool the heat of his throat, an outburst of laughter and the railleries of a sprightly voice saluted him.
Fresh and blooming as the month of May, in a periwinkle toilet, the Duchess, in the act of polishing her nails, was watching him with a sly and rebellious look, her eyes gleaming with a mischievous roguery which made her seem ten years younger.
Ah! the man smitten desperately, she had the air of saying, and who drowns in his cups his reason and his forces, who slides under the table when he might be gliding into a perfumed bed, and who now, with a tormenting headache, a brain empty and heavy as lead, and eyelids weighed down by an urgent need of sleep, must think of nothing but sleeping till the next day in his silent and dark chamber, steadily and dreamlessly!
A night and a day lost at sixty years, and when he felt disposed! what a waste, what lamentable prodigality! And perhaps even tomorrow would be spent in restoring the energies consumed by this night of orgies! What imprudence! especially with a creature as fantastic and as changeable as the diabolical Duchess Ellen! Yesterday she could receive the homage of Sir Newington, seduced by his prestige as a conqueror, caught with the fumes of his glory. Woman often changes; the occasion of this good-will might never be found again; but in its place whims without number which would disappoint the Duke!
See!
The mimicry, discreet as it was, and finely but so expressively shaded, distressed completely the poor Duke, entirely discomfited, whose piteous face presented such a comical aspect that under any other circumstances Lady Ellen, not at all charitable in temperament and willingly following her caprices at her husband’s expense, would have broken out into a wild, imperious laugh.
But she repressed it, reflecting that, to secure her ends, she must inflame him and fill him with desire.
She had planned everything to perpetrate the crime approved by Richard, and in a fold of the ample sleeve in which played her beautiful bare arm lay Marian’s dagger, while from Treor’s casemate had been coming, for some hours, to serve her projects, the sounds of the old man’s violin, by turns melancholy, plaintive, passionate, furious, and fantastic.
For some days the previously quiet cell of the prisoner, whom they held as hostage in case of the return of fortune to the Irish, had been filled with music as soon as daylight appeared; and sometimes even during the night the strains were heard, but more softly, as if the fear of disturbing those asleep had muffled the voice of the instrument, lightening the bow in the old man’s fingers.
To be continued.
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“In abolishing rent and interest, the last vestiges of old-time slavery, the Revolution abolishes at one stroke the sword of the executioner, the seal of the magistrate, the club of the policeman, the gunge of the exciseman, the erasing-knife of the department clerk, all those insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel.” — Proudhon.
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☞ The appearance in the editorial column of articles over other signatures than the editor’s initial indicates that the editor approves their central purpose and general tenor, though he does not hold himself responsible for every phrase or word. But the appearance in other parts of the paper of articles by the same or other writers by no means indicates that he disapproves them in any respect, such disposition of them being governed largely by motives of convenience.
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*** The Spooner Publication Fund.
Previously acknowledged . . . . $35.50
James Thierry . . . . . . 2.00
L. Ashleigh . . . . . . 2.50
Total . . . . . . $40.00
*** A Spirit More Evil Than Alcohol.
The authority of learning, the tyranny of science, which Bakounine foresaw, deprecated, and denounced, never found blunter expression than in an article by T. B. Wakeman in the August number of the “Freethinkers’ Magazine,” in which the writer endeavors to prove, on scientific grounds alone, that alcohol is an unmitigated evil, a poison that ought never to be taken into the human system. My knowledge of chemistry and physiology is too limited to enable me to judge of the scientific soundness of the attempted demonstration; but I do know that it is admirably well written, wonderfully attractive, powerfully plausible, important if true, and therefore worthy of answer by those who alone are competent to answer it if it can be answered. Such an answer I hope to see; and, if it arrives, I shall weigh it against Mr. Wakeman’s argument, award a verdict for myself, and act upon it for myself,— if I am allowed to do so.
But it is plain that, if Mr. Wakeman’s party gets into power, no such privilege will be granted me. For, after having asserted most positively that this “verdict of science” can be made so manifest that it will become “a personal prohibition law, which no person in his senses would violate any more than he would cut his own throat,” in which case its compulsory enforcement will be entirely unnecessary except upon persons out of their senses, Mr. Wakeman goes on to say that it is the duty of the lawyers (of whom he is one) to see to it that the manufacture, sale, and use of alcohol as a beverage shall be outlawed, proscribed, and prohibited just as arsenic is, and that, like arsenic, it shall be sold only as a labeled poison. Rather a summary way, it seems to me, of cramming science down the throats of people who like a glass of claret better! “Ah!” some reader will say, “you forget that this compulsory abstinence is only to be enforced upon people out of their senses, probably hopeless sots who are a public danger.”
This consideration possibly would afford a grain of consolation, had not Mr. Wakeman taken pains in another paragraph to leave no one in doubt as to the meaning of the phrase “in his senses.” It is not applicable, he declares, to any drinker of alcohol who claims to “know when he has enough,” for “that very remark shows that alcohol has already stolen away his brains.” His position, then, is that the law of total abstinence will enforce itself upon all men in their senses, for no man in his senses will drink alcohol after hearing the verdict of science; but that men who drink alcohol, however moderately, are out of their senses, and must be “treated, by force if necessary, as diseased lunatics.”
Was any priest, any pope, any czar ever guilty of teaching a more fanatical, more bigoted, more tyrannical doctrine?
Does Mr. Wakeman imagine that he can restore men to their senses by any such disregard of their individualities?
Does he think that the way to strengthen the individuals reason and will is to force them into disuse by substituting for them the reason and will of a body of savants?
In that case I commend him to the words of Bakounine: “A society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending,— such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of these missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.”
The mightiest foe of the human mind is not alcohol, by any means. It is that spirit of arrogance which prompts the conclusion of Mr. Wakeman’s essay, and which, if encouraged, would induce a mental paralysis far more universal and far more hopeless than any that science will ever be able to trace to the spirit of alcohol.
I swear before God and before men, upon the Gospel and the constitution. — Probleme Sociale, p. 259.
He who by poverty has been led to steal and is punished remains forever the enemy of God and man. — Contradictions, I, p. 313.
God is stupidity and cowardice, hypocrisy and lies, tyranny and wretchedness; God is eviL. — Ibid., p. 360.
Charity! I deny charity; it is mysticism. Vainly you sneak to me of fraternity and love. If you love me, it is through interest. Devotion! I deny devotion; it is mysticism. Speak to me of debit and credit. If I am drawn to aid you, I will do so gracefully, but I will not be obliged to. — Ibid., p. 228.
Humanism is most thorough theisM. — Ibid., p, 369.
The New Philosophy, subverting method, breaking the authority of God as well as that of man, and accepting no other yoke than that of fact and evidence, makes everything converge toward the theological hypothesis as toward the last of its problems. Humanitarian atheism is, therefore, the last term of the moral and intellectual enfranchisement of man; consequently, the last phase of philosophy, serving as a passage to the reconstruction or verification of all the demolished dogmas. — Ibid., p. 22.
Philosophy is merely a deceptive method consisting in going from the general to the particular. — De l’Ordre, p. 58.
I am in need of the hypothesis of God to justify my style. — Contradictions, I, p. 25.
A headless society, so to speak, cannot live. — Creation de l’Ordre, p. 485.
[The preceding statement was attacked by Stirner.]
But let us not blaspheme royalty, for to do so would be blaspheming humanity. — Ibid., p. 311.
Wherever religion appears, it is by no means as an organizing principle, but as a means of subjugating men’s wills. — De l’Ordre, p. 17.
Respect for contracts, fidelity to one’s word, the obligation of oaths, are the fictions — the ossicles, as the famed Lysander well said — with which society deceives the strong and puts them under the yoke. — Contradictions, I, p. 263.
Instead of regarding the man and his fellow, the prince and the citizen, as two terms the relation of which existed independently of consciousness and constituted the real moral law, they have imagined that this law preexisted. — De l’Ordre, p. 69.
Morality is not a science: it is an encyclopaedia. . . For, as two forces, being united, produce a complex effect quite different from the simple effect to which each one of them could give rise, and incommensurable with this, as from the combination of two simple bodies there results a composite the properties of which were not found in either of the originals. . . .
Now, just as the decisions of reason in man received the name of idea, just so the decisions of his liberty received the name of volition, sentiments, habits, morals. Then language, figurative in its nature, continuing to supply the elements of the primary psychology, people have contracted a habit of assigning to ideas, as a place or capacity where they dwell, the intelligence; and to volitions, sentiments, etc., the consciousness. All these abstractions have for a long time been taken by the philosophers for realities, their psychology being merely a will o’ the wisp. — Contradictions.
To be a member of a democracy it is necessary in law, independently of the quality of frankness, to have made choice of the liberal system. . . . As a variety of the liberal regime, I have distinguished Anarchy, or government of each one for himself. . . . It consists in the fact that, political functions being reduced to industrial functions, social order would result from the sole fact of business and exchanges. Then every one would be able to term himself the autocrat of himself, which is the furthest opposite of monarchical absolutisM. — Du Principe Federatif, p. 16.
To found the society it is necessary to set forth, not simply an idea, but a judicial act. — Ibid., p. 53.
There are three modes of conceiving law, according to the point of view. . . . as a believer, as a philosopher, and as a citizen. 1, Command; 2, Expression of the relation of things; 3, The arbitral statute of the human will; theory of contract. The social system to which they give rise is not the same. By the first, man declares himself subject of the law and its author or representative; by the second, he acknowledges himself an integral part of a vast organism; by the third, he makes the law his own and frees himself from all authority, fatality, and rulership. The first formula is that of the religious man; the second that of the pantheist; the third that of the republican [Anarchist]. This one alone is compatible with liberty. — Ibid, p. 53.
The social contract extends only to exchanges. — Idee Generate, p. 118.
They have agreed among themselves mutually to keep faith and right; that is to say, to respect the rules of business which the nature of things indicates to them as alone capable of insuring them in the largest measure of welfare, safety, and peace. Will you adhere to their compact? become a part of their society? If you refuse, you are a part of the society of savages. Nothing protects you. . . . If you swear to the compact, you become a part of the society of free men. — Ibid., p. 312.
Here I close, trusting that economists will especially note the extract beginning “Morality is not a science.”
Man only knows, the worse for him! for why
Are we Anarchists, whose proud boast has been that we are in the van of human progress, to discard all the truths which the latter half of the century has firmly established, to leave Spencer and Clifford and George Eliot and Morley, and fall back into the acceptance of the crude half-truths perceived by the men of the last century and transported by Stirner and others of his kind into this? Men of the eighteenth century, forgive me; we are going to surpass you in crudity; we are going to decide each question as it comes up,— not as you would have decided it, in favor of what you considered the “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” — no, we shall always decide in favor of our happiness; — our happiness, did I say? — there is no our, no one but me. I am the only one. All the rest of you are only puppets for me to use as best I can. Truth and justice and liberty are spooks, and all are ghost-ridden who believe in such things, and who would regulate their lives in accordance with such beliefs.
O Liberty, what are you being published for, for what is the Proudhon Library and the Spooner Library and all the other libraries, but to aid in the propagation of the belief in spooks? You dare not in the face of your life and work openly champion Tak Kak, to whose views you in private say you give full adherence. In the face of your scathing denunciations of the “fire-bugs,” the time-servers, the politicians, and the cork-screws, the advocate of the plumb-line dare not deny that there is a plumb-line.
Leaving you to your conscience, for I am sure that you have one, inherited from past generations of social beings, I have few words to say to your adherents in this controversy. Though I do not deny any man’s right to write under another name than his own, still, in general, the cause of honesty and consistency is best served by having a writer responsible for all that he writes. I wish that I could bring before the readers of Liberty by means of the “deadly parallel column” the statements made by Tak Kak as Tak Kak, and those made by him under his own name. Your readers would be forced to conclude either that he is thoroughly dishonest, or that he is utterly silly, us it would be impossible for an honest, intelligent man to hold two such opposite sets of opinions at the same time.
It is a fact observed for a long time that not the founders, but the disciples, of a creed show up its absurdities in the most glaring way. The zeal which the disciples display in carrying out the master’s ideas, thus bringing them to their logical conclusion, their endeavor to bring their lives into accord with them, will, if the creed contains absurdities, inevitably bring them to light. It would be highly amusing, were the subject not such a serious one, to see our poor little friend Yarros, the disciple, try to make the ideas of Tak and Tucker, the masters, accord with his mode of living and thinking. The ideas on egoism which you and Tak Kak profess to hold really form so small a part of you that you never feel compelled to bring them into consistency with your other views or with your way of living. But with Yarros it is different, he is young and enthusiastic, and must make these new ideas conform to his old ones, or the old ones conform to them. Unfortunately, the latter is what he has chosen to do, and the first signs of his moral degradation have already appeared in his letter on “Sentimentalism at the Spooner Meeting,” in which he states that the cause of our admiration for Lysander Spooner is that “we entertain a hope to live and enjoy its blessings” [of the age of reason] which he worked to bring about. The inference is that, if we do not expect to live and enjoy it, there is no reason why we should honor Spooner. O egoism, carried to sublime heights! But where did Spooner’s egoism come in? In,— as you quoted,— “obeying the voice at eve obeyed at prime,” in subjection to “spooks,” When Mr. Yarros becomes older and wiser, I dilute he will not be inclined to speak so disparagingly of the religious idea as he now is. The religious idea, as apart from the special dogma or church in which it was for the time being clothed, always represented man’s highest ideal, and as such is worthy of our respect. In this sense, Anarchism is a religion to us, and then is nothing improper in speaking of it as such. We are not separated by a great gulf from our ancestors. They placed their ideals in the skies; we have simply removed them to the earth, where there is more chance of their being realized.
It is not in any light spirit, but with all the earnestness of which I am capable, that I would warn Mr. Yarros that he has entered upon a very dangerous downward path, and that the sooner he leaves it, the better and easier will it be. There may come a time, distant as it now seems, when it will be impossible for him to retrace his steps. He has but to keep repeating to himself such sentences as those on Lysander Spooner, to keep before his mind his own happiness as the goal always to be reached, in order that very soon his devotion to liberty shall seem a very ridiculous thing in his eyes.
Deplorable as is the spectacle afforded us by Mr. Yarros, it is as nothing compared with that which a true disciple of Tak Kak would present. Mr. Yarros, deny it as he may, has still some “spooks,” such as liberty and equity, to which he is attached, but a true disciple would have none, and those of Liberty’s readers who would wish to meet him face to face need only go to Gorge Eliot, who has well pictured him in Tito Molema, or still better go to Diderot, who has drawn him in all his ghastly hideousness in “Rameau’s Nephew.”
Far removed as I am in ideas of what constitutes justice and truth from such men as Dr. McGlynn, Father Huntington, and William Morris, I feel myself much more closely bound to them by that common bond of human sympathy which connects all those who are working in a similar cause,— for, however much we may differ, they as well as I are seeking to discover what is right,— than I do to such wretches as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, whose ideas bear a hideous resemblance to my own,— a wretch who recognizes no rigid but might, and argues that men are as fit objects of prey as whitebait. And yet it is of such men, we are informed, according to the new doctrine, that Anarchy expects to make her converts. My friends, my friends, have you completely lost your heads? Cannot you see that without morality, without the recognition of others’ rights, Anarchy, in any other than the vulgar sense, could not last a single day?
Cannot he take his pastime like the flies?
And if my pleasure breed another’s pain,
Well — is not that the course of Nature too,
From the dim dawn of being — her main law
Whereby she grows in beauty — that her flies
Must massacre each other? this poor Nature!