From the Libertarian Library

Basic writings by Voltairine de Cleyre

2008-09-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

While there is no shortage of editions of Voltairine de Cleyre's writings, I've put together a collection which includes those I use most often, or recommend most often to others. The "basic writings" pamphlet includes "Anarchism and American Traditions," "The Economic Tendency of Freethought," and the two essays relating to individualism and communism. Invisible Molotov also has much of this material, in more confrontational packaging. Pick the package that fits your audience.

Proudhon's "Toast to the Revolution" as a bilingual pamphlet

2008-09-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

A new purpose for an old blog, the raison d'être of which had been largely eliminated by my migration of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive to the wiki site: a new series of downloadable pdf pamphlets from the archive.

First up: Proudhon's "Toast to the Revolution," in an English-French bilingual edition.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with these pamphlets. I'm also printing actual hard-copy pamphlets for local distribution, and will probably be issuing a few more elaborately produced items as fund-raisers for research materials.

Josiah Warren, Letter to Mechanics' Free Press

2007-12-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

(c) A LETTER FROM JOSIAH WARREN
Mechanics' Free Press, May 10, 1828, p. 2, col. 2.

Cincinnati, April 20, 1828.
Dear S-
The perusal of your letter which I received about three weeks since, gave me great satisfaction. It affords me pleasure to find that you still feel such interest in the subject to which I am devoted. You inquire what progress has been made since you left here; to this I could reply more than the limits of a letter will permit, but I will endeavour to enable you to form some idea. I think you left before the cold weather commenced, and therefore have not witnessed the most important [134] of our operations. As soon as the season became cool, there were great demands for cloths of various kinds, which I found no difficulty in procuring. I bought at the public sales on a credit of 60 and 90 days, and very often sold the goods in 6 days, and some in less time. The place now became crowded, although you know that it stands remote from the bustle of business; so much was this the case that I became so exhausted with buying and selling goods, and in talking and explaining that I was obliged to shut up the magazine, half of each day in order to rest from the fatigue and confusion occasioned by the business of the other half. But this produced so much disappointment to the country people & others, that I was induced to open again during the day-time. John Ramsdale, who was with us at Harmony, and who was much opposed to the system at the commencement, has turned his store into a place of the kind, and now fully adopts it. He is the only one who has actually commenced, but many have had it in contemplation. One very important fact, that Messrs. Folger, Nye, Saunders, Pickering, Burgen, Rider, and all those who were so much delighted at first, have not changed their views in the least, except by an increase of zeal in its favour; and many more who knew nothing of it nor had any correct views of the nature of justice between man and man, when you was here have become really enlightened on the all-important subject, and in their intercourse with others are now spreading the honest principle far and wide. The magazine has been enlarged to about double its former dimensions; the work was performed by seven Carpenters, all upon the time system, and by putting my labour against theirs, they have gained at the rates of from ~ to 50 dollars per hour. This would not be believed by any [137] one who had not realized it by some experience, but you have seen something of its results.

I have had Rice at 1 1/4 cents per pound, Codfish at 2 1/2 cents, while the standing prices are 6 1/2 and 8 cents for the former, and 8 for the latter. Medicines as usual. [23] Cloths at about 33 per cent. below the current prices; remarks will be rendered unnecessary by your own reflections upon these facts.

We have commenced shoemaking, and several have perceived the practicability of learning a business which they never thought of before. Mr. Ashworth [24] made a pair of shoes at the first attempt, which none but a critic could perceive were not the production of an experienced workman; and many others have acquired a knowledge of this trade with equal facility. When we require instruction in any part with which we are not acquainted, we obtain it from some of our friends and pay them hour for hour in labour notes on the Magazine. I look upon these movements with great interest, for they are of immense importance to those who are now suffering by mystery and speculation. I can say no more now without incurring double postage, therefore for the present-farewell. Your friend,

JOSIAH WARREN.
MR. ROBERT SMITH, Philadelphia.

23 That is the wholesale prices which varies from one to three hundred per cent. discount on standard retail prices.

24 Mr. A. is a gentleman of between 40 and 50 years of age, who had never before worked at any mechanical avocation.- R. S.

Josiah Warren, Plan of the Cincinnati Labour for Labour Store

2007-12-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

3. CO-OPERATION
(a) THE PLAN OF THE CINCINNATI LABOUR FOR LABOUR STORE

Mechanics' Free Press, Aug. 9, 1828, p. I, col. I, 2.

EXPLANATION OF THE DESIGN AND ARRANGEMENTS of the Co-operative Magazine, which has recently been commenced in Cincinnati.

Whoever can for a moment, so far abstract his thoughts from his pecuniary concerns, as to look around him, and observe the evils, which the established laws and customs, with respect to the administration of property, are daily producing in what is called Civilized Society, must, if he is possessed of the least degree of sensibility, feel a strong desire, to remove these evils.

That the inevitable tendency of these Laws and Customs, is to produce Ignorance, Want, and Wretchedness, to the majority of mankind, to the labouring and useful members of Society, we have only to refer to their condition, in those countries where the present arrangements have been longest in operation, and where a full and satisfactory trial of them has been made.

In these countries, abounding with everything that is desirable, we see the labouring and useful members of Society, who have produced every thing, starving in the streets for want; while some are rendered equally miserable from the anxieties of speculation and competition, and others for want of an object worthy of pursuit, are destroying their health, and shortening their lives by inactivity and apathy, or by luxuriously revelling upon the labour of the depressed.

Insincerity among friends, Lawsuits between relations, [125] Hypocrisy in religion - deception in trade - dishonesty, speculation and enmity between man and man, are only a few of the results of these laws and customs.

Nor should we confine our observations to the old world only. Already have we in this country, made alarming progress in the road to national ruin; and unless some effort be made to prevent the accumulation of the wealth of the country, in the hands of a few, we instead of setting to the world an example of republican simplicity, of Peace and Liberty, shall soon add one more to the catalogue of nations, whom aristocracy has blasted, and whom inequality of wealth, has precipitated from a comparatively prosperous situation to the lowest grade of degradation and misery.

Every reflecting mind must perceive the propriety of searching for the means by which these evils may be avoided, and of making every practicable effort (however feeble) to put them in operation.

With these views an experiment has been commenced in this place; which although upon a very small scale, will test the principles upon which it is based. And it will be a very easy and natural step, to make more complete and extensive arrangements whenever it may be desirable.

As this experiment now begins to excite much inquiry; and as it is immediately connected with the greatest interests of all parties, it appears necessary and proper to bring the subject forward in such a form and manner that all may have an opportunity to consider, and to understand it.

It is already known that the method of dealing at this place is different from that in common practice. But it is a few of our friends only, who at present understand in what this difference consists.

It is for the information of inquiries, and for the [126] benefit of those who are desirous of making similar arrangements, that the following statements are made, and in doing this, we shall carefully avoid all comments and matters of opinion, they may in future occupy their proper time and place-at present we wish to make a simple statement of facts, and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.

By the new arrangements, all Labour is valued by the Time employed in it.

Much might be said to show that, as Time is above all things most valuable, that Time is the real and natural standard of value. But we will not now undertake to prove, that, which (upon reflection) no one will undertake to deny. We will rather proceed to give the arrangements which have been made to carry this principle into effect.

PRESENT ARRANGEMENT OF THE MAGAZINE. Here upon this single and simple principle, all exchanges of articles and personal services are made, so that he who employs five or ten hours of his time, in the service of another, receives five or ten hours labour of the other in return. The estimates of the time cost, of articles having been obtained from those whose business it is to produce them, are always exposed to view, so that it may be readily ascertained, at what rate any article will be given and received. He who deposits an article, which by our estimate costs ten hours labour, receives any other articles, which, together with the labour of the keeper in receiving and delivering them, costs ten hours, or, if the person making the deposit does not wish at that time, to draw out any article, he receives a Labour Note for the amount; with this note he will draw out articles, or obtain the labour of the keeper, whenever he may wish to do so.

In cases where the labour does not admit of being deposited, [127] the person who receives it, gives a labour note oh the Magazine, by which the bearer can draw out any articles which the Magazine may contain, as persons of all professions will require those things which do admit of being deposited. At present many articles are bought with money - these are delivered out for the same amount of money which the keeper paid for them, and he is rewarded for his labour with an equal amount of the labour of him who receives them, which is deducted from the note before mentioned.

There are some articles, one part of which at present is procured with money, and the other has been deposited upon the new principle. That part for which money was paid, is paid for in money, and the other part is paid for in an equal amount of labour. We do not exchange labour for money, or money for labour, excepting in particular cases of necessity.

The loss on any article, after having been ascertained, is added to, and becomes one part of its price. An account of all the labour and money expenses is kept, and when any one receives an article, he pays as much labour and money over and above the cost, as will be likely to pay these expenses; the amount being liable to vary according to local and other circumstances, is fixed periodically by the keeper. An open record is kept upon which is noted in a simple and expeditious manner, each article that is delivered: and this is done by such a method that at a meeting of those who are in the habit of dealing here, it can be readily ascertained how much labour and money have been received for the purpose of discharging these expenses: and if when compared with the account of expenses it appears that too much has been received, the overplus will be distributed equally unless any individuals choose to keep an account of the precise proportions of their dealing, in which case [128] they will receive accordingly. If too little has been paid, all will see the propriety and the necessity of supplying the deficiency, and therefore no obligation to that effect is required. The expenses are paid in this manner, in order to secure the Magazine against the chances of loss, and to enable strangers to receive the benefits of the establishment, without being under the necessity of returning at a future time for the purpose of discharging these little items of expense.

The keeper exhibits the bills of all his purchasers to public view so that the cost of every article may be known to all. There is a list upon which each individual who is in the practice of dealing here, can make known his wants, and the keeper of the Magazine reports each day the articles or labour that can be received, and those who wish for the employment, refer first to the report of their wants to know whether their articles or services are required-as none can be received which are not wanted.

When the keeper has occasion for money, he reports upon the list of wants the rate at which he is willing to receive it in exchange for his labour. There is a place for advertisements, so that communications can be made to all interested. When any one wishes to deal in the common way, and feels no interests in the new arrangements, the keeper will deal in that way, provided the profits will amount to that which he requires in money as the reward of his labour for that day.

These are all the important arrangements which have so far appeared necessary. There are no contracts or agreements between any parties but these, or any other regulations or customs which may from time to time be adopted at this place, will always be subject to alteration, or to be abolished whenever increasing knowledge shall exhibit the propriety of change. [129]

N.B. Those who may be desirous of establishing Magazines will find their labour very much abridged by taking copies of our Labour estimates of Articles.

Josiah Warren, Positions Defined

2007-12-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

Positions Defined

An impression is abroad, to some extent, that the "Equity movement" is necessarily characterized by an unusual latitude in the Marriage relations—I as one, protest against this idea. "The Sovereignty of every Individual" is as valid a warrant for retaining the present relations, as for changing them; and it is equally good for refusing to be drawn into any controversies or even conversations on the subject. I find no warrant in my "sovereignty" for invading, disturbing, or offending other people, whatever may be their sentiments or modes of life, while they act only at their own Cost: and would again and again reiterate in the most impressive possible manner that the greatest characteristic of this movement is its "INDIVIDUALITY"—that the persons engaged in it are required to act entirely as Individuals—not as a Combination or Organisation That we disclaim entirely, all responsibility for the acts, opinions, or reputations of each other. The principles of "Equity are as broad as the universe, embracing every possible diversity of character: I therefore do not look for conformity, and therefore repudiate all combined or partnership responsibilities, or reputations.

I suppose the world's experience to be its great instructor, and if it has not had enough of isms and follies I disclaim all right to oppose experiment, while the "Cost falls only upon the experimentors." But for myself, so far from proposing or wishing to see any sudden and unprepared changes in the sexual relations, I am satisfied that they would be attended with more embarrassments and more disastrous consequences than their advocates or the public generally are aware of; and farther, I wish to have it understood as a general rule, that I decline even entertaining the subject, either for controversy or for conversation.

I again caution all persons not to make me responsible for the acts and words of others; it is my right to have the making of my own reputation, and I wish them to remember, that no person either in his or her deportment or conversation, or as writer or lecturer is to be understood as a representative of me, unless my sanction is specifically given, to every idea thus advanced; and that no Newspaper or Journal is to be understood as an organ for me, except so far as it may have my signature to the articles it may contain.

Village of Modern Times, Aug. 1853.

Godek Gardwell (Edward Kellogg) to the Merchants' Magazine

2007-11-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

Godek Gardwell, “Labor and Other Capital” The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, 18, 1 (January 1848), 65.

Art. VIII.—LABOR AND OTHER CAPITAL:
THE RIGHTS OF EACH SECURED, AND THE WRONGS TO BOTH ERADICATED.

Freeman Hunt, Esq.—Dear Sir: Although it is universally admitted that nearly all wealth is the product of labor, yet the laboring classes of all civilized nations have been, and are, as a body, poor. If the natural product of labor be wealth, the natural result of toil would be competence or wealth to those who performed the labor, unless something intervened to deprive them of their natural rights. Many philanthropic men have endeavored to ascertain the causes of the poverty of producers, and many reasons for it have been assigned, but not one of them is sufficient to account for it, and no practicable plan has been suggested for the removal of the evil.

I am about to publish a work entitled " Labor and Other Capital: the Rights of each Secured, and the Wrongs of both Eradicated;" in which I expect to show the true and only means by which producers have been, and are, deprived of their just and natural reward, and to point out a practicable remedy for the removal of the evils. It will be my aim to exhibit those means so clearly that they will be understood not only by the statesman and man of science, but also by those who have hitherto bestowed little or no thought upon the subject, and who are now ignorant of the causes of their frequent suffering, and often scanty means of subsistence. When the causes are understood by which these evils are produced, it will be clearly seen that the remedy proposed for their removal is practicable, and entirely adequate to accomplish the purpose. Although the system is so simple that a school-boy may understand it, yet it is sufficiently powerful to secure the reward of labor throughout the world, and to direct the destiny of nations. The means necessary to put it into operation are as easy and simple as the system itself. The adoption of the system is so evidently the duty, and for the interest of the producing classes, not only of one, but of all political parties, that when its principles shall be once generally known, I doubt not that it will speedily be put into operation.

Public opinion on this subject must be changed, and it must, and will, undergo a complete revolution. It has been my aim in the forthcoming volume so to exhibit the principles and the practicability of the system which it advocates, that they shall be as evident as a mathematical demonstration, that all may see the bearings, and appreciate the importance of its adoption.

Although the system will secure to labor its reward, it will at the same time protect the capitalist in all his rights in property, and it will in nowise interfere with any disposal of his property that he may deem for his advantage. It will not diminish any right to form contracts, and it will make all contracts formed far more certain of fulfilment; and, therefore, instead of encroaching upon the liberty of man, it will add greatly to his freedom and independence. It is, in fact, a system which is necessary to the perpetuation of a republican government, to the security of individual property, and of the general rights of man.

The insertion of this communication in your valuable periodical will much oblige Your obedient servant, Godek Gardwell.

New York, Dec, 13th, 1847.

Josiah Warren, The Motives for Communism and What it Led To

2007-11-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

Josiah Warren, "The Motives for Communism—How It Worked and What It Led To," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, 1872.

COMMUNISM

Mesdames Editors: How often have I said to myself, "Oh, for a paper of world-wide circulation, through which we could pour into the public lap the most important results of our lives' experience! That others who come after us may avoid the thorny paths that have lacerated our feet—may profit by our errors and successes. I hope and believe that your is, or will be, such a paper: and in it I propose to furnish a series of articles, showing the practical workings of Communism and other reform experiments running through the forty-six years devoted to peaceful social revolution; and it will be seen that some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance and more conservative than conservatism.

THE MOTIVES FOR COMMUNISM—HOW IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.

When Robert Owen came to this country in 1825 I listened to some of his sublime discourses and read some of his publications, from which it appeared that, unless some peaceful revolution could be devised, the working classes, driven to starvation by machinery and destructive competition between themselves, would be compelled to choose between death by destitution and an effort to save themselves by violent revolution.

He showed us that in Communism, instead of working against each other as in competition, we should all work for each other while working for ourselves. A problem that had been profoundly considered by the wisest of our race, but which had always baffled the highest stretch of genius. It appeared that mutual help would beget mutual sympathy, or social harmony. That labor would be reduced to two or three hours a day, leaving abundance of leisure for new enterprises and general improvement. That the jealousies and antagonisms between the poor and the rich would be at an end, and a fellow feeling would grow up from equality of condition. No more horrible crimes, or punishments still more horrible. No more children crying for bread. No more suicides for fear of starvation. No more drunkenness from despair. No more prostitution to escape starvation. No more wars about the profits in trade nor for the privileges of governing, for the government was to consist of all above a certain age. The business of nations would not be the destruction of each other, but a mutual interchange of services beneficial to each.
Sick at heart with the habitual contemplation of the frauds and cruelties of men toward each other, and the miseries in different forms that had surrounded me from childhood, all growing out of the crudity of our civilization, and seeing no hope of change, I had, at the age of 23, become willing to shut my eyes forever; but here was a new sun arisen! and my young and ardent spirit grasped at it as at the breath of life. Mr. Owen had become a new god to me, and I said to myself, now I have an object worth living for!

I was not alone in these views and feelings; several excellent people of rare intelligence and thoughtful habits joined in a project to start a community in the neighborhood of Cincinnati.
The next article will show how it worked.

I would gladly avoid the imputation of egotism, but for the sake of giving definite responsibility, and as simple truth works better than anything short of it, and to put myself in communication with readers, I give my name and place of residence.

Josiah Warren,
Princeton, Mass.

Josiah Warren, "The Motives for Communism—How It Worked and What It Led To—Article II," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, IV, 15 (February 24, 1872), ?.

THE MOTIVES FOR COMMUNISM—HOW IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.

ARTICLE II.

Some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance and more conservative than conservatism.

In my previous article I spoke of some of the motives for communism; and, certainly, no higher or more holy motive can possibly actuate human beings. We now come to the way it worked.
We had assembled with a view of organizing a community, as I said, in the vicinity of Cincinnati. We were in the best of humor with each other, and expectations ran high. After a little preliminary conversation, the idea of organizing a meeting came up; but who should call us to "order?" No one felt "authorized" to do it, and each one seemed to feel a modest objection to assume authority. At last, one seemed to think that, if anything was done, somebody must do it, and he modestly laid aside his modesty and "called the meeting to order," and proposed the appointment of a chairman. Of course, no one objected, and chairman was appointed, not without some embarrassment in selecting one for "the honor of presiding" where all were admitted to be equally entitled to it.

The first subject proposed for consideration was a name for the contemplated community. One proposed "the practical Christians." Another objected that there were some very good Jews with us, and he hoped there would be many; not only so, but this movement was, we hoped, to become world-wide, including all beliefs and all non-beliefs in natural co-operation and harmonious feeling; and it would seem contrary to this all-embracing brotherly spirit to adopt a name that would imply anything like sectism or tend to divide us into insiders and outsiders. He said, it pained him to be obliged to say any thing adverse to what the brother had proposed, for we look for perfect "unity" in this movement. The other replied that we need not look for unity till all were willing "to stand up for Jesus." This is the first dash of cold water upon our kindling enthusiasm, and it was felt keenly by several who endeavored to allay the disturbed feeing by various remarks, all differing to some extent with each other; and the evening was spent without coming to any conclusion as to the name. If we came near to any one conclusion from the proceedings, I think it was not that "unity" that we had expected to see among us.
The next meeting was spent in a similar manner, but with the brotherly feeling somewhat diminished though no one could hardly acknowledge the fact to himself. At the next meeting we fortunately hit upon the experience of naming the community by the place of its locality, whatever that might eventually be. That being settled, the next thing was a constitution. A committee was appointed to draft one, at the meeting following, it was brought forward for acceptance. There were perhaps about thirty articles in it, and we found it impossible to agree on three of them that evening. In fact, we got into confusion. The chairman felt embarrassed, and the rest of us, (some at least) began to feel that this was not the "Unity" we had expected. Just in proportion as we desired to perserve this "unity" we hesitated to express conflicting opinions; some were consequently silent and their opinions were unknown even in regard to a measure with was to involve the whole life's destiny.*

At this meeting I said "Friends, we have certainly committed some mistake somewhere: I do not know where it is: but if we were right, there would not be so much friction in our machinery. I will go down to New Harmony and join Mr. Owen's Community. He knows how to do it. I will go to school to him; and when I have got the lessons I will report to you."

[These friends went on and organized, and moved out about thirty miles from Cincinnati—failed within a year and returned to Cincinnati discouraged.]

J. Warren,
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED.
ARTICLE III.

I knew nothing then about Individuality. I had, indeed, heard that individual ownership was one of the great roots of human evil, and that Communism was to be the remedy. The idea of individuality being the germ of "intellectual anarchy" had not yet reached this country, where we were asleep like the man in the boat that was silently gliding over the cataract of Niagara. I had heard of the monarch who, in reply to a proposition to educate the people, said "he did not want learned opponents; he wanted obedient subjects." There certainly can be no "intellectual anarchy" where there is no intellect. The monarch was right in his conclusions from his premises: if one mind is to govern millions, these millions must have no minds; but, like dried herrings on a stick, their intellectual eyes must be punched out, all life must be extinguished, and they must all be dried and fixed to one pattern. As I have said, knowing nothing about Individuality (as the great, supreme, divine* law of order, progress and repose); I had plunged my hand into scalding water and suddenly withdrew it, and was now ready to plunge into it over head and ears.

I began to prepare for joining Mr. Owen at New Harmony, Indiana. Among my customers were some very good friends who endeavored to dissuade me from the contemplated step. One said, "Now, it isn't possible, is it, that thee is going to break up thy nice, comfortable home and business, and risk all in an untried experiment that may disappoint thee at last?"

"O, my dear, sir, it is because is untried that it requires to be tried. I don't fear that I shall ever want for business: and besides, in the present condition of things and people in general, life has no charms for me."

"But, then, how can thee succeed, when thee knows that minds differ so much from each other, they cannot agree, and how can they walk together unless they be agreed ?"

"O, my friend, we must yield these little difference for the great general good."
"Well, I hope thee will not be disappointed, but I fear thee will."

Several other friends went over just about the same ground with me, and though I fully appreciated their kindness I thought my replies ought (in view of the public good) to overbalance their objections. My wife, too, a most careful and judicious woman, was as much in favor of the movement as I was, and I began to sell off and give away some of the goods in the store, and send other notions to be sold at auction, let my house for a year, bought a "flat boat" and floated down the Ohio river, bag and baggage, and reached New Harmony about the first of May, 1825.

Josiah Warren.
Princeton, Mass.

* By the word divine, I mean that which l not the work of man, whatever may be thought to be its origin.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED.
ARTICLE IV.

We found New Harmony to be a clean, handsome village with substantial buildings, wood and brick, capable of housing about eight hundred people, most of whom had already arrived. There were very intelligent people from Philadelphia, Washington, London, Paris and other cities, all as enthusiastic as ourselves. Mr. Owen had purchased the whole of the Rappite community which had just left. In the town there was a woollen factory all in running order, a large grist mill, a little outside of town, twenty-eight hundred acres, I believe, of the best land well timbered. Mr. William McClure, a life-long philanthropist and "the father of geology in this country," with millions of money all ready to embark in the movement, with an immense collection of apparatus for model industrial schools, with a set of Pestalozian teachers whom he had met and engaged in Europe, paying them salaries from the time they started and their passage across the Atlantic. A rare library of very scarce and valuable books, costing perhaps thirty thousand dollars. Mr. Owen had another and particularly a musical library, containing a copy of all the pieces that in London were thought worth having; and, what Mr. Owen playfully termed "a whole boat load of learning," books without number on the sciences and professors to match. I give these particulars so that our failure can not be attributed to the common explanation, "want of means."

We had a Constitution (of course) of perhaps about thirty articles, one of which was that all the members were to give their best services for the general interests; but we had no sooner sat down to the committee table and got a subject before us, than we found that we differed widely as to what would best promote the best interests of the society; and the more we talked, the more points of difference were raised (as usual) and we were obliged to leave the decision to Mr. Owen at last. Here was king and council at the very outset! This looked ominous, but I supposed it was the best that could be done in the crude state in which we found ourselves.
Everyone felt free to express any opinion he or she might entertain on any subject, without fear of a Bastile, or even of offence, and as there was a great deal of active intellect assembled there, and in dead earnest, upon subjects entirely untried, no wonder that we could scarcely find much "unity" of opinion on any subject that came up.

I am not now writing the history of the present time among Reformers, but of Communism in New Harmony in 1825. If one is a description of the other, the fact may help us in the end to a solution that will well pay for the study it may cost.

We could not get things into working order. The people, having no land of their own, could not set themselves to work, but must wait for orders from superintendent; and superintendents must be appointed by the committee, and the committee were not sufficiently familiar with the business to be done nor with the qualifications of persons for superintendents, and besides they were busy with other matters, equally embarrassing.

We now heard complaints of "idleness,"—a desire to "shun labor,"—but those complaints came from those who, having had an over share of labor their whole lives, very naturally would like to escape from it and have a little rest; never even suspecting that the subjects of their criticism wished above all things to be at work, not only for their own personal comfort, but for the sake of the cause that had brought them there. It was almost impossible to believe one's eyes when they saw two eminent physicians right from their practices in Philadelphia, the one in the harvest field, in the hot July suns, week after week, and the other, a young and light framed man, rolling logs the whole day long, doing more than the share of one man, among those who had done such work all their lives.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED.
ARTICLE V.

Here we are, eight hundred of us, living mainly at Mr. Owens expense, at the rate of $9,000 a mouth.

Economy was now the word, and the expenses of living were reduced to the lowest living rates. We had, as I said, a ''Constitution, and this called for ''Equality;" and one member who had not thought much upon such subjects, demanded an opportunity of keeping the public-house his share of the time, in order to get his share of the good things that were promised for visitors, and so persistent was he that a public meeting of the whole population (of legislative age) was called to give him a hearing, although it excited only laughter in some, and sadness in others, to see so noble an enterprise produce such results: but we had got a ''Constitution" like all other Constitutions or rather, it had got us, for we were bound to carry out its requirements, however absurdly they might be interpreted; or else alter or abolish it. Very soon a meeting was called for public business, and it was proposed to alter the Constitution in several respects. Conflicting views consumed that evening without result, and the meeting was adjourned to the next day, and the next day was taken up in trying to make a "Constitution," instead of making food and clothing. After several days spent in this way, a great variety of subjects being agitated, the ''Constitution was altered (if not amended) but the meetings and conflicting opinions consumed day after day and week after week, and led to dividing the society into three societies or departments—the agricultural, the mechanical, and the educational. Here was a step toward individuality; but it was thought best as a step out of, instead of into, "confusion and anarchy."
Mr. Owen, believing that a uniformity of dress would have a tendency to allay jealousies and envy, proposed that the women wear what was called the tunic (what is now called the bloomer dress) and that the men wear something similar while aiming in this way to produce a feeling of equality among ourselves, he did not seem to think of the other fact that while this might bring us nearer together in feeling, it would drive outsiders further from us, when our object was not to build up a sect, but by including all mankind in an effort for harmonious life, to abolish sectism and clanship. This was the first intimation I had that my new god might possibly prove to be human.

We now began to hear of the failures of several community experiments in this country, and that of Orbiston in Scotland, managed by Abraham Coombe, who, after superhuman effort and intense anxiety, died of exhaustion and a broken heart.

Discontents among ourselves now began to appear in the succession of ten or twelve families from us, and going by themselves out upon the unsettled lands, believing that they, at least, who thought and felt so nearly alike, could succeed, but in a few weeks they returned to the main town defeated, but could not seem to explain why they failed. Then another little company went out, and another and another-—in all, from first to last. ten attempts of this kind were made, each very confident that if they only meant well they would surely succeed, but they all returned to the town disappointed. Now came the news of the failure of the "Valley Forge" community, and the Haverstraw, and others, but no explanation of the philosophy of these failures was heard.

Our expenditures were becoming alarming, when compared with the income. The charge of a desire to shun work was quite loud, and of course every remark of this kind was a very firebrand wherever it happened to fall. Mr. Owen proposed as a stimulus to industry, that each superintendent of a department should report his estimate of the workers under his direction, at the end of each week, at a public meeting. The working of this measure hardly needs illustration, perhaps, but I will give one. We had a young man there who had come all the way from Washington, (I believe), and who had been an apprentice to a jeweler. He was of a very delicate make and charmed even professional ears with his performances on the flute. He was in the agricultural department, and was ordered to go into the harvest field, and as might have been foreseen was reported as lowest, or almost or quite worthless. He was very sensitive and modest, and to see himself stamped all at once with such a reputation among us, seemed almost like a death blow to him. I felt deeply for him, for I loved him, but no words of sympathy and respect could restore his smile. We never heard his charming music again. We soon followed the first victim of our communistic criticism to his last resting place.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED.
ARTICLE IV. [VI]

We had organization after organization, constitution after constitution, and rules and regulations, only to abolish them and replace them with others only to be abolished in their turn. A large portion of our time, day and evening, was spent in legislation in general meetings or conversation in detail but the fruits of all this were only more compulsion and doubt as to our final success. Our confidence gradually gave place to anxiety, especially as some of the most intelligent began to leave.

Mr. McClure withdrew from the connection, and the ownership of the town was divided between him and Mr. Owen.

Here is an item of instruction. Two of the best men in the world, with exactly the same objects in view, could not act in communism together, but were compelled to go back to individuality for the sake of repose.

Mr. McClure then sustained the educational department with his own means, and he spent. S40,000 of his own money in three months, without anything to show for it (at. least it was confidently so stated at the time).

One little incident will show how communism destroys harmony and friendship. In this department, one woman had been very low with a nervous fever several weeks, and shortly after she began to recover, some of the other women thought she was well enough to take her share in the washing and other house work, and continued to have this intimated to her husband; but his wife did not make her appearance in the kitchen, and some of the women agreed among themselves to confront the husband as he came out of the dining room, and to tell him in positive terms that they were for equality, and unless his wife came forward and did her part in the kitchen, they would leave it, and anybody might do the work that had a mind to. "Well," said the husband, "my wife will not come, at any rate, at present, let the consequences be whatever they may."

In two or three weeks after this, the department broke up, and having returned to individuality, there was nothing between the parties to dispute about.

All organizations had now failed; and we had so completely worn ourselves and each other out by increased legislation, that we could not talk any more on the subject that brought us together. The question then was, what is to be done? A public meeting was called, at which an intelligent gentleman from London (Mr. Whitwell) got up and said, "We have done nothing for the last six weeks but to meet here and make constitutions, laws, rules and regulations and to unmake them—It is now the middle of May* and there is not a seed in the ground; and I propose that all of us immediately put ourselves under the direction of Mr. Owen for one year from this date." This was carried without a single word of debate or one dissenting voice.

Here we are, after having gone through every possible form of organization and government: we had arrived at anarchy, to be succeeded, as always, by despotism—that is, individuality in the deciding power: but it was individuality in the wrong form. It was the denial of the right of individuality in all except the ruler: this led to its inevitable consequences. In three weeks Mr. Owen, though still the best of men, was as unpopular as he had before been beloved: do what he would no body was satisfied: and one man watched the streets a large portion of the time, declaring that his purpose was to meet Mr. Owen and fight him.

Some young men got a coffin and a flag inscribing on it "The Social System" with the intention of having a funeral the next day and burying the social system after parading it through the streets: butt to save the feelings of Mr. Owen some one or more broke into the room where the preparations were, (the night previous to the intended funeral,) and destroyed them.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.
ARTICLE VII.

Some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance, and more conservative than conservation.

THE MODEL SCHOOLS.

I must not omit to describe the model schools, sustained by Mr. McClure. They were conducted by the pestallozian teachers before mentioned. One was conducted in one wing of the large town hall. There was a partition separating this from the centre portion, where I was when my attention was arrested by a few words that I overheard addressed to a class of boys by Mr. Darusmont, a French gentleman, the conductor of this school. The thoughts presented to the public were so new, so sublime, and the language so charming, that I stood fascinated. I could not go about the business I went there for; but after having listened to the whole discourse, I resolved (though several years a married man) to beg of Mr. Darusmont the privilege or coming and sitting with his boys and listening to his teachings. I knocked at his door—he came—I made known my purpose—his handsome countenance lighted up and his eyes moistened with an evidently benevolent emotion, and taking my hand within both of his, he drew me within the door and gave me a welcome with a charming cordiality, in word, tone and gesture truly French. We immediately became fast friends.

The next day I took my seat with the boys, and for the first time in my life, I saw the true mission of education! No generalization that I can give will convey an adequate idea of the teachings of William Phiquepal Darusmont, so careful was he to put forth the exact truth, and to see that it was thoroughly understood—so minutely analytical; so profoundly philosophical in the smallest particular—such nice discriminations where common eyes see no difference, but the want of' which so often proves disastrous through life! With all this minuteness his discourse was not tiresome; and though addressed entirely to the intellect, the effect upon the feelings was like that of a masterly musical composition; which, by judicious changes of' key and occasional digressions from the main theme, and then by natural and easy returns to it, with slight variations of expression, carries us, unconsciously wherever the author chooses.

I was speechless with admiration—reverence—love! When the sitting was over and the boys gone to their work, we had a long conversation (if that may be called conversation in which I could only listen). In this and subsequent interviews I learned that he had, early in life, resolved to devote himself to what he considered education should be. That he had been several years a friend and coadjutor of Pestal-lozzi. It seemed that one great idea with him was to draw out into exercise the self-sustaining faculties and thus qualify pupils to meet any contingencies of after life; and with this view he had experimented with himself in order to find out the extent of human capacities. He had learned several branches of mechanism—made a piano-forte from the raw materials, had gone all through the details of cooking food, washing and mending clothes, as well as as cutting out and making them, and his pupils were now doing all these kinds of work for themselves.

He had remodeled the modes of almost every branch of civilization. He was the inventor of the instrument now used in many of the schools, viz, a frame with ten rods in it with ten balls on each for the better teaching of arithmatic; and he called it the "Arithmometer." In teaching geometry, instead of depending on words and lines, he had cubes, cones and every geometrical idea in wood, hanging up about the schoolroom or otherwise in plain sight. In teaching geography, each pupil had a little globe which he held in his hand to refer to. He had spent four years in one of the hospitals in Paris to qualify himself to speak intelligently upon anatomy and diseases, and he discoursed to us on those subjects using a pig for illustrations, as the animal nearest resembling the human structure. I also understood, (not from him) that he was a most thorough musical scholar, and an exquisite performer. He had also digested a system of universal phonography, representing all the elements of all languages.

In short, he seemed, like Lord Bacon, to have taken for his life-long pursuit, the study and promulgation of all useful knowledge, by the shortest and most thorough modes that could be devised; with the great leading idea that "there is nothing too large or too small for the greatest to engage in, which has a tendency to mitigate the pains, or promote the enjoyments of the humblest."

Since his death, I have learned that he belonged to the French nobility: but no hint of the kind ever escaped him in our interviews. With all his wonderful acquirements, his unaffected modesty was strikingly conspicuous.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.
ARTICLE VIII.

As I before said, our experiments had come to an end. We had fairly worn each other out by incessant legislation about organizations, constitutions, laws and regulations, and we would no longer talk with each other on the subject that brought us there. We had tried every possible kind of organization and government, from political Democracy through every modification and mixture of all known political elements to anarchy, and then, of course, to despotism, and then, of course, to revolt—the old routine over again, excepting that we did not quarrel; because Mr. Owen had made it an habitual thought with us, that all our thoughts, feelings and actions are the effects of the causes that produce them, and that it would be just as rational to punish the fruit of a tree for being what it is, as to quarrel with each other for being what we are; that our true issues are not with each other, but with causes.

Many intelligent and far-seeing members had left, and others were preparing to leave, and an oppressive despondency hung heavily upon all. I shared the general feeling, and nothing saved me from despair but the idea that our business is with causes; and the question now was, what could be the causes of all this confusion and disappointment? What was the matter, when all were so willing to sacrifice so much for success? These questions led my thoughts back to our difficulties in detail. The first constitution bound every one to give his best services for the general good of the society; but we could not agree as to what would best promote this general good, and the more we talked and argued, the more we disagreed.

That phrase, "the general good," is a harmless and useful one, providing there is no necessity of agreeing as to its meaning. Why was it necessary to agree as to its signification? The necessity evidently arose out of our connected interests. If each one interpreted the word only for himself, the great diversity of views would not only have been harmless but might have been profitable; but in communism, some one view must prevail over all Communism, then, was the root of the trouble here. The constitution also required every one to be industrious, but the word industrious is an indefinite one, and like all other indefinite words is subject to different interpretations. The teacher of music was busy all the school hours, week after week with the children, and in many of the evenings, teaching the use of instruments; suffering torture (of ear) all the time, and craved above all things to have rest in something to do out of doors, in the sun-light and air; but he thought he must be industrious for the good of the whole; while at the same time, the out-door workers raised a cry that this man's teaching was not at all necessary, they demanded that be should go about some industrious pursuit! So differently do we see, feel and think, according to our circumstances and experiences, and so incapable are we of judging and deciding for each other; and consequently are not adopted to live in communism, where there is no freedom to differ, but all must conform to some one idea or view of each subject as it arises.
The demand in the constitution for equality, gave rise to the demand of the clown for a chance at the good things in the public house. The idea of entertaining strangers, who came to enquire into the philosophy of our movement, was no part of his programme.

That word, Equality, is a very useful word, in some places; but in a constitution, binding on all, anti subject to as many different meanings as there are people to use, it can produce only the severest and bitterest of fruits. The case of the sick woman arose from the same source, the indefiniteness of the word Equality. On this ground they demanded her presence in the kitchen, when she was not able to sit up half the time. These women did not know her condition, but thought they did. This mistake, which made a wide breech between the parties, would have been entirely harmless, had it not been for communism, and the constitution.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.
ARTICLE IX

"Some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance, and more conservative than conservatism."

In our educational department there was a gentleman of whom I was very fond, who took to going about the streets without any hat, and allowing his beard to grow to such an extent that, together with the effect of the sun on his fine skin made him look frightfully repulsive, somewhat like an ourang outang. Fearing that his appearance would give character to the schools (in which he was one of the teachers) and disgust strangers, I ventured to say to him as gently as I could, what I thought, that I was afraid that as strangers could only judge at first of our enterprise by externals, would it not be best to forego for the present unimportant peculiarities for the sake of getting the attention of the public for whose benefit we were working?

"My God!" he exclaimed, have I come three thousand miles over the Atlantic Ocean in pursuit of freedom to be dictated to how I shall dress!" I could say not another word, our friendship was broken up and was never renewed, for he soon left the place.

Now, what was the matter here? It was Communism that was the matter. He and I both belonged to the same (educational) department; and I was not willing to bear any portion of the reputation that the school was likely to get, nor to have it suffer defeat without an effort to save it. In our connection we could not both of us have our different ways; the liberty he desired was impossible if I had my way, or mine was impossible if he had his; but if each of us had conducted a school individually there would have been freedom to differ without disturbance.

Another case. Passing by the blacksmith's shop, I saw him sitting on the bench talking, as be was in the habit of doing a large portion of the time. On my return, in about a half an hour, he still sat there, swinging his legs and talking as usual. I had business with him, and stepped in. Just then a young woman was passing over the green at a little distance. "There," said be; "now what is she there for, wasting her time; she had much better be in the straw room at work, than gadding about at that rate." Neither he nor I knew who the lady was, nor where she was going, nor what she was going for. I was shocked and disgusted at the rough impertinence of the criticism upon the young lady, and asked myself the question: What could possibly justify him in his own opinion for wild brutality? and I perceived that it was communism. He would probably say that having a joint interest in results, he had a right to look at and criticise any member's movements; and in communisms this could not be disputed and for the same reason I should criticise the position in which be had been for the last half hour, and where would quarreling end? It could end in nothing short of individualizing our interests—the abandonment of Communism.

My thoughts went back to many more instances similar to these, and in every case I could come to no other conclusion than that Communism was the matter, and that it was false and wrong in principle.

What, then, was to be done? Must we give up all hope of successful society? Or must we attempt to construct society without Communism?—for all societies, from a nation to the smallest partnership, are more or less communistic.

We had carried Communism farther than usual, and hence our greater than ordinary confusion. Common society, then, had all the time been right in its individual ownership of property, and its individual responsibilities and wrong in all its communistic entanglements!

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO.—ARTICLE X

Some facts are "more strange than fiction," more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance, and more conservative than conservatism.

Had society, then, started wrong at the beginning? Had all its governments and other communistic institutions been formed on a wrong model? Was disintegration, then, not an enemy but a friend and a remedy? Was individuality to be the watchword in harmonic progress, instead of Union? I dwelt upon these thoughts day and night, for I could not dismiss them, and was almost bewildered with the imense scope of the subject and the astounding conclusions that I could not avoid; but I had become so distrustful of my own I judgment from our late disappointments, I resolved to dismiss these thoughts and these great problems to be solved by the wise, the "great" and the powerful; but I could not dismiss them They haunted me day and night; they presented to me society beginning anew; I found myself asking how it should begin. It could not be formed or formulized, for we had just proved that we could no more form successful society than we form the fruit upon a tree. It must be the natural growth of the interest that each one feels in it from the benefits derived or expected from it. The greater these benefits, the stronger is the "bond of society;" where there is no interest felt there is no "bond of society," whatever its "unions," its organizations, its constitutions, governments or laws may be.
We had just seen that no bond could be stronger than that which bound us together till we commenced "organizing" and making laws, rules, regulations and governments. There was now no interest felt in the enterprise, no "bond," no society; but we were scattering as rapidly as possible, never, perhaps, to see each other again.

If the enjoyments derived from society are its true bond, what do we want of any other bond? "Oh, we want governments and laws to regulate the movements of the members of society—to prevent their encroachments on each other, and to manage the combined (communistic) interests for the common benefit."

But the movements of members have never been regulated; encroachments have not only not been prevented by laws and governments, but they have always proved the greatest of all encroachers and disturbers. Encroachments are increasing every day, the common interests have never been managed to the satisfaction of the parties interested, and there is no agreement among us as to what would best promote the common interest or what measures to adopt to that end. It was precisely these problems that remained to be solved which was our purpose in our late movement. It had been defeated by our attempts to govern each other, to regulate each other for the common benefit, the good of society, no two having the same view of the best way of Promoting the good of society, and no one retaining the same view from one week to another. We had not arrived at principles, and infinite diversity with regard to measures and modes was inevitable in the transitionary stage. If we could fortunately arrive at principles, they would become our regulators, perhaps.
J. Warren.

COMMUNISM—THE WAY IT WORKED, AND WHAT IT LED TO—ARTICLE XI.

Infinite diversity instead of "unity" is inevitable, especially in the progressive or transitionary stage. Then why not leave every one to regulate his own movements, within equitable limits, provided we can find out what equity is, and leave the rest to the universal instinct of self-preservation? But what constitutes equity is the greatest question of all. It is the "unknown quantity" that even algebra has failed to furnish! One thing may be depended on. If all our wants are supplied that is all we want. Could we not supply each other's wants without "entangling" ourselves in Communism, and thereby involving ourselves in interminable conflicts and fruitless legislation? Could we not have a central point in each neighborhood where all wants might be made known, and where those wanting employment or who might have anything to dispose of could also make it known, and thus bring the demand and the supply together and adopt the one to the other? But on what principle could we exchange, so that each and every one could get as much as he gave? Here the idea of labor for labor (first broached in Europe) presented itself; but hour for hour, in all pursuits, did not seem to promise the equilibrium required, because starved, ragged, insulted and suffering labor would be shunned even more than it Is now by every one who could avoid it; and the more respected and more agreeable pursuits would be overcrowded, and conflict between all would continue, and the demand and supply would be thrown out of balance; but as no one would be bound to follow any theory any farther than it best suited him, every one could make any exceptions to the rule that he might choose to make.

Estimating the price of everything by the labor there is in it, promised to abolish all speculations on land on clothing, food, fuel, knowledge—on every thing—to convert time into capital, thereby abolishing the distinctions of rich and poor; to reduce the amount of necessary labor to two or three hours per day, where no one would desire to avoid his share of useful employment. The motive of some to force others to bear their burthens would not exist, and slaveries of all kinds would naturally become extinct.

J. Warren
Princeton, Mass.

* Freedom of speech here might have gone against "unity," but it might have saved the company from an expensive defeat and discouragement.

Josephine Lowell - extracts on the Greene family

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William Rhinelander Stewart. The Philanthropic Work of Josephine Shaw Lowell. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

[page 13] I know a great many men in the army who are: My brother, and first cousin, H. S. Russell, in Gordon's Regiment (2d Mass. Vol.), Capt. Curtis, Lieut. Motley, Lieut. Morse, Capt. Tucker, Lieut. Bangs, Lieut. Robson in the same Regiment; Joe and Ned Curtis, the former belonging to the Ninth Regiment, N. Y., the latter, a surgeon in the Georgetown Hospital. My cousin, Harry Sturgis, in Raymond Lee's Mass. Regiment. My uncle, William Greene, Colonel of the 14th Mass.; Dr. Elliott and his three sons of the Highland Regiment; Capt. Lowell of the U. S. A., and Theodore Winthrop, who died for his country at Great Bethel, June 10th, 1861. Also, Rufus Delafield, a surgeon U. S. A. Twenty brave men,—nineteen living and one dead.—O. Wendell Holmes, Caspar Crowninshield.

[pages 20-21] October 3d, 1861. Everything goes on as usual. We have no battle yet, although September has passed, the month in which they were to take place. The weakness of the Rebels is shown, I should think, by that one fact and they keep having doleful accounts of the condition of their army. Uncle William Greene says that "Peace will come upon us like a river." Would to God it might.

[page 70]

Feb. 25, '94.

DEAREST ANNIE :

I wonder if you are much disturbed about the bomb-throwers? What a crazy, dreadful set of creatures, and how all the newspaper talk only serves to set off some other lunatic to do the same thing. Certainly the modern newspaper is a very "mixed good." The view a reporter takes of things is generally the wrong view, but it helps to make public opinion. Well, there's no use talking about it—only I am glad you and Aunt Anna Greene do not take your dinner at a café.

Greene family portraits

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Charles Carleton Coffin. History of Boscawen and Webster, from 1733 to 1878. Concord, N. H.: Republican Press Association, 1878. 384-394.

GREENE, NATHANIEL.

Nathaniel Greene was born in Boscawen, 20 May, 1797. He was christened Peter; but having great respect for the memory of his father, by permission of the legislature of Massachusetts he took the name of Nathaniel.

Educational advantages at the beginning of the century were limited to eight or ten weeks of schooling in winter, and a term of about the same length in summer. Two of his teachers were,— Miss Lucy Hartwell, who afterwards became the wife of Col. Timothy Dix, and Rev. Henry Coleman, then a young man, who subsequently was a minister in Salem, Mass., and who distinguished himself as a writer on agricultural subjects. One of Mr. Greene's schoolmates was John Adams Dix. Together they stood with their toes to a crack in the floor, their spelling-books in their hands, and made their " manners " when Lucy Hartwell said, " Attention !"

At the age of ten he went to Hopkinton, and became a clerk in a store. While there he had some three months' additional schooling.

The death of his father when he was but eleven years of age, leaving an embarrassed estate, compelled him to begin the struggle of life under adverse circumstances. He was a great reader, and devoured all books that came in his way, and which he could find time to read. By chance he read a memoir of Franklin, which awakened in him a desire to be a printer, and especially to become an editor. The idea took complete possession of his youthful mind. He thought of it by day, and dreamed of it by night.

At this time—1809—a new paper made its appearance in Concord—the New Hampshire Patriot, established by Isaac Hill. On the 4th of July he walked from Hopkinton to Concord, and offered himself to Mr. Hill as an apprentice, and took his place at the case. That, however, was not the end of his ambition, but only the beginning. It was not to give other men's thoughts to the world, but his own.

Having left Mr. Hill, he became connected in 1812 with the Concord Gazette, published by Jesse Tuttle. This was the beginning of his editorial career. The newspaper at that time usually contained a ponderous article on some political topic, the latest news from Europe, the victories of the French armies or of the Prussians, but very little local information. There were no reports of meetings, no gathering up of home incidents. The paper was issued weekly, and there was abundant time for an editor to prepare his thunderbolt to launch at the opposing political party.

In 1814 Mr. Greene moved to Portsmouth, and became connected with the New Hampshire War Journal, published by Beck & Foster. He remained there only a year, when he removed to Haverhill, Mass., and became connected with the Haverhill Gazette, published by Burrell & Tileston. In this situation, although but eighteen years of age, he had the sole editorial supervision of the paper. In 1817, at the age of twenty, he became his own publisher, and started the Essex Patriot. The vigor and energy of his writing had already attracted the attention of the public, and he was invited by some of the Democratic Republican politicians to start a paper in Boston ; and, complying with the request, he issued, on 6 Feb., 1821, the first number of the Boston Statesman, a weekly, still in existence. At that time there was a triangular contest for the presidency, and the Statesman advocated the election of W. H. Crawford; but the result of the election—the elevation of John Quincy Adams to the presidential chair—and the great and increasing popularity of Gen. Jackson, made it apparent to the far-seeing young editor that the succeeding election would bring Gen. Jackson prominently before the public. Mr. Greene labored earnestly to bring about the nomination and election of the hero of New Orleans; and the triumph of the party, in 1828, paved the way for Mr. Greene's future political success.

He was appointed post-master of Boston in 1829, and occupied that official position until the accession of Gen. Harrison to the presidency, when he was succeeded by Mr. George Wm. Gordon; and although this was one of the first public removals of the new administration, yet one of the last measures of President Tyler was to reinstate Mr. Greene in the same office, which he occupied until after tho election of Zachary Taylor, in 1849. Mr. Greene had the reputation of conducting this department to the entire approval of the national executive, and, by his urbane and conciliatory deportment, to the satisfaction of the public in Boston.

While thus absorbed in official and editorial duties, he found time to acquire the French, Italian, and German languages. The French was taken up without much difficulty, as was also the Italian; and in a few wecks he was able to read them. He published, in 1836, a history of Italy, translated by himself from the Italian; and subsequently, as a birth-day present to his niece, he translated Undine from the German into the Italian. This work was read by Signor Monte, at that time professor of Italian at Harvard college, who pronounced it admirably done, and requiring very little alteration to be ready for publication.

In 1836, at the suggestion of a friend, he began German, purchasing a dictionary, a grammar, and a set of Van der Velde's works. Taking them home, he sat down in the evening, and began with the title-page. The first word was "die" which, on referring to the dictionary, he found to be the definite article " the." He wrote down the word, and went on to the next, which was "wieder taufer.'' He turned to the dictionary, but could not find it. Recollecting that many words in German are compounds, he looked for "wieder," and found that it meant "again." Then looking for "taufer," he found that it meant " baptiser;" and said to himself that "wieder taufer" must mean the re-baptiser, or Anabaptist. This was the title-page. He thus began with the first sentence of the text, and before retiring to rest completed the first period of a line and a half.

This was about Christmas time. Every evening during the winter he went on with his translation, and about the first of May following published the results of his labor in two duodecimo volumes, entitled "Tales from the German." He translated about fifty volumes, many of which have been published. Such literary perseverance has few parallels.

Mr. Greene had a fine poetic fancy. Many of his contributions have been given to the public over the signature of "Boscawen," choosing the place of his birth as his nom de plume. His stanzas entitled "Petrarch and Laura," published in the Boston Transcript, are marked by smoothness of rhythm and delicate sentiment :

PETRARCH AND LAURA.

Oh! deem not Petrarch all unblest,
In that he Laura never knew;
That no fond word his ear caressed,
In fair return for love so true;
That no response he ever heard
To lays in which his love was told
In sweeter strains than love's own bird
In grove or forest ever trolled.

Though Laura might disdain to hear
The music from his heart-strings wrung,
Those strains now reach the listening ear
In every land and every tongue.
Though made the subject of her scorn,
From which in life he suffered long,
There's many a maiden, then unborn,
Who since hath loved him for his song.

Not unrewarded nor unblest
The sorrows he in song deplored;
His sonnets oft relieved the breast
From which the strains divine were poured.
They won for him undying fame,
Which brightens with the lapse of time,
And eternized fair Laura's name,
Embalmed in "choice Italian" rhyme.

After retiring from public life, Mr. Greene spent a long period abroad, travelling through Europe. While in Paris, in 1852, he received intelligence of the death of a beloved daughter, who died at Panama, while on her way to San Francisco to establish a Home of the Sisters of Charity, to which order she had become attached. The father's heart, wrung with grief, found expression in the appended feeling tribute to her memory :

TO MY DAUGHTER IN HEAVEN.

I had on earth but only thee;
Thy love was all the world to me;
And tbou hast sought the silent shore
Where I had thought to go before!

Away from thee, in sad exile,
My lips had long unlearned to smile;
Bright wit might flash, red wine might pour,
But I, alas! could smile no more!

Thy death in these my fading years,
Hath sealed and seared the fount of tears;
My heart may bleed at every pore,
But I, alas! can weep no more!

Ah! how thy loss my soul doth rend,
My only daughter, sister, friend!
Of thee bereft, all joy is o'er,
And I, on earth, can hope no more.

But in those realms beyond the sun,
In that bright heaven thy faith hath won.
Where thou and kindred spirits reign,
There haply shall we meet again.

Paris, Sept. 20th, 1852.

Mr. Greene married Miss Susan, daughter of Rev. "Wm. Batchelder, of Haverhill, Mass. His son. "Wm. B. Greene, was educated at West Point, and served as lieutenant in the U. S. Army; but resigning his commission he entered the ministry, and settled in Brookfield, Mass. He married a daughter of Robert G. Shaw, Esq., of Boston. At the breaking out of the Rebellion he was living abroad. At the news of the attack upon Fort Sumter he hastened home, and offered his services to the government . He was appointed colonel of the 14th Mass. Volunteers, which he ably drilled as a heavy artillery regiment, and commanded the line of fortifications on the Potomac, serving with distinction.

Mr. Nathaniel Greene died 29 Nov., 1877, at the age of eighty years and live months. From among many of the obituary notices of him we quote the following: "Another of Boston's old and distinguished citizens has been added to the vanished throng. Few names have been more closely identified with the life and interests of this city than that of Nathaniel Greene. He was eminently a successful man. He handled the elements that lay before him with judgment and with vigor. For half a century his career was one of great activity, and it yielded results upon which he might well pride himself. He was a controlling spirit, a progressive force, in those circles wherein he moved, and his name will be remembered as long as the events of the Boston of this nineteenth century are written about or spoken of."

GREENE, CHARLES GORDON, COL.,

The youngest son of Nathaniel Greene, Esq., was born in Boscawen July 1,1804. His opportunities for obtaining an early education were as limited as his brother's. In 1811 he accompanied his parents to Virginia. In the succeeding year, his father having died, his mother, bearing a double burden of sorrow—her bereavement and an embarrassed estate—returned to New Hampshire. Three years passed, when Nathaniel, having become connected with the Haverhill Gazette, took charge of his younger brother, and placed him in the Bradford academy. His preceptor was the famous Benjamin Greenleaf, who has been characterized by Horace Mann as "a huge crystallization of mathematics." In 1817, when his brother established the Essex Patriot, Charles, at the age of thirteen, began to learn the art of printing; and subsequently he served one year in the office of Mr. Lamson, at Exeter. In 1822 he went to Boston (to which city his brother had removed and was publishing the Boston Statesman) and was employed in this establishment until 1825, when he settled at Taunton, and published The Free Press one year, upon contract, and upon which he begau his editorial career, at the early age of twenty-one. Upon the closing of his contract he returned to Boston, and published The Spectator, a literary journal edited by Charles Atwood, Esq. But the Spectator, after a brief independent existence, was united with another publication, and Mr. Greene was again engaged upon the Statesman, but only for a short time, for in 1827 he became a partner with James A. Jones, of Philadelphia, in the publication of the National Palladium of that city, the first daily paper published in Pennsylvania, advocating the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency. When he withdrew from that paper, in December, 1827, the United States Gazette remarked of him that he was "an able champion of his party, greatly endeared by his conciliatory and unobtrusive deportment." The warmth of his zeal in favor of the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency is evinced in this glowing and eloquent passage from an oration delivered 4 July, 1831: " His race is run out. Not a drop of his blood will be left flowing when he is gone; not a lip to say, 'I glory in his memory, for he was my kinsman.' Is it not, my friends,—is it not a spectacle to move and touch the very soul ? If there be moral sublimity in anything, it is in unmingled self-devotion to one's country; and what but this could have arrested, on the very threshold of the tomb, the feet of him who, though he turns to bless his country at her call, sees no child nor relative leaning forward to catch the mantle of his glory."

In 1823 Mr. Greene was engaged in the office of the United States Telegraph at Washington, owned and conducted by Gen. Duff Green, where he remained until after the election of Gen. Jackson to the presidency. Returning to Boston, he succeeded his brother Nathaniel as joint proprietor and publisher with Benjamin True of the Statesman. The latter's interest he purchased in a few years, and he became sole owner; and on 9 November, 1831, the Boston Morning Post made its appearance from the office of the Statesman, published and edited by Mr. Greene. It was a small sheet of sixteen columns, but quite as large as the times warranted. Mr. Greene labored with untiring diligence to make the paper worthy of public confidence. His editorials were sharp and incisive, but at the same time there was a geniality and courtesy which won the respect and esteem of political opponents. It was the period of the first secession manifestation, when Hayne and Webster were the gladiators in the senate of the United States. The Post sustained the administration, pronouncing against the new doctrine of state rights as set forth by the South Carolina school of politicians. It soon became the leading Democratic journal of New England. It was an authority, and its voice was potent in the party, and by its generous spirit became a powerful influence over young men. The Post was famous for its effective witticisms. " We have seen the puns of this daily as sensibly affect the risibles of the sedate old man of eighty as they do the merry youths of sixteen," says Mr. Luring, in "The Hundred Boston Orators." On the occurrence of its fortieth birth-day the colonel thus happily spoke of it: "Forty years ago to-day the Boston Post shed its first effulgence upon an admiring world, dispelling the darkness thereof, and diffusing joy among all people of the American species. From 9 November, 1851, to this morning, it has risen with the sun each week day, giving light, warmth, and comfort to all ready to receive its blessings. It is not for us, who acted as accoucheur at its birth, to boast of the promise it gave at its first breath, or of its sturdy youth, or of the power and activity of its present manhood. All these pleasant little matters of fact will be freely admitted by generous contemporaries, with whom it has fought and shaken hands hundreds of times; and after contests of two-score years, it can truly say it harbors no unkind thought towards one of them."

The Democratic party in the state and in Boston was in the minority, but Col. Greene was so much esteemed by men of all parties that he was elected representative to the Massachusetts legislature, and in 1848 was an aid to Gov. Morton, on account of which position he received his title of "Colonel." Upon the accession of President Pierce, Col. Greene was appointed naval officer, which position he held for eight years. Upon his retirement it was said of him that he had "discharged the duties of the office with admirable efficiency and promptitude,—though quietly, unostentatiously, and without political proscription.'' His political associates often selected him as their candidate for mayor and member of congress. He was frequently mentioned for other positions, such as postmaster-general, minister abroad, &c. Upon the breaking out of the Rebellion, he took the side of the loyal states with all his heart. Though the editorial pen often criticised the conduct of the war and the methods of the administration, Col. Greene stood unflinchingly for the union of the states and the crushing out of secession. At various meetings held in Boston, in 1862, to take action in regard to the call of the President for troops, Col. Greene made many patriotic and eloquent speeches in favor of promptly responding to the call, and exerted himself zealously in favor of enlistments. He was chairman of the general committee which held its sessions on the Common, in 1862, to promote recruiting: and his substantial aid to wounded soldiers and their families, unostentatiously administered, brought comfort to many of our brave men. The following extract from a letter written by Mr. Greene to a New York committee, in 1804, inviting him to be present at a social meeting, will serve to show his sentiments: ''The rebellion of the Southern states was totally unjustifiable ; it is a deep sin, which can only be expiated by suffering and repentance ; but the disregard of the provisions of the constitution, by those placed in power as its servants and its guardians, is as fatal to its perpetuity as the enmity of its armed repudiators. In such an alarming complication of political affairs, the salvation of the country would seem to depend upon the conduct of those who have resolved to resist both extremes,—namely, those men whose madness has arrayed them in rebellion against a benign government, and those whose sordid and wicked ambition has led them into transgressions and usurpations hardly surpassed by undisguised treason." And again, at a banquet given in honor of Capt. Winslow, of the immortal Kearsarge, Col. Greene, in response to a call from the president, said.—"No man, no class of men, can monopolize the starry flag of the Union: it is the nation's banner, the emblem of a nation of freemen :—its trinmphs are national glory. It is meet, therefore, that we express our thanks in glowing words to those who beneath its folds contribute to the treasurv of our common honor. In the present festivities may we forget the family jars just passed, and, like a Land of brothers, only see in the event we now celebrate, new lustre and increased strength given to our father's house,—the great temple of liberty erected by their valor, cemented with their blood, and preserved by the bravery of their children. Would to heaven, sir, that the echoes of the applause we now offer for gallant deeds were for such a victory as would draw cheering responses from each of the thirty-five states of this great country ; that no pang should agonize one American heart; that the blow struck was like unto that which taught a foreign foe 'the might that slumbers in a freeman's arm.' But, unhappily,—most unhappily,—such is not the case. The present necessity for spreading death over sea and land is an awful, a lamentable one,—a necessity that has arrayed in terrible combat one portion of our house against another portion ; but, like the Roman father, the government, while it administers justice with throbbing heart and weeping eyes, cannot withhold chastisement. Its integrity must be vindicated, its authority must be sustained, its constitution must be perpetuated, and the union of the states must be reestablished, at whatever cost. Therefore, sir, I offer as a toast, ' The Navy and Army of the United States. May the one drive piracy from the water, and the other treason from the land.'"

On the 24th of October, 1827, Col. Greene was married to Miss Charlotte E., daughter of Capt. Samuel Hill, of Boston, a lady of fine education and talents, whose prose and poetical contributions have often adorned the columns of the Post, and who, in the earlier days of that publication, wrote many of the book reviews,—thereby saving for the home library valuable works from the desecrating scissors and pencils of less careful reviewers. Their family consisted of six children, throe of whom now survive, all having inherited a share of their parents' literary ability. Charles, the eldest son, has contributed many valuable articles to Sears's Quarterly Review, besides letters and shorter articles to various periodicals and newspapers, which have been highly commended by those competent to judge of such matters. Nathaniel, the second son. ably assisted his father for more than a dozen years as managing editor of the Post, and during an extended foreign tour, under the nom de plume of "Flaneur,"' wrote a series of most amusing and instructive letters to that paper.

Col. Greene's popularity in a social way is illustrated by the following extract from the Boston Journal, 21 June, 1875:

"A WELL DESERVED COMPLIMENT. "

The parlors of the Central Club on Saturday evening last were the scene of a little incident so agreeable to all who participated, that we may be pardoned for making a public record of the pleasant occasion. Among the original members of the club. Col. Chas. G. Greene, editor of the Boston Post, was enrolled. He accepted the position of vice-president at the first organization, declining of late years to hold any office, though continuing one of its most interested members. His genial presence and fund of pleasant reminiscences contribute so frequently to the pleasure of a chance hour passed beneath its roof that many of his associates desired to make some permanent recognition of their regard. An excellent photograph of Col. Greene was reproduced in crayon, and hung upon the walls. "At the quarterly meeting held on Saturday evening, the donors presented the admirable portrait to the club. The president, in acknowledging the receipt of the communication, allnded in pleasant terms to the gratification which the club must feel in receiving a gift so acceptable to all, and, with many pleasant allusions to the past, introduced Col. Greene, who was not aware of the delicate compliment which had been paid to him. His remarks we cannot reproduce, but this testimonial of regard drew from him a speech replete with kindly sentiment most eloquently expressed. The club has honored itself in honoring one whose absence in every social circle is a loss, and whose presence promotes good fellowship and kindly regard."

Col. Greene is esteemed as much for candor as for affability. The Honorable David Henshaw said of him,—"He is the self-made, self-taught man,—the energetic and polished writer; he shows the superiority of real worth over fictitious greatness." "His name," said a contemporary, "is a synonym for all that is deemed estimable in a private citizen or politician; his ability is unquestioned; he has never forgotten the dignity of his profession ; has always known where he stood, always manfully maintained what he believed to be right, and never smirched his fair fame by having to do with tricksters and jobbers. No editor in the country stands higher as a gentleman than Charles Gordon Greene."

Charles Sumner visits the Greenes in Paris, 1857

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Edward Lillie Pearce, Charles Sumner. Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. III, 1845-1860. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894.

"March 26 [1857]. Wrote letters home ; visited the Invalides, and saw the new tomb of Napoleon ; then visited Mr. William B. Greene and his most intelligent wife, living off beyond the Luxembourg; saw something of that quarter ; then dined with Elliot C. Cowdin, a merchant here, once connected with the Mercantile Library Association [of Boston], — the first time I have met company at dinner for ten months ; then to the Italian opera, where I heard the last part of ' Il Barbiere di Siviglia.' " [page 530]

[another entry, p. 531, March 31, obscured in available copy, probably reads: "Din[ed with Mr. and Mrs.] Greene at their lodgings, beyond the Luxembourg.]

Lilian Freeman Clarke visits Anna Greene in Paris, 1882

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James Freeman Clarke. Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1889. 369.

LONDON, May 29,1882.

Our voyage was rather long, cold, foggy and disagreeble, and we were glad last Thursday morning to be at Liverpool, where we took a train at once for London. Lilian joined us Friday evening, coming from Paris, where she has had a pleasant time with Mrs. William B. Greene and Ellen Hale.

Yesterday (Whitsunday) we four went to Hampstead, where I preached for Dr. Sadler, a fine old gentleman, in a very pleasant, picturesque English chapel.

Hampstead is lovely, half city and half country. We went, after church, to dine with Professor J. Estlin Carpenter. His father, Dr. William B. Carpenter, was present, and was very agreeable, talking about Darwin, Carlyle, and many others whom he had known.

Notice of William B. Greene, Transcendentalism, etc

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"New Publications." The Religious Magazine and Monthly Review. 45, 5 (May, 1871), 544.

TRANSCENDENTALISM, and THE FACTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, and the Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, are the titles of two remarkable pamphlets by Mr. William B. Greene, and will furnish what William Corbett would call " a bone to gnaw," to those who have a liking for such hard problems in Psychology. We look upon Mr. Greene as an able and independent writer, less satisfactory, perhaps, than he would be were it not for the slight excess of individualism which marks his productions.

Notice of William B. Greene, The Blazing Star

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"Notice of New Books," The New Englander, XXXII, 1 (January, 1873), 183.

MR. WILLIAM B. GREENE'S BLAZING STAR† seems to us to shine by a reflected light, and that light, whatever there is, is reflected from the Appendix on the Jewish Kabbala, if this be not darkness visible. We frankly confess to have been able to gather little or nothing from both except the excitement of our curiosity to learn somewhat more of this same Kabbala. But whatever these first portions of this volume have failed to furnish has been more than compensated by the tract on the Philosophy of Spencer and the tract on New England Transcendentalism. The first is sharp, clear, and decisive, and abounds in the clear analysis of which the author is capable, and the soldier-like charge upon his adversary, in which there is nothing unchivalrous though it is annihilating. Mr. Spencer's pretentious inflations would not long survive a few such criticisms as this. The tract on New England Transcendentalism is equally able though not so long. Its affinity with Buddhism is clearly set forth, and there is a sad pathos and almost stern reproof in the reflections at the close.

† The Blazing Star; with an Appendix treating of the Jewish Kabbala. Also a tract on the Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and one on New England Transcendentalism. By WILLIAM B. GREENE. Boston: A. Williams & Co. 1872.

Ezra Heywood and prison vaccinations

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"An American Experience," The Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review, 1 (April, 1879), 12.

AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.

MR. EZRA H. HEYWOOD, a fellow labourer with W. Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Francis Jackson, and Parker Pillsbury, for the abolition of slavery in the United States, has recently suffered imprisonment for the same cause as Mr. Truelove in England, but was liberated by President Hayes. He is turning his prison experiences to account in public lectures, showing how adverse to good are prison influences and regulations. " I have no personal grievances to vent," he says. " I was in a liberal jail. Judge Clifford allowed me to choose the one to which I should be taken. Prison life implies social, financial, and physical death. When I stepped over the threshold of Dedham jail, I stepped from the civilisation of the nineteenth century into the barbarism of the tenth."

Among the outrages practised on prisoners is compulsory vaccination. If a convict refuses he is knocked down, handcuffed, and operated upon—a lesson in sweetness and light. Mr. Heywood managed to escape pollution once, but the doctor was too much for him, and insisted on his submission ; but, as soon as the doctor had gone, Mr. Heywood energetically rubbed the virus off his arm, and only escaped punishment because there was no rule to apply to the offence.

Consistently with this trust in vaccination, is the indifference displayed towards cleanliness. The prisoners are allowed to bathe but once a week, and then only three minutes are allowed for their ablutions ; and when prisoners are unwell they go for weeks without bathing and without change of clothing.

B. W. Ball, The Revolution

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B. W. Ball, "The Revolution," The Radical Review, 720.

THE REVOLUTION.

There is no pause. Still blow resounds on blow,
The order old making to shake and reel
From base to pinnacle. To dust brought low,
Crescent and Cross the shock of ruin feel.
Shallow Reaction tries in vain to stem
The Revolution’s surge, which more and more,
Drowning tiara, throne, and diadem.
Spreads undulating wide from shore to shore.
What though Priest, Kaiser, Sultan, King still sit
Sceptred and crowned above the encroaching flood?
Belshazzar’s legend is above them writ,
And they grow pale before Man’s altered mood.
Voices of Revolution, trumpet-clear,
Byron and Shelley, lo, your day is near!

B. W. Ball.

Edward Stanwood, Mr. Spooner's Island Community

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Edward Stanwood, "Mr. Spooner's Island Community," The Radical Review, 578-581.

MR. SPOONER’S ISLAND COMMUNITY.

If one could only accept all of Mr. Lysander Spooner’s assumptions as true, his argument would be sound and his conclusions would follow. Unfortunately for him, his most material assumptions have no basis. Letus take his first case: one hundred men on a solitary island; each producing ten bushels of wheat, exactly enough for his own wants; each the possessor of coined money to the amount of what we call five dollars. It is true, wheat would have no price, though it would have a value. Now, Mr. Spooner supposes that one of the hundred men abandons wheat-growing and produces something else. The other ninety-nine, however, produce as much as before. A, who now raises no wheat, must buy ten bushels. He pays for it, Mr. Spooner supposes,—for it must be pure assumption—one cent a bushel.

Here then we have a price fixed for all the wheat grown,—not simply for the ten bushels A must buy. Next year B also stops wheat-growing, and engages in another occupation. What will be the price of wheat then? Two cents, says Mr. Spooner. Isn’t that getting ahead rather fast? The ninety-eight men have produced one thousand bushels, as before, and they need only nine hundred and eighty bushels. Neither supply nor demand has changed. There are twenty bushels for sale, and twenty are wanted by two men. Of course the price remains unchanged, at one cent a bushel. If it went higher than that, each of the ninety-eight men would endeavor to produce a surplus the next year,—Mr. Spooner’s theory allows one man to produce the entire thousand bushels,—and the result would be an excessive supply, and a price fixed at a fraction of a cent, instead of a whole cent, a bushel.

The whole fallacy of this part of Mr. Spooner’s reasoning [579] rests on the assumption, wholly unwarranted, that the number of buyers, rather than the amount of the article they need or the supply in the market, regulates the price. Fifty men, needing each ten bushels of wheat, would fare as well in a market where five hundred bushels were for sale, as would one man in a market where there were only ten bushels to be had. And the number would have no effect whatever on the price. And if there be only two sellers who are real competitors for the trade of the community, prices will be as steady as if there were a hundred sellers. This is a matter of common experience, and not of theory. We can therefore safely divide by one hundred the amount of money declared by Mr. Spooner to be needed by this community of one hundred persons.

But Mr. Spooner supposes that, when A quits wheat-growing, he engages in a business which produces something worth the whole amount of the wheat crop on the island. That is a very violent hypothesis, but let us adopt it. Each of he ninety-nine men who successfully engages in a new occupation does the same, we are told; and the result is that, when every man on the island is in a business different from all the others, the aggregate production is one hundred times as great as at the beginning.

Now, let us begin back at the beginning. A, we will say, makes shoes enough for the whole community. What can he get for them? Mr. Spooner’s hypothesis requires that he should get ten cents from each member of the community,—that is, the value of the wheat crop which each has raised. So he pays out ten cents for wheat, and he takes in ten dollars for shoes. What follows? Will B, and C, and D raise wheat next year, or will they rush into the shoe trade, glut the market, and drive down the price? The latter, of course; or, what would be more likely, A would find a hard market. The wheat producers would say to themselves: We got along without shoes when we all sowed wheat, and we can do so still, rather than pay the whole value—ten cents—of our crop for them. Consequently, next year A would be glad to reduce his price.

But let us grant that in some way or other each man of the hundred has finally got into a separate business of his own, and that he produces a full supply for one hundred men of some article that must be had by all. Do they then need for purposes [580] of trade more money than five dollars each? Certainly not. The demand and supply regulates its value as much as the same circumstances regulat the value of anything else. Instead of more money being needed, it may be doubted if any money at all would be required in such a community. It would only be necessary to keep accounts with one hundred men. A wants one hundredth part of the wheat which X produces; X wants one hundredth part of the shoes which A makes. When they have given each other what is due, the account is squared.

Still, that might not be convenient. There would be, we will suppose, a very quick and active demand for money. Then the value of it would increase. A would need it so much that he would sell a pair of shoes for five cents instead of for ten; B would sell a hat for five cents where he had been asking ten; and so on through the list. The fail in prices would be one-half, and would diminish the demand for money by so much, or, in other words, money would be worth twice as much. As production grew, the prices would fall, or the value of money would rise, again; and so on, until at the volume of currency would be made “equal to the wants of trade” by the simple process of raising the value of each cent or dollar.

We have come to this, then: during the whole progress of the change from wheat-growing to other occupations, the price of wheat has never been able to rise above one cent a bushel. As the demand for money has increased, the price of that and other commodities has declined. The value of the wheat grown, and of every thing else, has been the same from beginning to end, because demand and supply balanced each other exactly at all times. The purchasing power of money has increased. The five dollars every man had at the beginning will buy, say, what would then have cost twenty dollars. Then a smaller amount of money does the same work.
The community is just as rich and just as prosperous as if it had more money. The man who can buy ten bushels of wheat for ten cents and has twenty cents, is as rich as the man who with twenty dollars in his pocket must pay ten dollars for ten bushels of wheat.

I have confined myself wholly to Mr. Spooner s first case, but it covers all the rest. Every condition is changed the moment [581] the element of intercourse with the rest of the world is introduced; but as Mr. Spooner does not discuss it, I leave it alone. He, however, builds up a huge structure of fancy as to the amount of money that would be required by a community of ten thousand men, and then goes to work to trim it down, until he settles on the conclusion that each of the ten thousand would need one hundred thousand dollars. Now, suppose that we raise the value of the dollar to one thousand times as much as it is now, why would not one hundred thousand mills serve the purpose? When Mr. Spooner can show that a community which called its unit of value a mill and used an iron or other coin to represent it would not be as rich, and prosperous, and very way as well off as a community that it made its trades in dollars and used gold,—provided always that both were cut off from intercourse with the world,— it may be worth while to continue the discussion. But until he can show that the number of buyers rather than the excess or deficiency of a commodity governs prices; that the value of money is unchangeable, resisting the influence both of the number of persons requiring it and of the amount they want; and that it makes a community wealthy to reckon values in dollars rather than in cents or mills,—I must hold that he has not begun to prove his ingenious theories to be true.

Edward Stanwood.

I. G. Blanchard, The Warfare

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I. G. Blanchard, "The Warfare," The Radical Review, 533.

THE WARFARE.

Along the battle’s flaming van We mark the tried and true, —
Defenders of the cause of man, A chosen, peerless few.
Born to their mission and inspired, Oh, should they fall, we feel
No spirit would like theirs be fired, No hand could wield their steel.

Yet, one by one, they step aside, Or on the red field lie,
And still their places are supplied, Still rings the battle-cry;
Still o’er the hoary walls of Wrong Truth’s startling missiles fly,
And still, with steady step and strong, Her hosts are marching by.

And so it shall be evermore, Until the trump is blown,
Proclaiming Wrong’s hard rule is o’er, And Right is on the throne.
Oh, fear not for our cause sublime!Let hate do all it can;
For in the darkest coming time The hour shall bring the man.

I. G. Blanchard

Elie Reclus, Female Kinship and Maternal Filiation

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Radical Review, August 1877, 205-223.

FEMALE KINSHIP AND MATERNAL FILIATION.

1.—Das Mutterrech, eine Untersuchung über die Gjynoekokratie der altere Welt, nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. By I. I. Bachofen. Stuttgart. 1861.
2.—Studies in Ancient History, comprising a reprint of “Primitive Marriage.” An inquiry into the origin of the form of capture in marriage ceremonies. By G. T. M’Lennan. London. 1876.

THE learned Mr. Bachofen had read, as we all have, the story of Orestes, who, having killed his mother Clytemnestra in order to revenge the murder of his father, was summoned to answer for his crime before the Areopagus of Athens. The Athenian women with one voice declared ‘hat Orestes bad committed the most heinous deed of which a man, born of woman, may be guilty. But their husbands insisted that, by revenging his father’s murder on the perfidious wife, Orestes had nobly performed his duty. The voice of each party was of equal weight, for we are told that in those days women sat on terms of equality with men in the courts of justice. Orestes was, however, finally acquitted by the casting vote of Minerva, who [206] presided over the trial. The Erinnyes—terrible goddesses of remorse and revenge—protested indignantly against the verdict, but it was favorably received by the entire male population, and approved by the civilization of all the ancient world. The verdict was ratified by succeeding generations; and, finally, the illustrious Goethe devoted the greatest product of his dramatic genius—the “Iphigenia in Tauris”—to the endeavor to reconcile us fully with Orestes, and with Minerva’s decree.

Mr. Bachofen, however, has dared to defy this voice of ages. After much profound meditation he has come to the conclusion that this trial is one of the most terrible in its issues which has ever been held. It marks, he declares, the limit between two ages, and between two radically different conceptions of the family. Previous to the decree of Minerva, a family was represented by the mother; maternal lineage was alone recognized. From that moment the rule was reversed, and undivided supremacy accorded to the father. According to Æschylus, the dissidence of opinions on this subject which existed between the men and women of Athens extended even to the gods. The younger sided with Orestes, the elder took part against him. It is from the profound depths to which were thus stirred all consciousness, human and divine, that was evolved that awful drama of antiquity, in which are concentrated all horrors and monstrosities of which the most sombre imagination can conceive.

While Mr. Bachofen was engaged in unravelling the meaning of the legend of Orestes, Mr. M’Lennan, a Scotch lawyer, was meditating upon the institution of marriage as it existed among the plebeians of ancient Rome. Tue essence of the ceremony consisted in carrying away the bride by sham violence,—in remembrance, we are told, of the famous rape of the Sabines. This ceremony is vividly described by Apuleius in his story of the “Captive Damsel.” The heroine relates how her mother, having dressed her becomingly in nuptial apparel, was loading her with kisses, and already contemplating in imagination the long line of descendants which was to spring from the union, when suddenly a band of robbers, armed like gladiators, rushed in with glittering swords, made straight for the maiden’s chamber, and tore her away, half dead with fear, from the bosom of her trembling mother. [207]

The reasons alleged by the Romans for this strange custom were even stranger than the custom itself. The maidens were expected to prove their modesty by violent resistance to their captors, and youths the fierceness of their love by the violence with which they possessed themselves of the objects of their desire.

But M’Lennan is not satisfied with this reason. He inquires pertinently: How could the Roman legislators tolerate and even consecrate a custom, worthy of a nation of outlaws? Why such brutality in a marriage ceremonial? How came an immoral form constitute the sanction to a moral act? To be sure, only by means of some idea deeply rooted in the mind perpetuating itself indefinitely, long after the thing to which it belonged had ceased to exist, Symbols, too often lightly regarded, are nearly always the remnants of extinct customs. Legal fictions, the poetical side of jurisprudence, constitute the more or less fortunate adaptation of existing conditions to others long since dead, or continuing to survive by a sort of artificial respiration. Customs become embalmed in symbols, like Egyptian mummies in their wraps. And symbols enable us to reconstruct the dead reality of the past, of which they are the only remaining indications. Thus, from the plebeian marriage at Rome, we learn that men were once really obliged to secure their wives by force, and thought fit to appear to do so after the necessity no longer existed. Our feelings and instincts are shaped by habit, and morality and public conscience are more often the effect than the cause of public customs. (Mores, moralitas.)

Traces of the violence inherent in primitive marriages are found in classical antiquity. The so-called “heroical marriage,” the Marriage of Rakchasas or Gandharvas, was defined by the laws of Manu as “the seizure of a maiden by force, while she weeps and wails for assistance, after her kinsmen and friends have been killed in battle, or wounded, and their houses broken open.” Plutarch and Herodotus corroborate the narratives of legendary history. The former tells us that in Sparta the bridegroom always feigned to carry off the bride by violence, and, according to Herodotus, the same practice prevailed in Corinth and Crete.

In the present day the custom of capture exists among several [208] tribes of Australia and New Zealand, and in many islands of the Pacific, as well as in parts of South America,—from Cape Horn to the Caribbean Sea. On the coast of New Guinea and the Torres Straits, it is customary for the bridegroom to abduct the bride and run away with her. The Fuegian youth first obtains the consent of the bride’s relatives; then watches for an opportunity, and carries off his bride. Among the Bedouin Arabs it is necessary for the bridegroom to force the bride to enter his tent. Among many negro tribes the girl is carried away bodily on the back of her lover. The form of capture is said still to prevail to a great extent in India. Among the aborigines of the Dekkan and of Afghanistan it is prescribed as a marriage ceremony to the Hindus in the Sutrâs. It prevails among the Khoncls on the hills of Orissa, and among their neighbors and kinsmen, the Gonds and the Koles. Among the Tunguzes and Kamtchadales a matrimonial engagement is not considered to be definitely concluded until the Suitor has overcome his beloved by force, and torn her clothes, the maiden in the meanwhile professing to defend her liberty to the utmost. This form of marriage is likewise observed by the noble classes among the Kalmucks.
Among the Circassians the ceremony much resembles that of ancient Rome. The wedding is celebrated with noisy feasting and revelry, in the midst of which the bridegroom rushes in, and, by the help of a few daring men, carries off the maiden by force. Then only may she be considered his lawful wife.

In Europe evident traces of this custom may be discovered in the ancient Grand Duchy of Moscow; in former Poland; in Samogitia, Livonia, Lithuania, Prussia, and Scandinavia; and fainter indications in Friesland, in some French provinces, in Wales, and in the north-east of Scotland. As Mr. M’Lennan remarks: “Nothing in Nature exists by itself. Every individual example of this custom leads us to contemplate a great area over which it once prevailed, as the discovery of single fossil fish in a hill enables us to imagine the whole surrounding country as at one time under water.”

What is the origin of so universal a custom? Simply the fact that men once provided themselves with wives exclusively by means of war upon neighboring tribes. War was then the normal state of society. “Peace and friendship were unknown between [209] any two separate tribes, except when they united against a third,”—as a cynical wit remarked many ages later, that friendship between two coquettes was impossible, except when they were combining in a conspiracy against a dear relative! In these early and lawless periods, woman shared the fate of all other species of property, in regard to which it was universally held that “he should take who had the power, and he should keep who could.” The women were a once the principal cause of war and most desirable spoils of victory, and were tossed from one hand to another with magnanimous liberality. The fate of the women thus disputed over was far from enviable, if we may judge from that of the Australian females who have acquired any reputation for beauty. George Grey, a truthful and intelligent observer, tells us that in Australia a beautiful woman is really far worse off than her less-favored companions: “Conspiracies are constantly being formed for her abduction, and, in the scuffling which results, she is almost always injured; for each of the combatants orders her to follow him, and, if she refuses, throws a spear at her. The early life of an Australian belle is passed in a series of captivities under different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor. Rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds. Many a female thus wanders several miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off successively to distant and more distant points.” “The male captives,” says M’Lennan, “furnished by their labor additional means of subsistence, but the women were prized as wives and luxuries. In the Feejee and other islands of the Pacific the male captives were eaten, while the women were generally saved alive, except in a few districts where prevailed a special relish for the flesh of females.”

The scarcity of females naturally added to their value. This Scarcity was artificially maintained by putting to death girl babies in great numbers as soon as they were born. This practice was inspired on the one hand by motives of economy, and, on the other, of gourmandism, for they were eaten up like young Guinea pigs. This primitive peoples had discovered long before [210] the Right Reverend Malthus began to speculate that population increases in a geometrical, and food only in an arithmetical, proportion. They killed the babies to avoid the expense of rearing them, and then ate them to avoid the trouble of procuring other food. The boys were spared to be educated as hunters and warriors, but the girls were at best only objects of luxury, and hence necessarily sacrificed by a prudent community whenever times were hard. It was deemed simpler and more economical to capture full-grown women for wives than to incur the expense of rearing female babes to maturity. In one village of the Phweelongmai, East India, Colonel M’Culloch found in 1849 that there existed not a single female child.

From this disproportion between the sexes arose the correlative institutions, polyandry and exogamy. Mr. M’Lennan insists upon a distinction, which he claims to have been the first to point out,—a distinction between exogamy, or inter-tribal marriage, and endogamy, or intra-tribal marriage. Amongst the exogamous tribes none but strangers wert. permitted as wives; union between persons belonging to the same tribe was regarded as incestuous, and only to be atoned for by death.

“The practice of female infanticide, which rendered women so scarce, led at once to polyandry within the tribe and to the capture of women from without. This practice has existed from time immemorial among the same races as possess the symbol of capture in the marriage ceremonial. With some of the exogamous races it seems to be a rule to kill all the female children, except such as happen to be the first born. Colonel Macpherson tells us that among the Khonds of Orissa, of whom we have already spoken, marriage between persons of the same tribe, however large or scattered, is considered incestuous and punished by death. Not even with strangers adopted into or domesticated with a tribe is it permissible to marry.”

Circassians were until recently strictly exogamous, and so married until their nationality had been destroyed by Russia. Mr. Bell writes as follows in 1840:—

“These cousins german, or members of the same fraternity, are not only themselves
interdicted from intermarrying, but the prohibition extends to their serfs, who must wed only with serfs of another fraternity. The fraternity contains perhaps several thousand members. Formerly, such a marriage would have been looked upon as incest, and punished by drowning. Now, a fine of two hundred oxen and the restitution of the wife to her parents only are exacted.”

Notoriously exogamous are the Kalmucks, the Yurak Samoyeds, [211] the Kirghiz and the Nogals, the Kafirs, the Sodhas of Northern India, the Beduanda Kallung (Singapore), the Warali (India), and many others. We find the principle in Australia, in North and South America, in Africa, in Europe. “We shall suspect and infer it in many places where the actual evidence of its existence is incomplete,” says Latham in his “Descriptive Ethnology.”

The women, captured and recaptured, passed from one tribe to another as the property of an unlimited number of husbands, and were necessarily unable to identify the fathers of their children. At the present time the Code Napoleon forbids the Recherche de la Paternité, whereby a bastard child might discover his parentage. If, as the French law and the English proverb both assume to be true, “only a wise son can know his own father,” much greater must have been the facility for error where several tribes might have claimed the paternity of a single child! It is not even sure that the motherhood was plainly demonstrable. Children easily lost sight of the mother who had nursed them, and probably belonged less to her than to a group of nurses. The impersonal tribe stood in the place of both parents to its children. The community was like a herd of cattle, where all ties between parents and offspring are severed, so soon as suckling ceases.

An immense stride in progress was made when, under the influence of more peaceful habits, maternity became an institution, and children, hitherto known by the name of their tribe, could adopt the name of their mother.

The fact that maternal filiation preceded paternal filiation has, until recently, been ignored. Mr. Bachofen searched for the illustrations which might be found in ancient authors. Every text he examined; no scholiast did he leave unconsulted. With the deepest erudition coupled with a criticism delicate and sagacious, he arrived at the same results as Mr. M’Lennan, whose argument is mainly grounded on contemporary facts. Says he :—

“The Kasias, the Bairs, the Saporogian Cossacks, have the system of kinship through females only. We find that system in Tulawa in the neighborhood of the Nairs. Among the Buntar—the highest rank of Sudras in Tulawa—a man’s children, says Buchanan, are not his heirs. During his lifetime he may give them money, but all of which he dies possessed is given to his sisters and to their children. [212] Among the Rajputs, we have traces of the system of female kinship. The Kooch have kinship and succession through females only; and so have the Bodo. Farther, we find that system among the Banyal, in Ashanti, Aguapim, and Congo, and are assured that traces of it are to be found all over Africa. We have reason to believe that it anciently prevailed among the Celts. We find traces of the like system in India, among the Sutras of Gautama. In short, though the original tradition has obviously been tampered with, enough of it remains to oblige us to acknowledge it as a genuine tradition of a stage of Aryan civilization.”

The law of Menu points out the family name as the test whether persons are of the same stock or not. The Southern Indians consider it to be highly criminal for a man to marry a woman whose totem is the same as his own, and they relate instances where young men, for a violation of this rule, have been put to death by their own relatives. Among the Iroquois, husband and wife were, by the ancient law, always of different tribes. The children belonged to the tribe of the mother. When maternal descent prevailed, there was, so to speak, a perpetual disinheritance of the male line.

The Australian family names and divisions are perpetual and spread throughout the country by the application of laws: the first, that the children of either sex always take the name of the mother; the second, that a man cannot marry a woman of his own family name.

Here are fresh instances which we take the liberty of adding to those already quoted by Mr. M’Lennan :—

“The Kanories (Central Africa) give always the mother’s name, and, at the present day, particularly to their kings The chronicles always mention the mothers’ name as a circumstance of the highest importance. The celebrated king Dunama ben Iselma at Bornan, is generally called Dibbalami, from his mother’c name Dibbala.1 His royal name, in full length, is Dibllami Dunama Iselmani; the mother’s name being prefixed to the father’s as the nobler and more important of the two Even in the driest chronicles it is impossible not to remark the great influence which the Queen mothers Validi—the Magira, as they are here called—have exercised upon the affairs the country. Here is an example in the Queen Goumssou Fa-ssa-mi, who kept own son Biri a whole year in prison, even after he had ascended the throne and another in the Queen Aaischa, mother of Edriss, who for a long period, took such part in the government that she is mentioned positively as amongst the rulers of the kingdom.’—Barth. II, 297.

Travellers have noted the same institution in many islands the Pacific Ocean. Among Hawaiians the political functions [213] were hereditary, but the rank was given by the mother. Such is, assuredly, the reason why the male members of the royal family married among the nearest of their kin, and espoused even their own sisters.

In the Gilbert and Marshall Isles the mothers give their own rank to their children. The sons of a chief never belong to the clan of their father, because the chief must always marry outside his own clan.

In the Carolina Islands certain functions are hereditary, and pass, at the functionary’s demise, to his next brothers, and to his son only alter the death of all the brothers. It is otherwise with the social rank, which is not given by the father, but by the mother; and many brothers, who are the sons of the same father, may thus belong to distinct classes of people.

The case of the Australian tribes deserves closer examination. They have departed already from the rudest and most barbarous type. Polyandry having given place to a moderate polygyny, a man may have, by various wives, different children, who will be long respectively to the tribes of their mothers. If war breaks out, all these boys will take up arms against each other, and most likely, first of all, against their own father. Carried to its extreme consequences, the Australian theory comes to this conclusion: that a father is no relation to his son; exactly the reverse of what we may be permitted to call Orestes’ formula: the son is no relation to his mother. Both maxims now grate on our ears, and are felt to be as revolting as they are absurd; and one is inclined to ask: Those feelings which are said to be innate in every human being, where then did they hide themselves; where then was the voice of blood; where then was the cry of Nature?
This Australian family makes us well aware of the evils of a system which knew nothing of the father. The filiation by the mother was only one-hall of the truth. The conflict of maternity and paternity could not fall to occasion desperate situations, finally intolerable. And, as the human mind is constantly vacillating from one extreme to another, the reformers of the family, as it was shaped then, jumped to the conclusion that a complete revolution, and a substitution of paternal for maternal filiation, was absolutely necessary. Because the father had not been [214] made of enough consequence, the mother was now to be made next to nothing. The human mind was then too narrow for the simultaneous admittance of the double parental feelings, which none of us find any difficulty in understanding.

In the society of Australia the excess of evil was destined to bring about its own remedy. Exogamy tended to develop into endogamy, and maternal filiation into paternal. When the offspring of a single father might belong to several different tribes, the youth of a single tribe comprised a variety of individuals, who fairly represented all surrounding communities. A sufficient number of young girls, who were supposed to be foreigners, grew up in each tribe, and offered material for wives at a cheaper price than perilous expeditions. Thence, possibly, the origin of marriage by coemption. When, therefore, a tribe found, itself populous, powerful, and sufficiently provided with young females, it is probable that the men gradually abandoned their raids for wives, and the community glided into endogamy Here we see the history of the development of the tribe into a n. ton. We may trace the origin of clans and families to captured women Fe- presenting different original stocks. This hypothesis s indeed less agreeable than the doctrine current in legends and ordinary history, and adopted by our Peerage books, that the ancestor of a race begat several sons whose scions formed older and younger branches of the family; and that, from intermarriage betwixt these branches, clans, tribes, and finally a whole nation arose.

Mr. M’Lennan’s hypothesis lends itself to the origin of castes as well as of families:—

“Nearly all the Indian castes, from the highest to the lowest, are divided into gotrams, or families. Marriage is prohibited between persons of the same gotram, who, according to the rule of Menu, are shown by their common name to be of the same original stock. We hold that this at once shows the caste to have been composed of members of original stocks, and the stocks themselves to have been originally exogamous. There can be little doubt that all castes of this description were farmed by these processes The Kamilaroi among the Australians appear to be such a caste. And, were the natives of Australia to be left to themselves, their system of kinship remaining what it is, we might expect hereafter to find among them numerous caste tribes of this description.”

We believe that the transition from maternal to maternal eponymy [215] can be traced to the period which immediately precedes that of authentic history. Abraham himself, the great ancestor of the Ben-Israel, whom we have been accustomed to consider as the typical Patriarch, was entirely indifferent to paternal filiation, as is shown by the fact that he married his own sister, the daughter of his father. We find the story in Genesis worded with truly antique simplicity:—

“And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife; Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon. Therefore, it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife, and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.”

This was Abraham’s answer, when reproached with his deceit:

“Yet indeed she is my sister. She is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.”

Mr. M’Lennan has been so lucky as to discover a text proving that Abraham’s marriage would have been considered legal in Attica, where a man was allowed to marry his half-sister when born of his father, but forbidden to marry her when born of the same mother. This law depended on the idea already referred to,—that no relationship existed between the father and his children, the sole parent being the mother.

According to “Primitive Marriage” the most logical progression, and probably the mo3t frequent, which, beginning by exogamous polyandry, ended in the Greco-Roman family, took place in the following manner :—

I. The mother lived apart from all her husbands, in her own house, where also her brothers dwelt, and where she reared her children. Example: A Nair woman could have no more than twelve husbands, and had to select them under certain restrictions as to rank and caste. . . . . A Nair may belong to several combinations of husbands; that is, he may have many wives. The twelve husbands therefore formed a partnership, each shareholder being entitled to enter, if he chose, eleven other firms; ingenous system of polygamous polyandry, which allowed twelve wives to each husband and twelve husbands to each wife. [216]

2. The sister separated herself from her brothers to live with her husbands. The children belonged to the mother, and not to the husbands, each of whom took his heir, not the children of the common wife, but the children of his sister, or the relatives of his mother. That system is, like the former, practised still by the Nairs; both easily coexist in the same country.

3. The conjugal abode becomes the property of the associated husbands, who bring into it their common wife, and forbid her to leave it whenever they entertain any doubts as to her fidelity. Mr. M’Lennan believes that sequestration was the means of leading to important progress. Under this régime the children belonged to the establishment rather than to their mother.

4. The common wife no longer belonged to a group of unrelated men, but to a “brotherhood,” or group of brothers. The adherents of masculine superiority may now feel satisfied; for at this stage it is easy to see that the race will be modeled by the man, and no longer by the woman. At first the offspring of this fraternal group will possess no personal father, but all, the fathers will belong to the same blood, and thus a vague idea of paternity springs up. Mr. Bachofen had already shown that the story of Bacchus Dimorphos, or Metropator, who was son both of Jupiter and Semele, symbolized this stage of progress. No equality existed between the consorts; Semele was a mortal, Jove King of the Immortals. Hence the son, arrived at maturity, does not hesitate to abandon his mother, and choose the paternal side as the most profitable.
This polyadelphic monogyny, as Linnæus would call it, persists in great purity in Thibet, and especially in Ladack.

“In Ladack,” says Moorcroft, “when an eldest son marries, the family estate descends to him, and he is charged with the maintenance of his parents. A younger son is generally made a Lama. Should there be more than two brothers, and they agree to the arrangement, they become a species of inferior husbands for the wife. All the children, however, are considered as belonging to the head f the family. The younger brothers are compelled to wait upon him as his servants, and can be turned out of doors at his pleasure, without it being incumbent upon him to provide for them. On the death of the eldest brother, his property, authority, and widow devolve upon the next eldest. This one enjoys the right of succession to his brother’s property and to his widow, and he cannot take the one without taking the other.

“The Thibetan system is the prevailing species of polyandry in nearly the whole o the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan regions,—Kashmyr, Ladak, Kinaver, Kishawar and Sinior. It is the general form in Ceylon. It is the form which Humboldt found [217] among the red men. Among the Avaroes and the Magpures, brothers have often but one wife. It is the form which Cæsar found among the Britons. We must hold that polyandry in the Thibetan form prevailed at one time throughout India among the race from which the Hebrews were descended, and among the Moabite and ancient Persians; among the Druses and all drab tribes in Syria; the Mongol, Khirgiz, Turks, and tribes of the Caucasus; among the Makololo; and, we may believe many other peoples in Africa.”

From this institution arises, in several parts of India and America, the custom of children addressing their uncles as “father.” Mr. Morgan of Rochester was the first to point it out. If there are no brothers, the nephews succeed to the inheritance, which, according to the most ancient custom, tails to the nephews, sons of the sisters; and, according to the more modern one, falls to the nephews, sons of the brothers; as happens still in the Sultan’s family in Constantinople.

According to the institutions of Manu, the widow was transmitted to the heir-brother without more ado. ‘Who would not recognize in these regulations the Levirate known to all readers of the Old and New Testament ?—the law which compelled the nearest relative to marry the widow of the heir of the family who should have died without issue, in order to perpetuate the name of the deceased.

The Levirate could only be observed so long as polygamy existed, and was doomed to disappear with it. No force could have compelled always the younger brother to separate from his own wife and bind himself to an old sister-in-law. Moreover, brothers and near relatives had little impulse to deprive themselves of an inheritance which, in default of a direct heir, would have fallen to them. The Levirate was a remnant of the system of “brotherhoods,” which began to go to pieces so soon as it ceased to be associated with collective proprietorship of the Woman or women. When each brother possessed his own wife, his own household, his own children, his interests soon began to diverge from those of the others. As the ancient family ceased to exist, the’ modern one constituted itself on the principle of transmission of blood from father to son, and of the transmission of the inheritance from eldest son to oldest son. The principle of agnation had triumphed, and under its influence society was renovated. At the death of the father the eldest son became [218] the head of the family, and inherited the whole, or at least the larger part, of the inheritance; as is still the custom in Great Britain among the nobility and the gentry. But this privilege, which has been abolished in most civilized countries, will soon be so in all, and disappear amidst few regrets. The influence of this system was at its maximum some little time ago, but has already begun to decline. Nothing is stable or permanently lasting in this world. The future family will probably be as different from the present one, as is the present from that of antiquity. Our family, essentially Greco-Roman,—like our whole civilization,—is exclusively based on paternity; but this basis did not always exist, and, therefore, can scarcely be expected to last for ever. Already has it been modified, and soon slighted motherhood will resume its rights. The mother will not always remain subject to the father’s authority; she will recover her fair share in the management of the common property arid in the education of the children. It is the sentiment of maternity which raised mankind from the mire of universal promiscuity. The mother was the first to create the family, and from this fact we may infer that through her will be shaped its final expression. Both naturalists and moralists declare that no instinct, human or simply animal, can vie in intensity with maternal love. Whereas all other passions spring from selfishness, the essence of maternity is self-abnegation. It is the most intelligent and far-sighted of impulses, and we never tire of listening to narratives of the marvellous achievements it inspires among most animal. We have every reason to believe that it is to maternal instinct we owe the first moralization of our race. Before this instinct stirred within us, we were among the lowest in the brute creation, more cruel than the tiger more treacherous than the serpent, more gluttonous than the crocodile. From a mother, smiling on her infant, came the first ray of light which illuminated the human countenance. Bret Harte tells us, in his “Luck of Roaring Camp,” how a little child, left orphaned at his wretched mother’s death amidst a horde of California miners, tamed them unconsciously into civilization. This charming story may be said to typify the history of humanity. All our political and social institutions may be traced, link by link, to a mother nursing her babe. Each modification in ante-patriarchal polyandry corresponded to some [219] change in the position of the mother. The highest expression of her importance was given in the institution of maternal eponymy. Filiation by the father was substituted for it when tribes extended into nations, and when polyandry gave place to polygamy in the governing classes, and to monogamy in the lower classes. The rights of fathers were at first asserted humbly; then more boldly; and at last despotically. Masculine pride could not have failed to revolt against maternal filiation; it wound itself around the difficulty, neutralized it, and finally conquered it. An absolute system was transformed into a mitigated one; the mitigated one into a third, totally different from the first; but this third system will not be the last one, because it is exaggerated, artificial, too conventional, and has put its social codes above Nature’s laws. Far more than man, woman clings to Nature, which man strives to obliterate and trample down. Nature was held to be identical with lust and corruption, and woman, as more akin to Nature, was made the very personification of sin; and some people have been deemed holy for never having looked at her, for never having talked to or even answered their own mothers. This nonsense, in which reveled deep theologians and high-flown mystics, is not quite an affair of the past, as many believe too readily. But it will become so promptly. If granite wears out, so does absurdity; error dissipates itself even a little quicker than Jo rocks and mountains. We conclude that our modern family itself will continue to undergo secular changes, as the old has undergone them. It is probable—nay, it is certain—that the mother will henceforth count for more than she does now, and that the child will obtain many rights of which he is now deprived. But it is not our business to guess at changes looming in the distant horizon. We are too ignorant of the family as it was to be able t foretell its future. We ignore yet its true laws of evolution; we make but surmises as to its origin, which was certainly even humbler than we can conceive. For the present the researches are to be pushed on with a patient zeal; and happy the investigators who may light upon such lucid theories as that of maternal filiation, which, supported by such arguments as those which Mr. M’Lennan has brought forward, may be hailed as a great discovery. Let us now consider why the theory of maternal filiation was readily accepted when presented by Mr. M’Lennan, whereas [220] it was pushed aside when advanced by Mr. Bachofen. This is a delicate point, upon which we shall express our opinion in all frankness.
Both writers are agreed on the main principle, but their method is wholly different. Mr. Bachofen’s arguments are borrowed from deep erudition and from subtle interpretations of an obscure symbolism, which, to be understood, demand much learning and patient inquiry, and even a special cast of mind. When he first gave to the world his far-fetched conclusions, which then were received as shocking paradoxes and unheard-of heresies, it was easy to shrug the shoulders, and answer with the disdain of ignorance, in the words of the celebrated Festus, “Thou art beside thyself, Paul; much learning doth make thee mad.” This disdain was all the more natural, as superficial minds instinctively dislike whatever is opposed to existing doctrines and conventional formulas. Learned folks of the vulgar sort, who know only what others knew already, are as pedantic as timorous. They keep aloof from new ideas, because, unable to sift them thoroughly, they deem it safer to cling fast to old tenets. Their shaky second-hand or tenth-hand scientific furniture would not bear the brunt of battle. Pedantry, which, after all, is hut porous ignorance, looks with deadly hate upon all new ideas, because they are living things, and not dry, withered flowers in a herbarium, or dusty and labelled butterflies pinned down on cork. To the common-place scientist ideas that move and wriggle about are as hateful and appalling as might be to a stuffer of hides for a Museum of Natural History the sudden coiling up of a hissing rattlesnake. Orthodox science is so averse to the discoveries that have not yet obtained official diplomas, that many precious ideas would be lost to the world were it not for the lucky interference of simple-minded and even ignorant people, who, attracted by the novelty of the things, advocate them, often very unwisely, and attach themselves to them, often by the wrong side.

So it happened that for some years Mr. Bachofen’s discovery was systematically ignored and nearly forgotten. At last the conspiracy of silence was broken up by a young professor, the only one among the host of learned men in Europe who came forward as the champion of the slighted theory. Mr. Giraud [221] Teulon expounded some of Mr. Bachofen’s views in a short pamphlet entitled, “The Mother in Certain Peoples of Antiquity,’ followed by a most interesting work on the same subject, “ The Origin of the Family.” However, the scientists above mentioned are not wholly to blame. Mr. Bachofen, impregnated as he is with deep ancient lore, initiated, we may say, in the abstrusest mysteries of Pythagorean philosophy, chose to draw from his unexpected formula the most extreme consequences. He carried his subject into chthonic religions, and he carried chthonic religions into his subject. From maternal filiation, a positive fact, he jumped at the Matriarchat, and at antique gynocracies,—a doubtful enough affair. Animated by a praiseworthy desire for completeness and accuracy, he heaped together every kind of information more or less connected with his theory, and set forth minor considerations with as much detail as essentials. His hypothetic arguments too often destroyed the effect of his solid reasoning. Mr. Bachofen gave too much, and, as a natural consequence, received in return nothing, or next to nothing. His merits have been equaled but by our ingratitude, or rather by our indifference.

Mr. M’Lennan set to work very differently. The name given to his treatise, “Primitive Marriage,” was simple, and attracted many who would have been frightened away by Mr. Bachofen’s ponderous science. He adhered closely to logic and good sense, and to facts chiefly borrowed from contemporary history. His conclusions were presented in clear and precise language; his argument was both sober and vigorous. Wherever he aimed he hit the mark. He established his facts, and troubled himself little about their consequences or the inferences which might be drawn from them. In a word, Mr. M’Lennan addressed a large and unrestricted public, while Mr. Bachofen only wrote for a chosen few. The success of the former and the apparent failure of the latter afford new proof that, for the appreciation of new ideas, a general public is a better judge than a public under the restraint of scientific technicalities. The moment inventions and discoveries, in order to be comprehended, necessitate a true disinterestedness, a real freedom, a certain breadth of intellect, they no longer belong to the domain of cultivated coteries and academic clichés. Mr. M’Lennan, in his thesis on maternal [222] than the fact of maternal filiation, and may be able to renovate in a large measure the history and science of jurisprudence. Let us say, in conclusion, that the studies of the Scotch and the Swiss savants mutually complete each other. It might be supposed that the researches of Mr. Bachofen held true, at the most, for certain nations of classical antiquity. On the other hand, Mr. Gladstone and Sir Henry Maine were willing to accept the conclusions of Mr. M’Lennan in all that relates to contemporaneous savage tribes and isolated populations, but were decidedly opposed to applying them to our Aryan ancestors, whom it is the fashion to consider a chosen people, a holy nation, an exceptional race. But these two eminent authors unconsciously
have completed each other’s arguments,—Mr. Bachofen replying to the objections raised against Mr. M’Lennan, and Mr. M’Lennan to those brought forward against Mr. Bachofen.

Elie Reclus.

Sidney H. Morse, The All-Loving

2007-08-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Radical Review, 307

THE ALL-LOVING.

Million-Folded are my likings,

All the world my well-loved home;
Would my kindred not regale me,

To their world-fires I would roam.

Pleasant ‘tis with love to tarry,—

Pleasant to recount its store:
Glooms and sorrows passing by me

Leave my heart young as before.

Listen, loved ones, o’er the planet!

Think ye not I’m lost, if missing
From your fire-lit hearths my greetings:

All your loves my love is kissing.

Warm and glowing goes my spirit

Toward my million-fated kin.
Oh! I keep their hearts enshrined

In the deep my heart within.

Sidney H. Morse.

William J. Potter, The Two Traditions

2007-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

William J. Potter, "The Two Traditions, Ecclesiastical and Scientific," The Radical Review, 1, 1 (May 1877), 1-24.

THE TWO TRADITIONS, ECCLESIASTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC

I PROPOSE to treat in this paper two views of Tradition; one of them very old, the other comparatively new. The old view is ecclesiastical, the new view is scientific. The old view is that which commonly goes by the name of Tradition in theological discussion. The new view has not yet received the name, but on etymological grounds might fairly claim it. I shall have to begin with some very familiar and elementary statements, but trust that the subject may develop, as I proceed, into phases more provocative of thought.

The ecclesiastical view of Tradition is easily stated; and, admitting its premises, is easy of comprehension. The word Tradition has a very definite meaning in religious history. It may not always be easy to define the contents of Tradition. To show the real origin of this or that doctrine or practice which is said to belong to Tradition, or to trace the changes ‘shih may occur in such doctrine or practice in historical religion, and to assign the right cause for the change, may be a difficult problem But the word Tradition itself stands for a. much simpler and more uniform conception than is usual with [2] words which have figured so largely in the history of religion. The conception in Christendom comes from Judaism, and, among the Jews, Tradition meant the unwritten law of God As Jehovah on Mt. Sinai was believed by the Jew to have directed Moses to write down certain things for a rule to the people of Israel, which made the written law of belief and duty, so it was believed that Jehovah had committed certain other things to Moses orally; that Moses had repeated these things to the elders who helped him in his office; that these elders had delivered them, also by word of mouth, to their official successors, and these, again, to theirs; and that thus a body of divine precepts had been handed down intact from one generation of Hebrew history to another, making the unwritten law of Jewish doctrine and practice. And the orthodox Jew regarded both of these rules,—the written law and the unwritten law, Scripture and Tradition,—as authoritative. The Traditions themselves finally became written in the Talmud.

The Roman Catholic doctrine of Tradition in Christian history is precisely like this of the Jews, except that Jesus and his apostles re put in the place of Moses and the elders. The Roman Catholic believes not only that the New Testament was written by divine inspiration to be a guide to the Christian Church, but that this guidance was supplemented by certain oral precepts, transmitted originally from Jesus and his apostles, and remaining now in the Church as uncorrupted and as binding as the written record. Like the Jew, the Romanist holds to the divine authority of both Scripture and Tradition.

Of course, the liability is great that any doctrine or rite which is thus committed to oral tradition alone for preservation will become corrupted, arid lose in time its original form; also that beliefs and ceremonies which may spring up and grow in religious history, one hardly knows how or whence, and which find no authority in the written law, may be referred very safely for their right to exist to this source of Tradition, the authenticity of which cannot easily be put to a test. The Roman Catholic meets this difficulty by alleging the continued supernatural inspiration of the Church. The Christian Church, he claims,—by which he means his own section of it,—is saved from all corrupting influences by its own divine nature; and the [3] sacred trusts of doctrine and ordinance committed to its keeping by the oral precepts of the first apostles are preserved in their original integrity by the gift of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously enlightens the rulers of the Church in every age. In our own rime this claim has been more closely defined, and practically made more simple, though at the expense of its rationality, by the proclamation that the Pope represents this miraculous enlightenment of the Church, and is officially clothed with infallibility.

But it is impossible that such a claim as this should be assented to by people who have once learned accurately to observe the facts of human society and history, and to use their reason upon them. As soon as and wherever thought is awakened, the claim will be questioned. The Jews never went to the extent of this modern Roman Catholic statement in behalf of the authority of Tradition; yet some of the more thoughtful and cultivated among them before the time of Jesus were wont to complain of their brethren for making too much account of Tradition in their teaching and practices. These objectors asserted that, under cover of regard for the oral law, many and gross corruptions were creeping into the faith of Israel. Notably the Sadducees made this complaint. They charged the Pharisees, who represented the mass of the people, with allowing and encouraging, under shelter of the authority of Tradition, doctrines and customs which had no vestige of foundation in the original religion as promulgated by Moses; and which, in truth, were imbibed from Persia during the period of Israel’s captivity there, or had crept in from other foreign faiths. So, too, after some ten or twelve centuries of Christian history, it began to be queried whether some things were not being proclaimed and believed as Christian truth, on the authority of Tradition, whose real source might be found in Pagan religions or in the infirmities of human ignorance and passion. And no very deep learning nor preternaturally sharp eyes were required, but only the strong common sense and preponderance of reason over sentiment which characterized the Teutonic mind, to detect that these human infirmities, though clothed in saintliest robes and elevated to thrones of absolute power, were far from being saved from their natural human [4] consequences by any overshadowing protection of the Divine Spirit. Hence Luther and the Reformation, and the formal abolition of Tradition in Protestant Christendom as a source and channel of spiritual truth.

But Protestant Christianity also has its definition of Tradition, as well as the thing itself. Protestant theologians do not much use the word, regarding it rather as damaged phraseology. Nevertheless they claim that on Tradition rightly understood all true religion has been founded. The ordinary Protestant position is that Tradition was limited to the primitive divine act by which all necessary spiritual truth was delivered over to certain persons specially chosen and prepared to receive it, these parsons writing it all down in so-called sacred books, and leaving nothing that was important to the uncertain medium of oral repetition. A well known Protestant author, of recognized authority, expresses it thus: “Primarily, Tradition stands for a doctrine first delivered by speech from God, and afterwards written in his book for the use of the Church.’ And, on the most important point this agrees with the Roman Catholic definition; the point, namely, where the origin of religious truth is touched. Both Protestantism and Catholicism make Tradition the starting-point of revealed religion. They alike regard all true religion as the product of a certain supernatural act, by which the Almighty directly and personally gave to man a set of doctrines to be believed, and a code of duties to be performed. And this statement expresses the central idea in the ecclesiastical view of Tradition. Some such belief as this will be found in the ecclesiasticism of all the important faiths of the world. The Catholic definition of Tradition in Christendom, and the Pharisaic in Judaism, with their special recognition of the oral channel as well as the written message, are but different phases in the development of this one primary conception. The main and controlling thought is that religious truth is primarily given outright and complete to mankind, by a few very definite supernatural transactions between an Almighty Being and certain human beings whom he has chosen as media of communication: this truth, thus miraculously handed over to man f rain his creator, [5] is then preserved,—either by book, or orally, or both—as the perfect rule of faith and duty for the human race.

If what I have said thus far seems familiar and common-place, it is because I have tried faithfully to present the ordinary ecclesiastical view of Tradition,—a presentation that was a necessary condition for a clear development of the course of thought which I have in mind. But this simple idea, natural to a childlike state of human intelligence, of resting religious faith wholly on one or two alleged historical transactions of a miraculous nature in the distant past, has not been permitted to pass unquestioned in any religion. In these latter times, and in Christendom especially, the idea has been vigorously attacked. It is objected that such a theory of the origin and authority of religious truth removes the Divine Power far away from present scenes of human life, and makes religion now a second-hand affair; that it compels the worship of the letter, and imprisons the religious sentiment in technical forms; that it requires people to observe where the Almighty has been rather than where he is, and to adore a memory more than a living Presence. It is claimed that Creative Power must he as near the earth to-day as it ever was; that a Being conceived as infinite and omnipresent cannot also be logically conceived as coming to and going away from the world, but must be ever immanent in Nature and man,—the Law of Nature’s laws, the continued sustenance of every normal energy of the human mind; that Inspiration is not local, intermittent, supernatural, but constant, natural, universal; and that somewhat of genuine truth and faith has been possessed by every race and nation of the human family. In fine, instead of this traditional religion preserved through a book, or a church, or a ceremony, the counter proposition has been maintained that every mar by himself stands in the attitude of immediate communication with Divine Power, and draws therefrom, through his natural faculties of intelligence, conscience, and spiritual aspiration, the moral and mental nutriment by which he lives now and is forever to live; and that, therefore, for the authority of tradition, however vouched for, as a basis of religion, must be substituted the authority of human consciousness,---or, in other words, the aggregated [6] authority of individual reason, intuition, conscience; that these, enlightened to the best of each man’s ability, offer the requisite guide in all matters of belief arid duty: the revealed word of God for each human being is to be listened for in the utterances of his own soul. This we shall recognize as the teaching of the Intuitional, or Transcendental, philosophy as applied to religion, in opposition to the doctrine of Tradition as ecclesiastically defined.

And now Science appears, propounding a new doctrine of Tradition; a kind of tradition very different from that which the ecclesiastical word stands for,—in fact, wholly undermining its chief assumptions; yet, on the other hand, crossing some of the theological affirmations of the Intuitional philosophy, and taking such a position with regard to the two sets of conclusions respectively drawn from the ecclesiastical idea of Tradition and from the philosophical idea of Intuition as eventually, perhaps, to effect a reconciliation between them in their application to religious problems.

How, then, shall we state the scientific doctrine of Tradition? Is it that man was instantaneously created, with the form, features, appearance, organs which his body presents in the advanced state of civilization where we observe him to-day, and that then, by special creative act, there was breathed into this body, as a receptacle prepared for it, a living soul, endowed with all the faculties of thought, affection, and will, such we are now familiar with in human beings? By no means. Nor again that at special and critical times the Creator chose certain individuals out of the human race, and by exceptional and supernatural means made them the depositary of his thoughts and wishes concerning mankind,—decanting, as it were, into a few finite minds a set of theological ideas and religious precepts, with the injunction that these elect individuals were to pour out the miraculous gift in turn into some common receptacle for the benefit of their fellow-men. The scientific doctrine of Tradition, of course, is not so crudely mythological as this. It points us back to no such definite personal transaction, but takes us into the region of slowly operating, far-reaching, and subtly penetrating natural law. Yet it holds much more closely than the common ecclesiastical view of [7] Tradition to the etymological significance of the word. The doctrine is that each generation of men hands over to its successor, by natural ways, the consolidated results of its own experience,—passing on to the common mental property of the race whatever of accumulation it has added, of thought, affection, moral sensibility, practical power, and beneficence, to the vital stock of human society; having inherited from the preceding generation a certain amount of the same kind of stock to begin with. The process is like capital invested in trade, or money at interest. Each generation, if faithful to its trust, increases the capital which it received from its predecessor in the various kinds of knowledge open to human capacity, and in their application to human welfare; and hands down, therefore, to the generation that inherits its possessions, not only the original capital, but the income from the wise use of it added.

And the original capital of all, that sum of resources with which primitive man began business on this planet, the mental, moral, religious sensibility, or capacity for sensibility, which the first human beings are supposed to have possessed,—does the new Science resort to the ecclesiastical idea of Tradition to account for that? Does it assume that this primary mental and moral outfit was transferred outright to man in full efficiency by Creative will? Again, by no means. The new scientific view simply follows back this same idea,—that each generation begins as the product of preceding generations, and ends by the natural transmission of its own achievements to form the next generation,—and applies the conception there at the initial point of the human race. The claim is vigorously maintained by not-a few of the most eminent living scientists,— indeed, we may almost say that it is established,—that the faculties possessed by the first beings that could be called human were not such as to require an act of miraculous infiltration of divine power to account for them, but were the evident result of the life and accumulating experience of thousands upon thousands of generations of beings for innumerable cycles of previous ages; that, in fact, all previous processes and energies of the universe (so far as they come within the limits of human knowledge), with their countless forms of organic life and activity,—species following upon species, and [8] through a natural process of differentiation arid selection improving constantly by experience,—culminated in the mental and moral consciousness of man; that man, therefore, in his first appearance on the earth is himself the creature of tradition, having a genealogy that runs back through all phases of animal, and even of vegetable, life prior to him, and in the contents of his being holding the product of a force that began its career at a past era so remote as to be beyond all human power of measurement or comprehension.

This doctrine denies that any insuperable line of demarcation can be drawn between primitive man and the highest order of animals before him. It claims that there was no space, no gap, which Tradition had to leap by a miracle. No other tradition was required than that established in the natural law of transmission and inheritance. The difference between the highest civilized races of mankind today and the lowest existing savages is scarcely less than the difference between the lowest savages and the highest order of the brute creation. And the primeval men, according to this doctrine, were in a savage state, and doubtless lower than any existing savages. But there are tribes of savages now existing who manifest great dulness of mental and moral perception. Hence, it were absurd to suppose that the primitive human race was endowed with the same mental and moral ideas, or even sensibilities, that are manifest in civilized society in the nineteenth century. These ideas and sensibilities, even those moral and religious perceptions which we today call intuitions, are, this scientific doctrine alleges, the product of the accumulated and often bitter experience of the human race; and the beginnings of them, in that distant past which we cannot measure, arc the product of the accumulated experience of races before the human. As Herbert Spencer expresses it:

“The experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition,—certain emotions corresponding to right and wrong] conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” And Mr. Darwin, in “The Descent of [9] Man,” sets himself confidently to the task of showing by the most patient and frank elaboration of evidence, that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties,” but that a legitimate mental relationship, through laws of natural physical descent, exists between the two; and that the human moral sense was gradually developed by natural inheritance and growth in the same way, its origin being “social sympathy,” which is characteristic of the higher animal orders as well as of man. He says it is probable “that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, would inevitably require a moral sense, or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” He traces religious beliefs and sentiments back by the same method, and conjectures for them a similar germination; finds something akin to the sentiment of worship in the adoration of the dog for his master; and sums up the whole argument in defining instinct and intuition by the exceedingly felicitous phrase, “inherited habit.”

In this phrase, which is itself an argument, we have a concise statement of the scientific doctrine of Tradition. It carries us back to no specific, complete, full-rounded revelation of truth at some definite moment of time, gives us no picture of Infinite Being imparting by one act conscious perceptions of truth and right to the finite mind of man; but it directs us backward through the clear or tangled ways of human history, beyond the road of all recognized history and the era of all so-called Sacred Books, to a revelation that began in the first rude monosyllabic stammerings of the beings in whose intelligence first dawned the sense of the word ought, and whose consciousness first thrilled with the impulse of adoration before some unseen Power; a, back of that remote era, to the strivings of Nature upward, through manifold forms of organism and tentative experiments of life, to reach the point where these stammerings became possible; and thence forward, following the revelation—the light of Truth and Social Order and Virtue—as it has spread and increased by natural process from lower forms of humanity to higher, through successive races, religions migrations, civilizations, literatures, and through all the ages [10] Primeval and historic, down to this point of time in the nineteenth century and to these familiar phases of moral, religious, and social life amidst which we are living to-day.

This, then, is what may be well called the Scientific view of Tradition. And what shall we say now of its bearing on questions of ethical and religious philosophy, and especially in regard to certain widely prevailing theological conceptions in Christendom? First, we may say that the view agrees with the ecclesiastical doctrine of Tradition in this particular,—that it lays special and great emphasis upon the past for what man is at present as an intellectual and moral being But it differs fundamentally from the ecclesiastical doctrine in respect to the mode in which the past preserves authority over the present. Ecclesiasticism teaches that there is a separate and supernatural channel, external as it were to the ordinary and natural course of human development, through which certain truths, miraculously revealed to man at the outset of his career, have since been transmitted. Science teaches that the transmission and origin of such truths is internal,—that these truths, or beliefs, are involved in the natural organism and development of the race itself, and become apparent in the ordinary unfoldings of human history. This scientific view, again, agrees with the intuitional philosophy—in opposition to the ‘ecclesiastical view of Tradition—in recognizing the present declarations of human intelligence in matters of truth and duty as more authoritative than any alleged revelation at a definite era in the past can possibly be,—since the intelligence embodied in the highest human races to-day has beneath it the accumulated wisdom of all the past. But it also differs from the usual interpretations of the intuitional philosophy in that it goes back of the intuitions to account for them,—claiming ability to prove that, instead of being the direct gift or immediate manifestation of an external Creative Power, they are the gradually consolidated product of an experience extending back into an infinite antiquity: not so much, therefore, the immediate voice of a personal Deity in each individual soul, as the condensed lesson of a vast and august series of efforts of the Creative Energy. Now, since the scientific view of Tradition has points of unity with both the intuitional and the ecclesiastical schools [11] religious thought, while on other points it opposes both one of its excellent effects may be, assuming that its truth will be established, to furnish a basis of reconciliation between these two antagonistic parties. It may in time lead the ecclesiastical traditionalists to abandon their superfluous theory of a supernatural and exclusive channel for the reception and transmission of divine instruction for mankind, and to adopt instead the natural courses, through which perceptions of truth and right have been acquired and transmitted, as the legitimate and all-sufficient mode of divine revelation. And on the other hand, it may lead the intuitionalists to regard as more important than they have been wont to do the accumulated teachings of the past, or the general mental and moral sense of the most developed portions of the human race, as a means of verifying present theories and declarations which may be put forth on the alleged authority of individual personal consciousness and inward vision.

And here is a point which may well detain us for a moment, since it touches some questions of immediate practical interest. The point is that the deliverances of individual conscious must be able to show a connection with the general human consciousness, in order to legitimate their validity. All researches into the phenomena of history are daily bringing additional proof of close organic relationship between individual man and universal man. From every direction the facts multiply, disclosing the subtile threads of the natural lineage which connects the beliefs, thought, customs, language, institutions of the modern civilized world with the farthest antiquity of the race. Thus the materials of all past human experience go t the making of the mental and moral intelligence of the present age, and produce a certain average of mental and moral sensibility, or certain common elements of mental and moral sentiment: and these common elements must appear in the action of every individual mind, whatever else it may or else that mind testifies against itself as having lost by some mental derangement healthy relationship with its kind. And here is a test by which individual vagaries and idiosyncrasies may be discriminated from the genuine human consciousness; a. test by which we may detect when personal conceit, or [12] ambition, or passion, or a disordered imagination usurps the place of a real deliverance of truth, The light of consciousness may flame up higher and brighter in certain individuals than it does in the ordinary level of humanity; but it must have beneath it for fuel, and flame up from, the same elements of mental and moral perception that have become the common property of surrounding mankind: else it is an ignis fatuus, a delusive taper, which, having no permanent and substantial source of sustenance, must soon expire. The genuine “Inner Light,” to use the fine Quaker phrase, must be lighted from the substance of the common reason and the common conscience, with whatever exceptional brilliancy it may in some instances shine. In other words, however much consciousness may be refined in some persons to nicer sensibility and clearer perception, producing the sage and the genius, yet it must to a certain extent harmonize with the public intelligence and the public conscience, because of the mental and moral solidarity of the race. The New Testament saying, that “no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation,” suggests a larger truth than it utters; namely, that the Infinite dues not impart itself on any principle of monopoly, and that no private soul can set up a claim to have an exclusive revelation of he Divine Mind. The revelation, to be valid, must prove its hereditary relationship with universal truth. To this test we must bring all claims that may be made to a knowledge of truth on the ground of individual consciousness.

And in this test a mental safeguard is furnished against the danger that the cry of some exaggerated personal fancy or disordered imagination may be taken for the veritable voice of truth. A peril of this sort vitiates the sectarian interpretation of the noble Quaker doctrine of the “Inner Light,” as also the daimon of Socrates, the visions of Swedenborg, the ecstasy of the Mystics, and the modern spiritualistic claim of possession and inspiration by the spirits of the departed. Whenever the doctrine of the “Inner Light,” or of intuitive consciousness, has led individuals to claim the power of personal prophecy and vision, disconnected from all evidence of facts and grounds of reason; or has impelled zealous cevotee&tv2ik naked through the streets to testify to the Lord’s displeasure [13] against the people’s sin of extravagance and luxury; or has inculcated the belief that an edifying ministry may be sustained without learning, thought, or culture, on the ground that the Divine Spirit, or the spirits of dead men, will suggest both thoughts and words at the time of utterance; or has taken the form of a claim to have received a complete volume of religions directly from God, like the book of Mormon,—we may pretty sure that the mind in which such beliefs and impulses are generated has in some way lost healthy connection with the common mental stock of mankind, and that the real inner light of personal consciousness has been eclipsed by a cloud of intellectual delusion.

And the same test is a moral safeguard, too, against the danger that the doctrine of following individual reason and conscience may be pushed to an extreme individualism, under cover of which a claim may be set up for the vicious indulgence of personal passion and desire. For, just as certain mental aberrations from a certain standard of intelligence are intellectual lunacy against which society protects itself, so any gross departures from a certain common moral standard, which the aggregate of human experience thus far has established as the line of social ethics, are to be treated as moral lunacy. Whenever, under the plea of free reason and free conscience, the pursuit of individual impulse leads beyond this line, the inquiry is in order whether it is reason and conscience, or only disordered and selfish passion, that holds the guiding rein. Wherever reason and conscience really guide, there is necessarily recognition of the relation of the individual, not only to his own objects and impulses, but to the human race as a whole; and for every personal right that is claimed, a corresponding duty towards society is acknowledged.

So much for the modifications which this scientific view of Tradition might effect in the critical application of the philosophy of intuition, and for the restraints it might throw around the doctrine of individual liberty. It should be added, however, that they are not modifications that would invalidate, or restraints that would hinder, the peculiar services for humanity rendered by the great seers, sages, and geniuses.—the men who, like Moses, Sakya Muni, Jesus, Luther, Dante, Shakspere, [14] appear to stand so high above their contemporaries as to gaze at truth with clearer vision and who speak or act with a power that visibly lifts mankind upward to a higher level of life. Even scientific men have visions, or catch glimpses, of great principles, and laws of Nature long before they are able logically, or experimentally, to authenticate them. But these previsions of truth have their origin in some suggestion made by a fact already authenticated, ad so meet the required test: which, whether in the domain of physical or religious science, is that the new truth shall have natural and valid relationship with the old; that the personal proclamation shall not be put forth on authority exclusively personal and special, but shall be based on grounds that are common to speaker and hearer,—the personal proclaimer only making a finer and clearer revelation of what is already in many hearts. There has been but one Shakspere in human history. Yet no name in literature is so universal; no author combines so many interests of our common humanity. It is claimed in Christendom that Jesus occupied an entirely exceptional position as a teacher of religion,—that he received his truths direct from heaven, and bad thence also special endorsement of his right to teach them. But the common people had little difficulty in comprehending him,—not so much, indeed, as the learned,—and, we are told, “heard him gladly.” And this was really a more genuine credential of the authority which went with his teachings, and which has preserved them to this day, than any miracles which he is alleged to have performed.

It is to be observed, too, that what is here said of the weakness of the claims which are made for special personal revelations will apply equally well to the claims which ecclesiasticism sets up for the authority of all its traditions; for these traditions, it is maintained, had their origin in a specific revelation through supernaturally illuminated personal vision, the things thus seen having been then committed to oral transmission or to scripture. The test that sets aside the claims of Mormonism and of the Oneida Community to-day, ser aside no less all irrational and immoral doctrines and custom that may appeal to the Bible, or the Koran, or the Vedas, for their right to exist. The only sale place of trust is to be found [15] in this gradually developing moral intelligence of the race,— which pronounces at any time its clearest voice in the communities where civilization has reached the point of highest elevation, and which in the course of human progress comes to sit in judgment on the ancient prophets and bides themselves, with authority to sift all their teaching and to revise all traditions.

But this scientific view of Tradition—now commonly styled the doctrine of Evolution—starts questions that concern religious and moral faith mere vitally than any we have yet considered. The objection that the dignity of the human race is assailed, if man be thus linked in natural kinship with the brute animals, is becoming antiquated, and needs no consideration. To ridicule the theory, and oppose those who hold it with theological abuse, neither intimidates scientific men nor abolishes the facts upon which they claim that the theory rests. To ask if you want a monkey for an ancestor may raise a laugh among the bystanders; but science is not answered by a laugh and does not consult the caprice of human wishes so much a the purport of Nature’s facts. But even if it were a question of the dignity of the human race, it might be replied that it is better to have risen from an ape than, according to the popular theological theory, to have fallen from an angel. It is more honorable to be climbing up than slipping down. And there are species of animals with whom we might more proudly claim cousinship than with some specimens if mankind. But this concern lest human dignity is to suffer from any earnestly advocated theory of science is puerile. Graver questions demand attention.

Suppose this scientific view to be true; suppose man, as we find him in civilized society to-day, with all his beliefs, faiths, moralities, humanities, arts, sciences, power, to be only a natural and gradually evolved product of the accumulated experiments of certain organic forces that have been acting upon each other from the beginning of time to the present moment: how is this to affect the common belief in God, the common belief in an immutable moral law, the common belief in conscience as the human representative of that law, the common belief in intuitive perceptions as representing absolute realities, [16] the common belief in humanity as in direct communication with Divinity and under divine guidance? Here are questions that go to the centre of things. They arc questions that must be met with all candor and seriousness. But, in the limits of a magazine article, the answers are to be suggested rather than elaborated to completeness.

First, as to belief in God. It seems inevitable that this new scientific view of creation and of man’s relation to the universe in which he lives,—that any scientific view of the matter which stands a chance of being rationally justified,—should very essentially modify the conception of Deity as it has been ecclesiastically taught in Christendom. It must, as it becomes accepted, very materially change the popular idea of the external relation which Deity holes to the universe. It must revolutionize the entire ecclesiastical theory of the method of Divine Providence. it must, in time, wholly eradicate the mechanical view of the creation and regulation of the world,— the view that represents Almighty Power as embodied in a vast individual being, patterned after the form of man, only inconceivably greater, having an existence distinctly separate from the universe, and making the world in a definite period of time and superintending its movements from the outside, as a man might make and watch over a machine. This whole conception, with all its kindred and allied notions, must be relegated to the regions of mythology.

But when we have said this, have we not said all? “All, indeed,” many might be disposed to answer, “and enough to leave only atheism.” But to modify the conception we may have of a being is not to abandon all belief in the being. To eradicate one form of idea is not necessarily to eradicate the substance of thought for which the idea was meant to stand. To change our theory of the method by which power may manifest itself is not to say there is no power at all And, whatever theory science may establish concerning the creation and sustenance of the universe, it does not and cannot get rid of the central substance of what mankind have meant to signify through the word Deity and its cognate terms in different languages and religions. Science and culture are even modifying and refining the form of the thought, but the vital [17] germ of the thought remains. So, let science now trace the universe back through a system of evolving forces as far as it may, it must necessarily come somewhere to a force that resists its analysis. Scientific men admit this necessity, and, if they claim to he philosophers also, are apt to call this boundless region of powers and possibilities beyond their present search, “The Unknowable.” But “The Unknown” would be a more accurate form of expression; for human thought is continually pushing its explorations into this vast land of shadows, and translating its unknown possibilities into facts of positive knowledge,—proving that behind any present boundary of the Unknown there is always power and being. Yet we cannot conceive that finite mind can ever come to the end of this region of the Unknown and be able to say there is nothing beyond, and therefore no possibilities of further knowledge. To the finite mind, let it advance in knowledge as far as it may, there must ever remain a Beyond unexplored, unlimited, infinite. And we can no more conceive of this infinite Beyond as merely blank space and time than we can conceive of it as sheer nothingness. In it we know, as well as we know any thing that our eyes cannot see nor hands touch, there must be somewhat of existence and power. Up to it we trace clearly the threads of creating, sustaining, vitalizing forces which our knowledge grasps, and we keep tracing them farther and farther as fresh knowledge pushes back continually the boundary of the Unknown. What then? Do these threads suddenly case at that movable line? Such a supposition were as absurd as to declare that a rivulet ceases at the point where impenetrable thickets make it impossible for us further to follow back its course. We know that the Nile has a source, though we may not be able to find it. So we know that these threads of organic, formative energy, which science traces through the wondrous phenomena of the universe, run back behind the veil of human ignorance to sources of power and life whose existence must be admitted, though not revealed. And we know more. We know somewhat of the nature of these hidden sources of the universe. What is in the issue must be, at least potentially, in the source. The elements of being must be akin on both sides of the veil.

But there is one secret which science, with all its research, [18] never fathoms. The primal impulse with which things began yields to no experiments nor discoveries. This remains as much a mystery to-day as in the days of Pythagoras or the writer of Genesis. Science follows the illuminated line of natural laws and forces close up to the hounds of the great Mystery, and peers with awe into its depths, but never uncurtains it. Scientific men can trace the ways and by-ways of development in the world’s phenomena; may be able to tell us clearly how this form has come from that, and that species from another, and how one chain of power binds all the phenomena together,——but the original power itself, the evolving, developing force, the directive agency, the formative principle, or whatever other name be given to it, eludes all search, though it must always be assumed. Who will venture to say, then, that the scientific theory of creation is atheistic; since it only come, after it long journey, to the old Scriptural text, “Touching the Almighty we cannot find Him out”? Yet the Secret Power, Cause within cause, Force behind all laws, Motor within a movement, is necessarily assumed to exist: and the universe is somehow its work, and held within its grasp to-day! And is there not at least as much reverence in this silent recognition of Infinite Being, and patient devoted study of its ways and purposes,—though confessing that the finite mind cannot comprehend it in the entirety of its power,—as in the claim that mankind has received a definite revelation of the whole scheme and plan of creation as conceived by an Infinite Mind, and possesses a knowledge of religious and moral truth sufficient for all possible human needs for all time?

Secondly, does this new scientific view imperil the authority of conscience and moral law? I answer that, though it should be proved that conscience is a faculty which has been gradually acquired under the pressure of social experience; that moral intuitions are inherited habits of judgment into which mankind has slowly grown; that our perceptions of right and wrong, our sense of duty, our obligations of honor and virtue, are all the product of the laboriously accumulated and transmitted knowledge of things as they have been found to serve individual utility under the rough discipline of millions of generation of animated existence,—still it would not follow that the validity [19] of these intuitions and perceptions were disproved or even assailed. Nor is such a result claimed by any noted scientists. To account for the moral intuitions in a natural way is not to deny them. To say that intuition is “inherited habit” is not to say that intuition does not exist. It would not even follow that all the elements of these intuitions come from outward experience, and that nothing has been furnished from the mind itself, or from the organizing principle in animated existence as distinguished from the environment. The principle of utility may have been the practical agency for evolving the moral sense, and yet not account for the primal seed of the moral sense. Let it be admitted that all races and classes of mankind do not possess the same degree of moral sensibility; grant that there are ravages who have little or no perception of the Golden Rule as a guide of life, and whose moral nature seems scarcely above that of the highest brutes,—still it is certain that, as civilization proceeds and men advance in general intelligence and culture, there is, whatever be the varieties of race or the differences in outward condition and experience, a convergence towards unity of moral perception. Whence come this common drift and direction, this steady aim within the evolving action?—this progress in the process? How happens it that the principle or utility, operating in the midst of such various and even contradictory conditions, brings out at last substantially the same result? Whence the fact that men every where arriving a certain stage of mental development, come essentially to the same moral intuitions? Can we answer these questions without admitting that there is something in the organizing, evolving power which determines moral direction and sets the process definitely towards a goal? To account for the moral facts in human history, must we not claim that there was that in the germinal essence whence all things have sprung which guided the grand process upward to a definite result,—just as there is that in the elm-seed which, amidst whatever conditions of environment, determines the product into an elm-tree, and never an oak, or any thing but a elm?

If it be objected that the facts do not indicate moral unity,—that in reality there is great difference in the moral standards of different races and communities even when tolerably cultivated, [20] the people of one country sometimes regarding actions as right and praiseworthy which the people of another country will condemn as wrong,—the reply is ready, that differences of this kind occur in the application of moral principle, and convictions rather than in the principles and convictions themselves. Men may agree, for instance, that there is such a thing as justice, and define it in the same way, and alike declare its authority over human conduct, and yet differ as to what particular course of conduct justice might require in a given case. And these differences in respect to the application of moral principles are precisely such as we might expect would be produced by different sets of external conditions. But amidst all these differences there is essential agreement on the principle themselves; and this is the kind of moral unity that concerns the question under discussion. Take the nations that have risen to a civilization adequate to the production of a literature, and they show a wonderful unity in the elements of moral sentiment, and a growing unity a mental enlightenment has increased and become more general. Consider the great historical religions of mankind. With all their differences of custom and belief, and wide variety of educational discipline from outward circumstances, there is among them a startling harmony of ethical statement. We may read in them all essentially the same precepts in behalf of truthfulness, kindness, justice, purity. Is it possible that these precepts, and the moral sense of obligation involved in each of them, have been wrought out solely by the principle of serving individual utility, with no determining moral germ at the outset upon which this principle has acted? Has the principle of utility, with no essential moral distinctions or purposes as a foundation to begin upon, by mere accident or caprice amidst the heterogeneous conditions of human development, determined that certain classes, of actions shall be called virtuous or just o honorable; and upon this wholly factitious and. arbitrary ground finally built up a complete ethical system for mankind Moreover, whence comes the power to distinguish between a lower and higher utility, and to choose the latter, though distant and uncertain, in preference to the former, which may be sure and close at hand? And whence the obligation that [21] men often feel to serve others’ welfare rather than their own,—to sacrifice, indeed, individual utility to universal good By what metamorphosis can the selfish principle of serving individual utility ever be transformed into an act of genuine self-sacrifice? Can selfishness beget the love that utterly forgets and abandons self? If not, must not Love, Good-will, have been in some way involved in the developing process of the world from the beginning? Whence comes it that the Golden Rule has been independently reached, and uttered in nearly the same form, in three different quarters of the globe and among as mans’ different nations and religions? Whence comes it but from the fact that the principle of beneficence, or the principle of the Golden Rule, is one of the original germs of mind itself,—that it is an inherent element in the very substance of that Power which becomes manifest in the developing process of the universe—that it was first involved and hence has been evolved? The Golden Rule comes whenever and wherever man attains to any good degree of enlightenment, because the seed of it is in his nature; or, to go farther back, because the seed of it was in the germinal substance out of which man’s nature has been developed: in protoplasm, or whatever else was the primal germ-world whence all finite things started on their career.

And it argues nothing against the validity of this or any moral perception, to show that it does not appear until certain conditions of development are presented. The important question is, Does it appear at all? Is it there? And the fact that under such variety of environment, amidst such differences of external conditions and experience, men do in time develop substantially the same moral perceptions, come to the same sense of the binding obligations of virtue, reach the same convictions of the moral beauty of beneficence, show the same admiration for acts of brave honesty and self-sacrifice, is the strongest possible proof that these moral convictions and intuitions—and the same may be said of intuitions with regard to intellectual truths—represent immutable distinctions and realities. They are what they are, and could not have been otherwise than they are, because they are the very substance of that eternal power which science traces back by the pathway of wondrous phenomena to the secret places of more wondrous Mystery, and which is signified by the word [22] Divinity; unfolding itself, revealing its own essence and nature, in the consciousness of humanity. Thus the validity of conscience and of the moral sentiments in general, so far from being endangered by the new science, is strengthened; since their authority, instead of being left to the uncertain dependence of special personal revelation, transmitted by corruptible scripture or tradition, is established ineradicably in the nature of things.

Thirdly and finally, how must this new scientific view of the universe affect our personal relations to this Infinite Power? If this view be true, what becomes of the doctrine of Providential care and love? Doubtless, if this view be substantiated, since it must greatly modify the commonly accepted conception of Deity, it must also correspondingly modify the common idea of personal relation between him and human beings. But the relation is not necessarily on this account the less real or the less spiritually productive and satisfying. The popular theological view represents Deity as enthroned in the heavens, and as thence watching over the member of the human family with sovereign majesty or paternal solicitude, and communicate with them, through the vast intervening spaces, by the mysterious supernatural agency of his spirit. But suppose, in place of this conception, anthropomorphic and crude, we conceive of our relations to Deity as wholly internal and natural; suppose that we believe literally with Paul, that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being,”—does that make personal relations to him any the less close and vital? The divine influence certainly is as real, if, instead of conceiving it as passing by some miraculous process through the air, we believe that it comes into our being through our natural faculties and intuitions: and these faculties and intuitions themselves are none the less the work and product of divine power, though the power hrs been by so long a way working up to them, than if they were the immediate creation and endowment by the Almighty for each individual soul. The thought, indeed. is intellectually and morally ennobling, that man is the culmination and crown of this vast process of the ages,—that the creative energy, which has been working its way slowly and patiently from the simplest beginnings up through manifold forms of organism and life, comes to consciousness of itself in the mental and moral being of man; and [23] henceforth has in him a self-directive organizer of it purposes and fulfiller of its aims: a son, who carries on his manly brow the marks of his wondrous parentage.

Nor is the power any the less near or present because of the long road by which it has been travelling. Niagara loses nothing of its stupendous mightiness, though we may trace the majestic volume of its waters back to the rills in the far-off mountains where came the first bubbles from the soil, and though the precipice itself may have been in slow process of forging for ages under the Titanic forces of Nature. The power is present and in it all the same. A rose is as sweet and beautiful, though we know it to be the organized essences of elements that have been gradually drawn from surrounding air and water and earth and the distant sun, as it would be if it were a sudden apparition in our gardens from the skies.

Will the theological critics object, however, that they miss the Father’s face; that here, indeed, is order, law, majesty, beauty perchance, but no personal Providence, no paternal Heart? It is much, certainly, to see a father’s face. But do we rationally expect ever to be able to localize the Infinite Father’s face? Must we not be content to see its smile in the features of the universe and in the face of humanity; in the faces of our own fathers and mothers; in the lives of the good and brave; in the love of the friend at our side? surely, it is not to remove us beyond the reach of a paternal Providence, when we believe that the providence and the paternity, the wise foresight and the loving heart, are inwrought into the very law and life of the world wherein we daily share! It is the divine energy, springing in its finite manifestations, we know not whence nor how, from the primal fount of Being, which, thus working through the ages and through all the anterior forms of existence, makes, the very substance of the life that is ours to-day. Far away from God? Rather are we so close to him that we cannot see him apart from ourselves! In his light we see light By his love our hearts are warmed and thrilled with manifold forms of human love. In our consciences we feel the pulse-beats of his eternal rectitude. Coldly separate and distant? Oh, no! Rather do we stand in the very current of his living energies; [24] and day by day, more literally than the old Hebrew poet thought, he maketh us “drink of the river of his pleasures.”

William J. Potter

Benjamin R. Tucker, The Lesson of Homestead

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Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Lesson of Homestead,” Liberty, 8, 48 (Jul 23, 1892), 2.

The Lesson of Homestead.

Regarding method, one of the truths that has been most steadily inculcated by this journal has been that social questions cannot be settled by force. Recent events have only confirmed this view. But when force comes, it sometimes leads incidentally to the teaching of other lessons than that of its own uselessness and becomes thereby to that extent useful. The appeal to force at Homestead affords a signal example of such incidental beneficence, for it has forced the capitalistic papers of the country, and notably the New York “Sun,” to take up a bold defence of liberty in order to protect property. Now, all that Anarchism asks is liberty, whether it protects property or lot; and when the enemies of liberty can find no way of saving their own interests except by an appeal to liberty, Liberty means to make a note of it and hold them to it.

Listen, therefore, to the New York “Sun” preaching the gospel of liberty. The passages here quoted are fair samples of its editorial column for the last fortnight.

If a man has labor to sell, he must find some one with money to buy it, or it is of no more use to him than unused capital is to Mr. Carnegie. If the man does not like the price offered, he can reject it. If the buyer does not like the price asked, lie has the same liberty. Neither is obliged to accept, the bargain, though both are under the same law which forces men to take what they can get. If the laborer does not want the work longer than he contracted to give it, he can throw it up, and the employer has the same right to dispense with the laborer. The workman can choose his employer, and the employer can choose his workman. No law can take away that right from either. The workman can refuse to work and the employer to hire. Such is liberty.
. . . . . . . . . .
There are a good many fools and there are not a few scoundrels in the United States: but, even if the scoundrels could persuade the fools that violence is a friend of the workmen, the great majority of the American people, heartily despising the scoundrels and pitying the fools, would stand up for the right of every citizen to enjoy his own property and select his own employees, for the right of every citizen to work for whom he chooses, and to belong or not to belong to a labor organization, as he chooses. By whatever folly or violence these rights are attacked, they are invincible while the present idea of civilization lasts.

Truth, every word! Golden truth! Anarchistic truth! But the bearing of this truth, as Cap’n Cuttle would say, lies in the application of it. Applied to the conduct of the Homestead strikers, this principle of equal liberty, of which the “Sun’s” words are an expression, instead of condemning it as the “Sun” pretends, palliates and even excuses it; for, before these strikers violated the equal liberty of other, their own right to equality of liberty had been wantonly and continuously violated. But, applied to the conduct of capitalists generally, it condemns it utterly, for the original violation of liberty in this matter is traceable directly to them.

This is no wild assertion, but a sober statement of fact, as I will explain. It is not enough, however true, to say that, “if a man has labor to sell, he must find some one with money to buy it”; it is necessary to add the much more important truth that, if a man has labor to sell, he has a right to a free market in which to sell it, a market in which no one shall be prevented by restrictive laws from honestly obtaining the money to buy it. If the man with labor to sell has not this free market, then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken front him. Now, such a market has constantly been denied, not only to the laborers at Homestead, but to the laborers of the entire civilized world. And the men who have denied it are the Andrew Carnegies. Capitalists of whom this Pittsburg forge-master is a typical representative have placed and kept upon the statute-books all sorts of prohibitions and taxes (of which the customs tariff is among the least harmful) designed to limit and effective in limiting the number of bidders for the labor of those who have labor to sell. If there were no tariffs on imported goods; if titles to unoccupied land were not recognized by the State; above all, if the right to issue money were not vested in monopoly,—bidders for the labor of Carnegie’s employees would become so numerous that the offer would soon equal the laborer’s product. Now, to solemnly tell these men who are thus prevented by law from getting the wages which their labor would command in a free market that they have a right to reject any price that may be offered for their labor is undoubtedly to speak a formal truth, but it is also to titter a rotten commonplace and a cruel impertinence. Rather tell the capitalists that the laborer is entitled to a free market, and that they, in denying it to him, are guilty of criminal invasion. This would be not only a formal truth, but an opportune application of a vital principle.

Perhaps it will be claimed in answer to this that the laborers, being voters, are responsible for any legal monopolies that exist, and are thereby debarred from pleading them as an excuse for violating the liberty of their employers. This is only true to the extent to which we may consider these laborers as the “fools” persuaded by the capitalists who are the “scoundrels” that “violence (in the form of enforced monopoly) is a friend of the workmen”; which does not make it less unbecoming in the scoundrels to rebuke and punish the fools for any disastrous consequences that may arise out of this appalling combination of scoundrelism and folly.

Conspicuous among the scoundrels who have upheld these monopolies is the editor of the New York “Sun.” If he tells truth today, he tells it as the devil quotes scripture,—to suit his purpose. He will never consent to an application of equal liberty in the interest of labor, for he belongs to the brotherhood of thieves who prey upon labor. If he only would, we Anarchists would meet him with cheerful acquiescence in it fullest application in the interest of cap ital. Let Carnegie, Dana & Co. first see to it that every law in violation of equal liberty is removed from the statute-books. If, after that, any laborers shall interfere with the rights of their employer, or shall use force upon inoffensive “scabs,” or shall attack their employers’ watchmen, whether these be Pinkerton detectives, sheriff’s deputies, or the State militia, I pledge myself that, as an Anarchist and in consequence of my Anarchistic faith, I will be among the first to volunteer as a member of a force to repress these disturbers of order and, if necessary, sweep them from the earth. But while these invasive laws remain, I must view every forcible conflict that arises as the consequence of an original violation of liberty on the part of the employing classes, and, if any sweeping is done, may the laborers hold the broom! Still, while my sympathies thus go with the under dog, I shall never cease to proclaim my conviction that the annihilation of neither party can secure justice, and that the only effective sweeping will be that which clears from the statute-book every restriction of the freedom of the market.

T.

LIBERTY, Vol. XV—No. 3 FEBRUARY, 1906 Whole No. 391

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LIBERTY, Vol. XV—No. 3 FEBRUARY, 1906 Whole No. 391

"For always in thine eyes, O Liberty,
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust to thee."

John Hay.

LIBERTY

Published Bimonthly

Twelve Issues, $1.00; Single Copies, 10 Cents

BENJ. R. TUCKER, Editor and Publisher

Office of Publication:

2S FOURTH AVENUE, ROOM 13, NEW YORK

Post Office Address:

LIBERTY, POST OFFICE BOX 1312, NEW YORK

"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 gauge of the exciseman, the erasing-knife of the department clerk, all those insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel."—Proudhon.

LIBERTY

Vol. XV—No. 3 FEBRUARY, 1906 Whole No. 391

ON PICKET DUTY

Liberty expects to greet its readers bimonthly hereafter, in the form given to the present issue,—a pamphlet of sixty-four pages. It is with reluctance that I abandon the old form, which has served my purpose so satisfactorily for nearly a quarter of a century. But there are compelling reasons for the change. In the first place, to avoid governmental supervision, annoyance, and censorship, I have decided not to seek re-entry of the publication as second-class matter, but to mail it always at third-class rates; and, to do this economically, each copy must be made to weigh a shade less than two ounces or some multiple thereof. The pamphlet form fits itself to this requirement more easily than the newspaper form, and this change to third-class matter enables me to mail the publication when and where I like and in such quantities as I like, to mail it with other matter in one wrapper if I choose, to print what I choose on the wrapper, and to print in the publication itself as many pages of my own advertising matter as I may find serviceable without subjecting myself, my subscribers, or my other advertisers, to impudent interrogation from officials of the United States government. In the second place, the adoption of a page of the present size, not only for [2] Liberty, but for the books and pamphlets which it is my intention to issue hereafter, which books and pamphlets also will carry advertising matter, enables mc to interchange the advertising pages at will, and, when it seems best, to publish in pamphlet form matter that has appeared in Liberty, thus saving the cost of re-composition.

The business of publishing books and pamphlets, alluded to in the foregoing paragraph, will be conducted by me in pursuance of a policy lately approved by the New York "Evening Post" for university purposes. Urging that each large university should have its own press, and deploring the high prices and consequent small circulation of serious literature in this country as compared with France, the "Post" well says:

In France, with less than forty millions of people, there are probably from five to ten persons who buy serious books to one In the English-speaking countries with nearly four time-s the population. If that is only approximately so, it Is a terrible reproach to our civilization; and it is partly the result of the inflated prices charged for new works of serious literature, it should not be forgotten that the class of the community which buys, or might buy, such hooks, is one that feels very keenly the difference between paying less than a dollar or from two to six dollars. En Paris the publisher who should raise his price would lose his public; in London or New York the publisher who should lower his price would find the public unprepared and inexpensive. From the publishers there is little to hope save cheap reprints of works out of copyright; but might not an endowed press, working with steady policy over a course of years, help us? By inflexibly demanding adequate literary expression, by standardizing its prices at a low figure, by giving unknown authors a chance on their merits, by supporting scholars in difficult but little-trodden paths, it might serve a great national purpose. [3]

In my own small way, with such means as I can command, and in my special field, I purpose doing this very thing,—publishing at reasonable prices books and pamphlets, whether new or old, whose importance can hardly be over-estimated, but which offer too little promise of profit to induce other publishers to undertake their issue. In other words, I have" endowed" my own press, and, meagre as the endowment necessarily is, it is sufficient at any rate to guarantee the continuance of the work indefinitely.

The first publication, under the plan above outlined, will be a new edition, from new plates, of "Mutual Banking," by Col. William B. Greene. This little pamphlet, the most important work on finance ever published in this country, has already passed through several editions; but in none of them has the form been worthy of the contents. The new edition is reasonably sure to escape this criticism; moreover, it will be the first edition to contain a portrait of the author,—a fact which will cause it to be sought after even by possessors of the older editions. It will contain more than a hundred pages, will be sold for ten cents a copy, and will appear early in February.

In connection with the publishing business I shall carry on a small bookstore, and for this purpose have secured a room at No. 225 Fourth Avenue; a light and airy office on the twelfth floor of an elevator office- building, commanding a fine outlook over the city. Here I hope to carry ultimately the most complete line of advanced literature, in the principal languages, [4] to be found anywhere in the world. By advanced literature I mean the literature which, in religion and morals, leads away from superstition, which, in politics, leads away from government, and which, in art, leads away from tradition. It will take many months, perhaps years, to attain this end, but it will not take long to make a beginning; and within a very few weeks, or even days, those who may see fit to visit the store will find upon the shelves a fairly representative stock, which they are cordially invited to examine at their leisure.

I wish to obtain a considerable number of copies of whole No. 900 of Liberty. For the first copy that shall reach me in presentable condition I will pay one dollar to the sender, and for each copy arriving thereafter I will pay fifty cents to the sender, until I shall have twenty-five copies in my possession. The dollar offer is unconditional; the fifty-cent offer, however, is qualified by the condition that there shall be a total receipt of at least twenty-five copies. If on March 1 I have not received twenty-five copies, all save the first copy will be returned. I also invite correspondence with any person willing to sell one or more of the following issues: Whole Nos. 5, 32, 116, 346, and 380.

Referring to the "We Don't Patronize List" which appears in the pages of the "American Federationist," the organ of the Federation of Labor, the New York" Sun" says: "A manufacturer's blacklist is denounced by unionism as a crime against society. Its own blacklist is regarded as a legitimate weapon. It [5] seems to be the old question of the ownership of the gored ox." There is quite as much truth as spite in this comment. The "Federationist" is very, very individualistic and libertarian in treating questions involving the methods and weapons of labor,—boycotting, picketing, the closed shop, etc. It forgets its logic, however, when called upon to deal with the employer's converse of any proposition defended by it. Such an attitude invites attack; such a position is plainly untenable.

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A New York appellate court has pronounced unconstitutional a statute making it a misdemeanor for an employer to require of any workman, as a condition of obtaining work with him, to bind himself by contract not to join a particular union. The right to employ and to refuse employment, logically reasons the court, includes the right to exact such a promise or pledge as the statute sought to prohibit. The plutocratic press likes this decision, but, as usual, gives sophistical reasons for its approval, and misrepresents the philosophy of the matter. It sheds crocodile tears over the poor non-union man, whom the court cruelly disregarded. It refrains from calling attention to the recent decision of the highest court of the State in favor of the legality of closed-shop contracts,—contracts which the plutocratic judges, lawyers, and newspapers of the country condemn savagely on grounds of "public policy," patriotism, Americanism, and what not. Now, either decision implies the other; both are deductions from the same principle, and both are sound. The plutocratic press passed the closed-shop [6] decision in eloquent silence, but upon that sustaining anti-union contracts it parades with enthusiasm and joy. Unionist organs are "tickled to death" over the closed-shop decision; will they imitate plutocracy with reference to inconvenient corollaries of doctrines professedly acceptable.—'up to a certain point?

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The power of passive resistance has been strikingly illustrated in Russia. She has had three" general strikes," and only the first one was truly, magnificently successful. It was absolutely pacific; it was of the sort that Tolstoi has been urging for years. Workmen, clerks, professional men, even government employees and dvorniks (janitors converted into spies and informers), simply dropped their tools, briefs, documents, and what not, and refused to carry on the activities of industrial and political life. The result, on the government's side, was panic. A constitution was granted; a whole series of reforms—on paper— followed. The second strike was called when the circumstances were unfavorable and the causes distinctly doubtful in the opinion of the majority of the government's enemies. It failed, and the consequent bitterness and apprehension led to a third strike, with an appeal to arms at Moscow. That appeal was most unfortunate; the revolutionary elements had overestimated their own strength, and greatly underestimated that of the autocratic-bureaucratic machine. The army was loyal, and the "revolution" was crushed. Now the government has regained its confidence, and is reviving the Plehve tactics. It is suppressing not merely revolutionary bodies and manifest [7] tations, but liberal and constitutional ones as well. Reaction is admittedly. a strong probability, and the really substantial victories of October may be forfeited. Of course, human nature is human nature, and it were both idle and unfair to blame the distracted and exasperated Russian radicals for the turn events have taken. Witte has not been honest; the Bourbons were at no time in actual fear of his liberalism. Quite likely any other body of men would have acted as the Russian intellectuals and proletariat committees have acted. Still, the fact remains that, had the policy of strictly passive resistance been continued, and had not the strike and boycott weapon been too recklessly used, the cause of freedom and progress in Russia would today rejoice in much brighter prospects. Whatever reform Russia shall be shown by developments to have secured, she will certainly owe to the peaceful demonstration of the "Red Sunday" and to the passive strike.

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Things have come to such a pass that no American traveller can return from a trip abroad without being made to blush for his country. On the westbound ocean steamers every passenger of foreign birth, whether in steerage or cabin, is required, during the voyage, to fill out a blank form with answers to a score or more of questions, some of the last degree of impudence, others of the last degree of idiocy. Here are some of the questions: "Have you fifty dollars with you?" "If not, how much have you?" "Have you ever been in prison?" "Were you ever in the poor house?" "Are you deformed or crippled?" [8] "If so, how came you so?" "Are you a polygamist?" "Are you an Anarchist?" "Are you in good health, physical and mental?" The paper warns the passenger that, on landing, he may be required to swear to the truth of his answers, and that, if he swears falsely, he will be sent to prison. It must be admitted, however, that the circulation of these blanks on shipboard has one virtue; it serves to greatly remove the tedium of an ocean voyage. On the last trip that I made it was the chief topic of conversation, and at sea anything that "causes talk" is a blessing. My next neighbor in the dining-room was a young Englishman. Little knowing who I was, he produced his blank at table. "Have you seen these questions?" said lie: "just look at this one, for instance: "Are you an Anarchist?" As if any one would admit it under such circumstances! My answer to that will be: "Not at present, with hopes for the future." Another passenger's answer was: "I was not an Anarchist until I read these questions." Still another said:" If he who carries bombs is an Anarchist, No; if he who resents inquisition is an Anarchist, Yes." While, under the question: "Arc you in good health, physical and mental?" one man wrote:" I am mad." And so it went. It was all very entertaining; but to every American it was also very painful to see his country made, and with good reason, the butt of ridicule. Suppose England were to pass a law for the exclusion of foreign prostitutes; what in that case would be the feelings of an American citizen whose wife or daughter, before landing in England, should be confronted officially with the question: "Are you a harlot?" It [9] would be a fine stroke of justice if precisely such a fate could befall every congressman who voted for the silly and abominable law under which questions equally impudent and scarcely less horrible are plumped at every man and woman visiting these shores.

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In the tributes paid by the newspapers to the late Marshall Field much stress is laid on the statement that, unlike many other money magnates, he accumulated his wealth by legitimate methods. It is probably true, as the New York "Evening Post" says, that "to his money none of that taint attached which comes of building up a fortune upon the deliberately planned wreck of the property of others." But, when the "Post" declares that "no ruin-spreading monopoly could be pointed to as the source of his great riches," it goes too far. The" Post" knows very well that the protective tariff creates a "ruin-spreading monopoly," and it has especial reason to remember the advantages derived from the tariff by merchants like Marshall Field, for it is not many years since these very merchants organized a boycott of its advertising columns because of its advocacy of tariff reform. The "Post" does not know, or at any rate does not say, that the legal restrictions upon banking create a "ruin-spreading monopoly," but such is the fact; and Marshall Field profited handsomely by the absence of that sharper competition which would have held him in check under a really free banking system. Furthermore, but a comparatively small portion of Mr. Field's vast wealth was derived directly from his mercantile pursuits. Most of it came through shrewd outside in [10] vestments. It is probable that he was a large stockholder in most of the gigantic corporations that have been built "upon the deliberately planned wreck of the property of others," and it is sure that he was an enormous beneficiary of increase in land values, which he could not have been but for that "ruin-spreading monopoly" which vests land-titles in non-occupants and non-users. Field did not actively practise the methods of Rockefeller, but he benefited by them. He did not inspire the dislike that most of us feel for Rockefeller, but his money, no less than Rockefeller's, was tainted.

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Under cover of its tribute to Marshall Field, the "Evening Post" bestows a nasty kick on Andrew Carnegie. "Though Mr. Field's public gifts were not large in proportion to his means, he at least bestowed them in a way to carry no sting. Re gave freely and outright, when he did give. Not for him was the odious plan of "stimulating benevolence in others," by giving grudgingly of his abundance an condition that as much be extracted from the poverty of others. Thus his charities were, if not great relatively, at least not the offensive acts of a man who was at heart a miser." A singular declaration, in view of the fact that Mr. Field's $8,000,000 bequest for the endowment and maintenance of the Field Columbian Museum is made upon the express condition that within six years from the death of Mr. Field there shall be provided, without cost to the estate, a satisfactory site for the permanent home of the museum. This method of giving, far from being grudging or misery, shows [11] great wisdom in the giver, and no less in Mr. Carnegie's case than in Mr. Field's.

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The New York" Sun," taking a similar view to that of the" Evening Post," says of Marshall Field that "his business methods were honorable"; that" he did not bilk or prey upon the public"; that he did not seek public respect through "staring philanthropies"; and that " he did not try to cover up doubtful transactions with a halo or to bribe his way into' society' or heaven with benefactions in the nature of repentance." And because he did not do these things, declares the "Sun," "the red-mouthed yapping at the rich spared him." But the" Sun," in thus holding up Mr. Field as an exceptional case, virtually charges that most other possessors of fortunes as large as Mr. Field's are in the habit of doing precisely the things that he did not do. Now, if the making of these charges by the "Sun" is legitimate criticism, why do the same charges, when made by an Anarchist, become" red-mouthed yapping at the rich"?

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Some months ago Gustave Hervé, Urbain Gohier, and a number of other conspicuous members of the French anti-military party signed a poster advising French soldiers, when ordered to fire on strikers, to turn their guns on their officers, and this poster was put up in various parts of Paris. The signers were arrested, and in December, after an exciting trial, nearly all were convicted and received severe sentences. Two or three, however, were acquitted, though they were quite as guilty as the others, and one of the fortunate [12] ones was the famous Italian revolutionist, Amilcare Cipriani, who, it seems, once rendered the French nation a great service in an hour of peril. The day after his acquittal Cipriani again proceeded with the placarding of Paris with the original poster, this time, however, signed by himself only and having the following appendix:

In company with twenty-seven comrades I signed this poster. By acquitting me, on December 30, the Seine jury has proclaimed that I committed no crime. It has recognized my right of propagandism. I make use of it.

Cipriani may be lacking in gratitude, but there's nothing the matter with his logic or his sense of humor.

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When Theodore Roosevelt, writing to Henry M. Whitney, charged his correspondent with "lacking the power of exact thinking," it was hardly an instance of condemnation from Sir Hubert.

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Whether we have or have not an emperor in the United States,—on which point judgment may be reserved till Roosevelt and the senate and house get through with each other,—it is at least clear that we have a crown princess fully developed.

"And the said defendant is hereby enjoined from wooing or making love to Mary E. Brown." Thus runs a clause in an order issued recently by Judge Moss of the circuit court at Parkersburg, West Virginia. The defendant is William Brown, and the woman to 'whom he is ordered to cease making love is his wife. Mrs. Brown recently filed suit for divorce, and since their estrangement the husband has been [13] trying to woo his spouse over again. So do our courts protect the sacred institution of marriage. A judge in a monthly-magazine story would have been busy helping the parties to get reconciled, and straining the law for that purpose till you could hear it crack.

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Among the "tributes from educators" printed in the newspapers at the time of the death of Dr. William R. Harper I saw no mention of President Eliot's old- time characterization of the University of Chicago as "Harpers Bazar."

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Justice Rogers of the New York supreme court, in imposing a severe sentence on a violator of the election laws, declared: "There is too much illegal voting done in this large city." This judge seems to have formed an idea of the amount of illegal voting that can be allowed to the square mile with propriety. Perhaps he took his cue from Boss Odell, who, in an unprecedented burst of candor, said recently to a New York "World" reporter: "I have always believed that there were more election frauds committed here than there should be."

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Why does not Moses Harman, who is being so shamefully persecuted by the post office department, mail "Lucifer" at third-class rates, in small lots, at different times, and at different post-offices? By so doing he certainly would lead the national censor a lively chase, and perhaps would tire him out. Such a course would cost but twenty-five cents a year for each subscriber, and "Lucifer's" readers seem willing [14] to pay for the privilege of receiving their paper. To do this is, of course, to submit to an outrageous discrimination, but it is sometimes better to pay an unjust tax than to be deprived of one's liberty of speech.

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Mr. William Bailie's life of Josiah Warren, published by Small, Maynard & Co., is now ready for delivery, and is for sale at the office of Liberty. It is very prettily gotten up, and its contents are of high interest to every Anarchist. A later issue will contain a review of the work, discussing its merits, of which it has an abundance, and its demerits, from which, unhappily, it is not free.

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Perhaps some of the older readers of Liberty can give Max Nettlau, the bibliographer of Anarchism, the information which he asks for in the interesting article that I reprint from "Freedom." I have never seen the pamphlet of which be writes, but there are references in some numbers of Warren's "Periodical Letter" which indicate that Mr. Nettlau is correct in his surmise that A. C. Cuddon was its author. I think that I met Mr. Cuddon in London in 1874; though considerably more than eighty years of age, he was as enthusiastic a disciple of Warren as ever. Mr. Henry Edger too, the Positivist of whom Mr. Nettlau writes, I met once in New York in 1877, and, as a result of this meeting, he wrote for the "Radical Review," the quarterly which I published in 1877-78 in New Bedford, Mass., a long article on "Prostitution and the International Woman's League." Now that Mr. Bailie's life of Warren has appeared, it is hardly necessary [15] to correct Mr. Nettlau's error in calling Warren an Englishman. On the other hand, what is left of the sect of Universologists will learn with joy from Mr. Nettlau's article that, though since the death of the Pantarch the usually necessary period of one hundred years is far from having elapsed, he has already gained admission to the calendar of the Saints. Mr. Nettlau's address is: Langham House, College Road, Harrow, Middlesex, England.

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A Christian Science healer who failed to respond to a summons to do jury duty was fined therefor by a New York judge. The New York "Times" complains of the court for desiring such a juror. "Imagine," it says, "the verdict likely to be rendered by a jury containing a man who, not many years ago, gravely announced to a bewildered metropolis the belief that an inscription inaccurately chiseled on a block of granite had kindly corrected itself without any other assistance than the existence of a preference on the part of Mrs. Mary Baker Patterson Glover, &c., &c., Eddy, and a few of her worshippers that the inscription should read in another way!" Well, why should a verdict rendered by such a jury be less reasonable than one rendered by a jury containing a man who entertains the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin by a process known as immaculate conception? The theory of the "Times" will carry it far.

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The Filipinos have made W. J. Bryan a Datto, but nobody in the world Filipino or American, can make Mr. Bryan a Ditto. [16]

WHAT WE FIND INSTEAD OF THE FOOT

OF THE RAINBOW

I am indebted to a review in the" Advance" for my knowledge of a new book published by the Scribners, called "The City the Hope of Democracy." It is thus described:

Among the recent books on public questions the volume bearing the title above is one of the most important. It is from the pen of Frederic C. Howe, who says that his convictions are the result of several years of actual political experience In the administration of the city of Cleveland, and of personal study of municipal conditions in the leading cities of Great Britain and America. The author further states that his careful study of city problems compelled him to change from "belief in a business man's government to belief in a people's government" These two points he elaborates with a great array of facts and extensive argument.

In "a business man's government" Mr. Howe finds the principal cause of corruption. It is back of bossism, back of boodling, back of bribery, back of the whole business of exploiting the people. In this respect, as readers of the "Advance" need hardly be told, the author reaches the same conclusion as Lincoln Steffens. That this statement reverses the view which prevailed a dozen years ago is obvious. Then the whole emphasis was laid on the danger of the democracy. The public was told every day in the week that the masses in the city were the source of corrupt government. Now, us Mr. Howe says, the public is beginning to realize that the real source of corruption is the big business which puts its own selfish interests before the common welfare. . . The connection of the political boss with franchise corruption of cities is thus described; "The boss came in through political apathy. He has grown powerful through privilege. He is the natural and logical product of privilege, and lie everywhere perpetuates his power through an alliance with it. And the privileges which he now represents are the great natural monopolies that make use of our streets, the companies which supply transportation, gas, water, electric light, and telephone service. The boss enjoys a dual rôle; he not only controls the party, but traffics in legislation. He has become a modern feudal baron, who does homage to his supe [17] rier, levies tribute on society, and distributes favors to his retainers with a free hand, as did his prototypes of old. He is the link which unites the criminal rich with the criminal poor. For the former he obtains millions in grants and franchises, and Immunity from taxes. To the latter, in payment of election services, he dispenses small gratuities in jobs, protection from the police, and in charities. He makes party regularity a merchantable asset, which he uses for his own political advancement and the promotion of these interests whose agent he is."

So we must reverse the view that was taught us a dozen years ago, must we? Not without stopping to think, I hope. Correct it, doubtless; but why reverse it? The dozen-year-old view was, I believe, that the boss's power was based in his relation to the unintelligent masses, to whom, in payment of election services, he dispensed small gratuities in jobs, protection from the police, and charities, whereby their vote became his merchantable asset which he used for his own political advancement and for his private enrichment by the sale of privilege to the criminal rich. How far from that are we now, after all, according to Mr. Howe?

In the nineteenth century, to be sure, the boss's supporters were supposed to be the poor in general; now, it seems, they are" the criminal poor." As they are apparently able to furnish the mass of votes which does the main work of carrying an election, it is rather disquieting to find the criminal poor so numerous a class. The charge is substantially equivalent to saying that the poor voters in general are criminal, for the election returns give us an idea of the number of men who must be described as "criminal poor" in order to explain the boss's majorities. Does it appear from Mr. Howe's statement what facts show them to be criminal? It does. They are criminals in that they [18] vote a ticket which has a chance of success at the polls. Well, we Anarchists always did maintain that this is a crime; so we will not be bard on Mr. Howe for agreeing with us. Furthermore, they are criminals in that their vote is determined by liking for the man's personal character (I confess that, in expounding the phrase " small gratuities in charities," I draw on my recollection of the explanations that were given us a dozen years ago; but am I wrong in so doing? the thing to be explained is the same, and the explanation is plausible and is confirmed by observations taken a dozen years ago) and by the fact that he administers the government in their interest so far as they understand it. Mr. Howe does not appear to charge that they realize the antagonism between their position and the public interest,—that they believe the" good fellow" who looks out for the poor in general and for his friends in particular to be in fact a plunderer of honest men and a tool of monopoly. Mr. Howe's position, so far as I am informed of it, seems quite consistent with what we heard a dozen years ago,—that they believe this ruler to be the real friend of the people, and the talk about" plunder" to be the moonshine of theorists who are out of touch with practical life; so we may give these voters full credit for sincerity. Are they criminals, then, in letting such considerations sway their vote? Doubtless; for by wilful and unjust aggression they kill thousands of men and women who ought to be left alive. Only it is getting more and more obvious that they are criminal of the sort who can never be jailed, because there are not enough jailors to keep them; that the words " criminal poor," if [19] they are meant to suggest that we are here dealing with a minor subdivision of the poor, are a gross perversion of fact; that it is just as we used to be told in the nineteenth century,—this is the type of the poor in general, and will be so as long as they continue to be unintelligent, which will be nobody knows how long; and that this same type is not especially peculiar to the poor, but is identical with the type of the successful, but narrow-minded, New England manufacturer who votes for the protective tariff in the firm belief that his business would go to the dogs if he had to compete with Europe without a tariff, and what is true of him is true of his neighbors, so free trade would ruin the country.

Or does Mr. Howe really mean that the boss derives his power, on the popular side, not from his control of a large body of voters, but from his control of a machinery for registering fictitious votes? Do the words "criminal poor" refer solely to those whose election-day services are of a nature legally punishable? No one doubts that bosses make great use of such agencies on occasion; but it is hardly plausible to say that this is their main source of power; and, if that were true, it would hardly be plausible to say that anything else than this should be the main point of attack in an attempt to purify elections. I think I was right in my first interpretation of the phrase "criminal poor."

The source of the boss's mandate to rule our municipalities, then, seems, even by Mr. Howe's account, to be essentially the same as it used to be said to be. In the presentation of his relation to the capitalist there is a greater difference observable. The capitalist and [20] the boss used to come before our minds as two mainly independent powers, bargaining with each other either for mutual profit at the expense of the public or for the terms of blackmail levied by the boss on the capitalist; and the boss was supposed to be a sort of robber baron, fortified in a castle where he could and did claim to be the superior party in the negotiation, whatever advantage the supple capitalist might gain over his pride. Now Mr. Howe presents the boss to us as the capitalist's tool and agent,—removable at the capitalist's will, we must suppose, else the alleged relation becomes practically unthinkable in so far as it differs from the old conception,—through whom the capitalist exercises in fact, by deputy, the powers which the boss had been supposed to exercise in his own behalf.

I believe there is truth in both views. I believe there have always been places where it was possible for the capitalist to keep a boss of his own, and capitalists who have seen and welcomed such an opportunity. I believe, on the other hand, that the boss tends to aspire to as much independence as he thinks be can defend, and that the nature of his position puts him under constant temptation to go to the verge of prudence in reaching out for independence. I think, if we could get the lid all off from the dealings between the two, we should see struggles for conquest or for independence so numerous as to be a noticeable feature of the situation, and success inclining now to one side and now to the other; and I am willing to believe that the tendencies of the last few years have made the capitalists' successes abnormally numerous. But I think the capitalists' hold on such power must always be very [21] uncertain, since the boss's power consists so largely in his reputation, and this reputation must adhere personally to the man who is publicly known as boss— cannot be kept under the control of any power behind the throne. If John Smith, capitalist, having made John Doe a boss, wants to unmake him, what is he to do? floe controls the votes partly because he is known to be charitable to the poor, partly because he is known as a distributor of political patronage. Smith can sway most of the bribed vote, and most of the apparatus for conducting a campaign by means of printing, paid speakers, paid canvassers, etc.; but he must also have a man to present in Doe's place. If he presents his confidential clerk, Richard Roe, whose personal qualifications for such work are unquestioned, the fact that Roe is unknown to the voters will be a frightful handicap,—a handicap invincible for the time being, except by the difficult and dangerous process of buying up individually, with hard cash, a sufficient number of local sub-bosses. Practically Roe's chances would not be worth mentioning till he had spent some years getting himself before the bossable part of the public. Meanwhile Doe, controlling the government, will have half ruined Smith's local business. Consequently Smith is driven to fall back on Tom Styles, who is already in politics and has the political assets which a judicious addition of money will transform into dominion. But Styles is already in some' sort of relations with Doe; and the game to be played is one in which Doe is a specialist, while Smith is dependent on his subordinate for technique. Doe is described in the papers as "making the fight of his [22] life," and is getting money from a rival capitalist by flattering offers; and many are the voters who think it best to stand by the old man. Will it not pay Smith best, if floe is willing to do business on reasonable terms, to treat with him as an equal rather than try to crush him? I am assuming circumstances favorable to Doe, but not extraordinarily so; it is at least likely that Smith will have to wait a year or two till he can get a favorable opening, and time may work in floe's favor instead of his own.

The point is that so much of the boss's power is non-transferable. Part of it can be duplicated, and another part conquered away from him, but both the duplicating and the conquering take time, and time is money to the capitalist. I cannot think, therefore, that he will, as a rule, keep in efficient condition that power of removal which is essential to complete domination. But assume the case where he does it—what then? In a city where the known boss is a puppet, and a capitalist is the real boss, what of it?* Simply that we mistook the identity of our boss, There is a boss, just as we thought there was; and the voters are controlled, and the elections are carried, by the same means as we always supposed did the work. The inference is simply that in our reform movements we [23] must no longer trust this man whom we thought we could trust as a possible ally against the boss. Now, this lesson is well worth writing a book about, or a dozen books; but it does not cancel the lessons of a dozen years ago; they remain valid, and we add the new lesson to them.

Mr. Howe draws the lesson differently; he insists that we should have municipal ownership of valuable franchises, in order that there may not be these rich plums to attract capitalists to control the boss. Now, surely this is irrelevant unless the capitalist is the cause of the boss; and Mr. Howe seems really to think that this is so. But how is the capitalist supposed to cause the boss? It must be either by giving him his means, or by furnishing him his motive. The boss would continue if the capitalist were gone, if means and motive were still present; and assuredly they would be present. Money can hardly be said to occupy a foremost place among the means of the city boss, especially if you restrict it to such money as the capitalist may he supposed to furnish him; if you utterly destroy bribery funds out of politics, hut double the number of jobs to be given out in the city service, you may be sure you have not made the boss less able to hold his power. As for motive, I have no ground for disputing that the capitalist's money may be foremost among the motives which actuate the boss at the present day; and, if I tried to deny it, the testimony of Mr. Howe might well be conclusive against me. But in its absence other motives would come into play,— motives quite strong enough to make a man act as boss. It is difficult to conceive a great city govern [24] ment in which the plums of the administration, provided a man wishes to administer corruptly, could not be made big enough to give a considerable pecuniary motive; and, even if money could all be done away, the mere love of power, or the desire to accomplish some purpose for which the control of political power is needed, would suffice to draw men into this career. The matter can be put in a nutshell. If John Doe had devoted himself to banking, he might have made a million. If he had devoted himself to manufacturing, he might have made half a million. But lie did, when he was starting in life, devote himself to politics, and he did so well in it that he is able to be boss of the city. Now, if the place of boss is worth five millions, he gets the five millions; but, if it is worth only a hundred thousand, he still puts his whole strength into being boss, for the good reason that, if he were to go into banking or manufacturing now, when he is getting into middle age, he could not hope to make more than ten thousand. Some circumstance, joined perhaps to a natural bent, started him as a politician; as soon as he has won a standing in politics, and has not yet won any equally strong standing in any other line of life, it will take something unusual to keep him from going on as a politician, be the rewards great or small. All that you could hope to accomplish by lessening the boss's rewards would be to give us a less able race of bosses; or, if you could very considerably diminish the money rewards, to give us a race of bosses actuated by different motives. These different motives might be better than the motives of the present bosses, or they might not. [25]

The milk in Mr. Rowe's cocoanut, I think, is this. We have had bad government, and have thought of various ways to get rid of it. One of these ways, which many had pinned their faith to, was to put the government in the hands of the business men. Mr. Howe has shown up this fallacy, and thus, we may hope, saved many from spending more energy on this false line. But, when he tells us to go back to the old theory of trusting the honest patriotism and sturdy common sense of the masses, he has no basis to go on. We have tried that and found it wanting, and the experience is still valid and even still current. How does a comparison of the New York city election of 1905 with that of 1886—Hearst in the place of George, McClellan in the place of Hewitt, Ivins in the place of Roosevelt, the Tammany candidate each time counted in, the labor candidate each time claiming to have had an actual majority—show that the masses are more to be trusted politically now than then? When you are after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, never turn back to a place where you have already looked in vain. That, at least, is not the nature of rainbows. Better say that good government is to be had by educating the people into sound political principles; by seeking your rainbow on a mountain-top so distant as that, you will have the pleasure of a long walk in hope, before you suffer the disappointment of getting there and seeing what you find.

The project of securing good government has been tried in many shapes, and has failed in each shape. The longer the list of failures grows, the more must the thought recur that the project of doing away with [26] government, and leaving all that government now does to be conducted on the basis of ordinary business, has never in a civilized country been tried and found to fail.

Steven T. Byington.

WHAT NEXT IN RUSSIA?

The march of events in Russia affords a striking confirmation of the truth that the maintenance of the State depends upon organized brute force. Without an army and navy no government can successfully impose its authority upon a people. The Russian revolt proves to all the world that there, at least, bayonet and cannon are the only pillars of authority, and that these are fast crumbling away.

The growth of representative institutions obscures the primal nature of the State, though under its most democratic form physical force is still its ultimate foundation. In this land of the free few would accept the idea that a government born of the Declaration of Independence, purporting to rest upon the will of the people, has anything in common with the military despotism now in process of disintegration in northern Europe. Yet the most patriotic American will not hesitate to condemn the government of the czar. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how a downtrodden race, enthralled by superstition, ignorance, and want, could so long submit to a blighting and cruel régime. For generations they have been forced to cringe and crawl, until blind faith and passive fatalism are traits of national character. But even here we see that the spirit of liberty still lives.

At an early period the conquest of Russia by the [27] Tartars arrested the normal development of the people and threw them back oh their religion. In opposition to the heathen conquerors, the Byzantine form of superstition, magnified in importance, soon became a national bond gradually personified in the person of the czar.

To note an analogous instance, it is also the blending of religion and nationality in Ireland which has held her for centuries an easy prey to English domination. Had the people been able to unite against the conqueror, regardless of creed, political freedom would have been achieved long before the advent of Grattan's abortive parliament toward the dose of the eighteenth century. Superstition here was utilized by an alien government to hold a nation in subjection, while in Russia it worked band in hand with the native rulers, enabling them to fasten both an ecclesiastical hierarchy and a political despotism upon the people.

When the Tartar rule was finally overthrown in Russia, three leading consequences historically followed: the nation was politically unified, autocracy firmly established, and serfdom first imposed upon the masses. The enslavement of the cultivators was accomplished during a period when land was plentiful and labor scarce. There would have been no need for such a step, if the economic conditions had been reversed. With land scarce and free labor abundant, the dominant class could have secured a revenue by exploitation without resorting to so drastic a measure. It happened, too, when in other parts of Europe, owing to the growing scarcity of free land, serfdom was disappearing. [28]

In building up absolute power the crown, in order to insure the loyalty and support of the landed aristocracy, aided them through a series of enactments to perfect an economic revolution, which legally transformed the people from a condition of rude freedom into slaves of the soil for the benefit of the proprietors.

Of their ancient liberties one institution alone remained to the peasants,—the Mir. By cultivating mutual aid it enabled them too long to endure unjust exploitation; but it also rendered the serfs an easier prey to the rapacity of their rulers. As a tax-collecting agency the Mir became a highly efficient and serviceable tool of the government The peasants were thus held responsible collectively for taxes, Wherever he went, whatever opportunities to improve his fortune the peasant might find elsewhere, the commune could claim him, could compel him to return, to work oil' his share of the tax burden. After emancipation he was "holdfast" to his commune, just as he had been to his master. There has now grown up a new generation, with some glimmering of desire for individual rights and less faith in the" little father," a younger race born since the days of serfdom, which finds the old customs and conditions irksome.. This change in ideas has helped to make the revolution possible.

In the past all progress seemed hopeless. The historic events that made for freedom in western Europe had no influence on the masses in Russia. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the discovery of America, the French Revolution, the teachings of science, touched not the life of the people. There was no natural [29] growth toward free institutions. If complaints were made, the czar emitted ukases instead of remedies. If the laws worked ill, more laws were promulgated, which wrought more ill. Feats the most impossible and contradictory have been attempted through laws by the all-wise autocrat, only to display the folly of his labors.

Until comparatively recent times no middle class, no professional classes, had arisen. The nobility, made up largely of those in the government service, from whatever social rank they sprang, served always as a reliable and convenient instrument to keep the people down. When at length a class emerged, neither nobles nor peasants, and began to accumulate property, it was inevitable that they should desire political rights and seek representation in the government. It is this steadily-growing propertied class, which comes neither from bottom nor top of the social structure, though reënforced from both, that for more than half a century has furnished the leaven of aspiration and effort at last ripened into a nation in revolt.

Those who read history only through the doings of its figureheads and heroes will continue to credit Alexander II with the emancipation of the serfs, just as they ascribe the abolition of slavery in America to Lincoln. Emancipation was not the free gift of a generous ruler; it was an economic necessity to which the law reluctantly and half-heartedly gave recognition. Serfdom did not pay, and was a failure industrially long before it was abolished. And the reactionary measures in the interest of the landowners, that hindered the reforms essential to complete the work of [30] emancipation, have wrought untold suffering and injustice upon the peasants. Liberty without free land and exemption from ruinous taxation was an idle mockery, leaving the peasant as he is to-day,—helpless, dependent, and in abject poverty.

Under serfdom the government was upheld by the landed nobility, because, in order to secure to them their privileges, the State was necessary to the proprietors. But, since the emancipation, with revenues much diminished, the economic power of the landed class has dwindled, and therefore they have ceased to be a potent factor in the government. Yet, while the proprietors have lost, neither the peasantry nor the commercial classes have gained political power. Herein lies the anomaly of a government trying to maintain itself, though representing none of the component economic or propertied classes of the nation. The military organization, no longer, as in the past, identified with landed property, therefore becomes the sole reliance of the government.

In any country in time of peace it is well known that the military establishment is itching for a fight, thirsting for the opportunity to practise its murderous vocation. It is usually, however, restrained by the more potent commercial and property interests supporting the State. But, just as soon as this restraint becomes inoperative, the military class, regardless alike of just cause or adequate preparation, will plunge headlong into war. Under such circumstances Russia was driven to fight Japan. With the same irresponsible fatuity Louis Napoleon in 1870 dragged the French into a war for which his government was ut- [31] terly unprepared. In both instances the disastrous consequences led to internal revolution, It would be no hard task to show by classic citation that nations which tamely submit to the rule of unscrupulous despots, even if these be elected presidents or legislative assemblies, must surely reap in tears and blood the fruits of their supine indifference.

All classes in Russia outside the military were opposed to the late war. But, as already noted, none had any control over the acts of the autocracy. Japan's success convinced the people that the government, with all its armies, was hot invincible. Beaten and demonized by a despised foe, the army and navy at last began to waver in their loyalty. With popular revolt blazing out all over the empire, and open mutiny confronting them, the czar and his advisers prepare to temporize. A constitution is promulgated, yet no class or party is satisfied. The belief grows that the czar and his Cossack assassins will be unable to stifle the just demands of the nation.

Desperate, impotent, despised, cursed, hated, its hands reeking with the people's innocent blood, despotism is doomed. Standing for an obsolete past, a phantom tradition, a hopeless future, it must succumb before the rising social forces that have undermined it. Whether it take mouths or years, the transformation is assured. The old régime can never be revived.

No illusions should be cherished about the future of Russia. The State will not, with all. its crimes, be overthrown. It will, at best, only change hands. The upshot of the present crisis will be a shifting of power. In the end the dominant propertied interests will gain [32] control. Already the commercial, industrial, and professional classes are becoming the strongest social force. It is their demands, their efforts, that have brought the crisis to a head. As happened in other countries in the past, they enlist the working classes under their banners. The peasants will not, to any great extent, act with the revolutionaries.

After the revolution shall have performed its main work,—the overthrow of autocracy and establishment of constitutional government,—the working class and their Socialist allies will discover that their plans have miscarried. A stronger force than they had shaped them to its ends.

Instead of landed property, for which it formerly stood, the State in Russia will in the near future represent capitalist property. In a word, it will become a modern State. Their identity with the old régime and their present weakness will prevent the remnant of the landed class from gaining much share in the government. The peasants will, therefore, at the expense of their former masters, obtain extended rights in the land, because the dominant class in the State can always afford to be generous at the expense of another class whose day of power has passed. The working people, notwithstanding their sacrifices for liberty, will find that they possess no larger measure of freedom or independence than their brethren in Germany, France, or other European countries. Political rights, perhaps universal suffrage, will be attained, but the achievement of economic liberty will remain far off in the future.

In spite of disappointment and defeat, the people [33] will not abandon .the hopes and ideals for which they have suffered and bled. Uprisings against the new order, as against the old, will surely occur. But, under the coming régime of capital, such revolutionary efforts will prove even less successful than in the past. Nevertheless the attainment of so-called free political institutions is a step on the way toward the larger freedom which is the goal of social evolution.

William Bailie.

INSURANCE AND GOVERNMENTAL "PROTECTION"

The New York legislative inquiry into the methods and practices of the life insurance companies has been very useful. It has unmasked "respectable" grafters, embezzlers, and pirates. It has afforded fresh evidence of the rottenness of "high finance," and has exposed the sickening hypocrisy of the pillars of law and order. The good, dull moral people who, outraged by isolated instances of "labor" graft or of "slugging," frantically demand the fearless enforcement of the criminal statutes will sing low for a time. The shallow optimists who have seen nothing but benevolence and "duty" in the criminal adventures of our government in the Philippines, on the Panama isthmus, and elsewhere, demoralized by the revelations of rascality and treachery in the upper business strata, are demanding in despair that the American people "raise the black flag" and manfully avow that the dollar is their only religion, law, and moral code.

All this is refreshing, wholesome, grateful. But let no one expect any other beneficial result from the in- [34] vestigation. Insurance will not be reformed; the policy-holder's interests will not be safer; misuse of funds will not be prevented. State control and supervision having utterly failed, more control by politicians is advocated. Some are clamoring for federal control of insurance,—Missionary Dryden among them, by the way; and no doubt federal control, if exclusive, would be "cheaper than control of forty- five separate departments. The average man assumes that the insurance companies have enjoyed too much freedom, and jumps to the conclusion that restrictive legislation covering their investments, commissions, salaries, etc., will keep them honest and economical. But what are the facts?

That certain statutes designed to restrain them have been ignored or "waived" by complaisant officials is true; but they have paid well for this complaisance. More restriction will mean more bribery and more blackmail; the price of "laissez faire" will be higher, that's all.

It is not generally known that the companies have actually purchased legislation which has enabled them, not merely to hamper and thwart suspicious policyholders, to avoid judicial examination and publicity, but to discourage and restrain competition.

Here is an interesting extract from the chapter on "Remedies" in Actuary Dawson's new book on "The Business of Life Insurance":

First and foremost, the lessons of life insurance history enforced by recent events demonstrate that the formation of purely mutual companies, required by law to maintain solvency should be encouraged. The organization of mutual societies to operate on unsound plans, on the other hand, should not be [35] permitted.

At present precisely the contrary is the fact Mutual companies may be organized freely to operate on unsound assessment plans, but may not be organized at all under the legal reserve laws. Whether this came about through the cupidity of existing companies desiring a monopoly or through the stupidity of legislators who, influenced by no present interest calling for such powers, blindly shut the door against the enterprise of the future generations, does not much matter. It has resulted in the evils of assessmentism assuming gigantic proportions, and also in many grievous ills in life insurance companies operating on sound plans.

No remedy can go to the root of the matter, therefore, which does not provide for the organization of regular mutual companies.

Without indorsing these paragraphs as they stand, the statement as to the peculiar incidence and effect of the restrictive legislation is full of suggestion.

Mr. Dawson demands for insurance "freedom and publicity." His conception of freedom is inadequate, for he recommends several regulative and paternalistic measures that no consistent libertarian recognizes as necessary. Moreover, he does not even see the effects of denials of freedom in other directions—especially freedom in banking and credit organization—on the whole insurance business. The libertarian will recommend freedom as the remedy for the evils of insurance, exposed and hidden, is a more comprehensive sense, taking care to add that, provided competition is permitted and the policy-holder is let alone by the State, there is no occasion for tears over the losses of the careless, stupid, or indolent policy-holders who may be victimized by grafters and betrayers of trust. The policy-holders who, having power and choice, prefer the wildcat or doubtful companies to those known to [36] be conservative should pay the penalty of their folly. Has it not been said that against stupidity even the gods are helpless?

S. R.

THE LETTERS OF IBSEN

If the writing of an autobiography by Ibsen would have prevented these" Letters" (Fox, Duffield & Co.) from being given to the world, it is well that we shall (doubtless) have to do without the autobiography; for no survey of a man's life written by himself near the end of it could quite reveal to us the character of the man, and especially his growth and development, as does a collection of his spontaneous utterances to friends and foes, given forth, evidently in many cases, without a thought of the possibility of their being given to the public. The most striking impression, perhaps, that a careful reading of this volume produces is that Ibsen's life has been a very contradictory one, and that he has been guilty of many inconsistencies; but we are accustomed to this in geniuses and strong individualities, for from Shakspere to Whitman it has not been uncommon. While I think it indisputable that the tendency of Ibsen's writings, in his letters as well as in his plays, is toward the magnification of the individual and the abolition of the State (as will be remembered from his dramatic works, and as will be seen from the quotations which I shall presently make from his letters), it is also quite true that the State Socialists could point to many expressions that scorn to show him as sharing their faith. I am convinced, however, that these latter are chance and unguarded or unconsidered expressions, and not [37] really characteristic of his philosophy. He has often and unqualifiedly denounced the State, and yet he still continues to draw a pension from it; and in early life, when he had scant means, he made long and strenuous efforts to secure the pension, and to obtain "traveling grants" from the Norwegian government to enable him to go abroad and broaden and deepen his knowledge of the world. Of course he justified this acceptance of State aid by the contention that it was really due him on account of the fact that the government gave authors no protection, by international copyright arrangements, against the piracy of their works by foreign publishers; but even this contention is a decidedly Archistic one.

It is not, as I have intimated, difficult to show Ibsen's real opinion of the State, for he has many times characterized it in no mistakable terms. As early as 1865 he said, in a letter to Magdalene Thoresen (his mother-in-law), that "the downfall of the State would be regarded by our countrymen as the worst thing that could happen; but the downfall of a State cannot be a reason for sorrow." Equally unappreciative was he of so-called "political liberty," and lie never lost an opportunity to inveigh against

it. Here is a characteristic denunciation of both those State-Socialistic fetiches, which we find in a letter to George Brandes (to whom, by the way, Ibsen has written many of his best letters):

I shall never agree to making liberty synonymous with political liberty. What you call liberty I call liberties; and what I cull the struggle for liberty is nothing but the constant, living assimilation of the idea of freedom. He who possesses liberty [38] otherwise than as a thing to be striven for possesses it dead and soulless; for the idea of liberty has undoubtedly this characteristic,—that it develops steadily during its assimilation. So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says "I have it" thereby shows that ha has lost It. It is, however, exactly this dead maintenance of a certain given standpoint of liberty that Is characteristic of the communities which go by the name of States—and this it Is that I have called worthless.

The State is the curse of the Individual. The State must be abolished! In that revolution 1 will take part. Undermine the idea of the State; make willingness and spiritual kinship the only essentials In the case of a union; and you have the beginning of a liberty that is of some value. The changing of forms of government is mere toying with degrees,

—a little more or a little less,—folly, the whole of It.

The great thing is not to allow one's self to be frightened by the venerableness of the institution. The State has its root in Time; it will have its culmination in Time. Greater things than it will fall; all religion will fall. Neither the conceptions of morality or those of art are eternal.

Very much in the same strain is a later letter to Björnson, which is particularly definite in its disapproval of the State and statecraft:

I am therefore very much afraid that social reforms with us are still far off. No doubt the politically privileged class may acquire some new rights, some new advantages; but I cannot see that the nation as a whole, or the single Individual, gains very much by this. I admit, however, that, in politics too, I am a pagan; I do not believe in the emancipatory power of political measures; nor have I much confidence in the altruism and good will of those in power.

Twelve years earlier he had written to Brandes in about the same way:

The liberal press is closed to you? Why, of course! I once expressed my contempt for political liberty. You contradicted me at the time. Your fairy-tale of "Red Riding-hood" shows me that you have had certain experiences. Dear friend, the Liberals are freedom's worst enemies. Freedom of thought and spirit thrive best under absolutism.

It may appear from this that Ibsen's long residence [39] in Rome had given him slightly Machiavellian tendencies; but I do not think that this is the case. I think that the proper interpretation of the last sentence is that liberalism, as it was then known in Norway, had succeeded in establishing a certain amount of political independence and had then become stagnant and even reactionary, thus being a menace to real freedom, rather than an aid to it; on the other hand, it was doubtless apparent to Ibsen, as it is to many others, that, there being under absolutism no semblance of political liberty, the ever-nascent desire for freedom makes naturally for freedom of thought and spirit— an inevitable result of the inhibition of freedom of action.

That Ibsen is equally opposed to another of the essentials of democracy—namely, majority rule—is shown in a letter written in 1872 to Fredrik Gjertsen:

There is no danger of my soon having, out of regard for myself and my own peace of mind, to surrender my fundamental principle in every field and domain,—that the minority is always in the right.

Ten years later he wrote to Brandes as follows:

I receive more and more corroboration of my conviction that there is something demoralising in engaging in politics and in joining parties. It will never, in any case, be possible for me to join a party that has the majority on its side.

Björnstjerne Björnson was Ibsen's best and most helpful friend in the early days, and to-day they are on terms of intimacy; but for some twelve years—from 1868 to 1880—they were estranged, and this was due to the fact that, while Ibsen was growing to believe less and less in the State, Björnson was looking [40] more toward State-Socialistic measures for the solution of sociological problems. Their association is interesting in that it brought out what practically amounted to Ibsen's declaration of independence. He was writing in 1865 to Björnson concerning an attempt to secure a grant for him from the government, which he feared would fail on account of the radical way in which he had been writing, and he began, apparently, to get disgusted with the whole proceeding. Thereupon he relieved his feelings hi the following manner to his friend:

But hang me if I can or will . . . suppress a single line, no matter what these "pocket-edition" souls think of it. Let me rather be a beggar all my life! If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.

As a fervid expression of his sentiments concerning the baleful influence of the State and politics upon art, witness the following extract from a letter to Brandes in 1870 about the changes that were then taking place in Italy:

For every statesman that makes his appearance there, an artist will be ruined. And then the glorious aspiration after liberty—that is at an end now. Yes—I must confess that the only thing I love about liberty is the struggle for it; I care nothing for the possession of it.

It is certain from this that Ibsen thinks liberty wily the means to the end, and in other letters he has emphasized this point.

There is good and abundant evidence, too, that Ibsen is a philosophical Egoist, the most striking indication of which is found in another letter to Brandes. From the following it is dear that he has a rational conception of life and its realities: [41]

What I chiefly desire for you is a genuine, full-blooded Egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non-existent. Now, don t take this wish as an evidence of something brutal in my nature! There is no way in which you can benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself. I have never really had any very firm belief In solidarity; in fact, I have only accepted it as a kind of traditional dogma. If one had the courage to throw it overboard altogether, it is possible that one would be rid of the ballast which weighs down one's personality most heavily. There are actually moments when the whole history of the world appears to me like one great shipwreck, and the only important thing seems to be to save one's self.

Quite in line with this expression of Egoism is another utterance called forth by a statement by Brandes that the latter had no friends at borne. Ibsen replied that he bad fancied that for a long time, and added:

When a man stands in an intimately personal relation to his life-work, he cannot really expect to keep his "friends." Friends are an expensive luxury; and, when a man's whole capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. This means the crushing of many an Intellectual germ. I have had personal experience of it; and there are, consequently, many years behind me during which it was not possible for me to be myself.

This was in 1870, but as early as 1864 he was writing to Björnson that he knew that he was "incapable of entering into close and intimate relations with people who demand that one should yield one's self up entirely and unreservedly." These sentiments may not be wholly acceptable to a great many people, perhaps not even to all Anarchists; but a little retrospection and introspection ought to convince most thinking people that Ibsen's statement of the case is in keeping [42] with the experience of most of us under similar circumstances. This does not imply that one must abjure all friends, but there are friends and friends, and one is obliged to discriminate. There are friends whom one never is obliged to consider; but they are so rare that two of them are not often seen at the same time.

Religion is one of the questions upon which Ibsen is exceptionally contradictory. In 1865 in Rome he stated that lie was reading nothing but the Bible, and not very long afterward he was berating certain kinds of theology and theologians. The truth of the matter is that he is religious at bottom, speaks reverently at times of God, and seems to believe in him; but with churches and religious movements lie has had little or nothing to do, and particularly abhors their influence upon the people.

Björnson, who gladly accepted a pension, absolutely refused all official decorations, and was vexed with Ibsen for accepting them. The latter—consistent in this, at any rate—thought it puerile to take the one and not the other, and pointed out that, in order to be logical, "every kindly-meant festivity offered us, every toast, etc.," must likewise be rejected.

While on some occasions Ibsen showed himself very sensitive to criticism, he at other times expressed extreme contempt for the critics: "If they have been finding fault, then to the devil with them! Most critical fault-finding," he adds, "when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself—thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done, if he had been able." He is [43] not exactly oracular in this, but we must remember that he was often annoyed by inconsequential and stupid (and sometimes by malicious) criticism. But what writer is not?

It perhaps is worthy of mention in this country (it would not be in Europe) that Ibsen had a taste for speculation, and was a frequent investor in lottery tickets, as is witnessed by numerous requests made of his publisher in Copenhagen to purchase tickets for him. What would be thought of our foremost author (provided he could be identified!) if it were known that he regularly patronized lotteries?

It cannot be said that Ibsen has been very prolific as regards quantity, he having written, according to Henrik Jaeger's bibliography, only twenty-seven plays in fifty years; but of what tremendous significance some of them are! If all his plans had been fulfilled, the world would have a great many more, for a very frequently-recurring footnote throughout this volume is to the effect that this or that projected work, referred to in a letter, was never written.

It is difficult to say what, in a general summing up, is the chief value of this book of Ibsen's "Letters:" as there are so many things in it that give us a so much greater insight into the mind of this literary giant than we have ever had before; but I think it safe to say that, to Liberty's readers, the fact of transcending importance is that, in spite of all inconsistencies and contradictions, the volume conclusively demonstrates that the supreme tendency of Ibsen's life and work is toward the conservation of the individual and the destruction of the State.

C. L. S.

[44]

ANARCHISM IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS

AGO

[Max Nettlau in London "Freedom."]

A Contribution towards the Elucidation of the Science of

Society

By a Member of the London Confederation of Rational

Reformers

"Liberty is the realization of the sovereignty of the

individual"

(London: J. Watson, Truelove, Goddard.)

The pamphlet advertised under this title in the "Reasoner," of October 12 and 19, 1853, is, as far as I know, the first Anarchist propagandist pamphlet published in England. I cannot say where a copy of it may be found, but shall try to show to some extent under what circumstances the individualist Anarchist propaganda to which it belongs came into existence in the early fifties.

Godwin's "Political Justice" (1793) was never quite forgotten, and was even reprinted in the forties (9 vols., Wino.). William Thompson's "Inquiry" (1824), however, though beginning in an almost Anarchist spirit, drifted Into Owenism rather, and could not serve as a basis for an Anarchist movement. The mutualism of John Gray (1832, 1842, 1848) is logical, but dry, uninspiring, and anything but revolutionary. The individualism of W. Maccall is purely rhetorical, without aim, and purposeless. The rich Socialist literature of the forties contains no translation of Proudhon, no trace (as far as my limited knowledge goes) of any Proudhonist propaganda. It is wonderful that fifteen years of Chartism did not produce a single writer of mark who, after exposing the futility of the Chartist parliamentary panacea, would have arrived at Anarchism; the Owenites and simple cooperators of those times were anti-political, it is true, but that meant with most of them to acquiesce in any state of political oppression that might exist and just abstained from Interfering with them. In France, after but one or two years of experience with representative assemblies (184849), parliamentarism was utterly rejected by several Socialists (Considérant, Rittinghauaen, etc.) who advocated direct legislation; but the monstrous achievements of universal suffrage, the Napoleonic election and plebiscite, knocked the bottom out of this propaganda, which [45] did not to any extent touch England at all, though one of Considérant's pamphlets was translated (London, 1851). So the field from which Anarchism might have sprung was almost barren.

In 1850 Thornton Hunt begun to publish the "Leader," a weekly review, which under his editorship (until January, 1859) was in some sort of contact with the advanced movements, but which later soon degenerated into a malignant anti-democratic paper. Probably the ideas of Josiah Warren (the time store) were known to the readers of Owenite papers by American letters for many years, but to a larger public some letters and reviews published since 1851 in the "Leader" probably first made Anarchism known. Herbert Spencer's 'Social Statics" were given a very full review (March 15, 22, April 12, 1851), followed soon by four articles on Proudhon's French book, "Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIX. Siècle" (September 6, 13, 27, October 18, 1851). Here Proudhon's famous words of 1840 are reproduced, ending with: "I am an Anarchist," and it added: "By 'Anarchy' he means no more than what our admirable friend Herbert Spencer sets forth as the goal to which civilization is irresistibly tending,—viz., the final disappearance of government, become unnecessary because man will have learned so to control themselves as to need no external coercion." In another place: "We caution the reader against a natural misapprehension of the word Anarchy, which is not used as synonymous with disorder; but simply what the Greek word implies,—viz., absence of government, absolute liberty;' etc.

In this paper, then, on July 19, 1851, was published a letter, signed "H. E." (New York, June 19), in which the writer, who went to America to join Cabet's Icarien Community, says:

"Fourier is more known here than any other European Socialist writer, but Proudhon seems to me more adapted to meet the sympathies of American Socialism. He, in his paradoxical way, proclaims himself an Anarchist; and recently, in England, Herbert Spencer taught substantially the same thing, and tells you that government is not to be regarded as an institution, to be for ever needful to man." Then he tells how he got acquainted with Stephen Pearl Andrews's "The True Constitution of Government in the Sovereignty of the Individual" (The Science of Society," No. 1, New York, 1851). "Here," he says, "the principle of absolute individualism—or, if Proudhon prefers, we will say Anarchy (an-arche)—is laid down in plain English unconditionally; but the party profess to have made a [46] grand discovery,—viz, of a principle which idil render this absolute abolition of government possible and practicable forthwith—at once, by such as choose." y this he refers to a book then in the press: ' Cost the Limit of Price" ("The Science of Society," No. 2, New York, 1853).

These ideas of individualist Anarchism (which I need not discuss here) were formed at the end of the twenties (1827) by Josiah Warren, an Englishman who had lived in Robert Owen's New Harmony community, and then began various experiments by himself, His work, "Equitable Commerce: a New Development of Principles as Substitutes for Law and Government," in part published in 1846, was edited In New York in 1852 by Stephen Pearl Andrews; it was followed by "Practical Details in Equitable Commerce" (New York, 1852).

"H. E." is Henry Edger (born in Sussex, 1890, died In Versailles, 1888, a London barrister, later on an agriculturist in Modern Times, indications taken from Positivist publications). He sent several other letters to "Ion:" the pseudonym of a contributor to the "Leader." Next, on March 4, 1851, a lady signing "M" wrote to William Parr on a lecture by St. P. Andrews at the North American Phalanx, in New Jersey, who mentioned the existence of an "equitable" village in Ohio, at that time; land had already been taken on Long Island, where the Modern Times community was soon to be started (the "Leader," Sept. 6, 1851). On March 13, 1852, "Ion" publishes in The "Leader" a review of Andrews's "Science of Society," which had also casually been mentioned in the "Westminster Review." Henry Edger sends very full notes on Modern Times) as "Trialville" on Long Island had been called (November 91, 1851, in the "Leader" of March 27, 1852): "it seems to me not unworthy of remark that a heresy among social reformers should have sprung up simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Proudhon and Andrews alike discard association, alike proclaim Anarchy; but Andrews, more intelligently to English ears, proclaims it as the sovereignty of the Individual. Nor is Andrews alone here: a small party of thinkers, of whom Henry James and Dr. Curtis may be considered the chief, unite with him In teaching the doctrine that the individual is above the institution. Society is for man—not man for society." This is, of all the letters by Edger, the most descriptive and fullest of details scarcely anywhere accessible now, I believe. The "Leader" (August 14 and 21, 1852) reviews Henry James's "Lectures and Miscellanies." (New York, 1852), saying: "That his thoughts point [47] in the direction of no government, whither Proudhon, Herbert Spencer, and others also tend, will startle only those unaccustomed to modern speculations. Everywhere the police becomes less and less a faith with thinking men; end the necessity for 'strong government' in the baser physical sense gets less recognition" (the latter qualification being the means by which the critic of the "Leader" usually retracts everything sensible he has advanced). I have looked up some of the writings of Henry James, but whatever good he may have had to say is hopelessly buried in religious twaddle, and it is impossible to resuscitate him as an Anarchist sympathizer of any use.

A year after his first visit H. Edger saw Modern Times again (letters in the "Leader," January 8, 1853); the first winter had bean vary trying. "For, there being no association, the first leaders cherishing a horror of Fraternity-sentimentalism, everyone had to shift for himself as he best could." In 1853 H. Edger spent five months at the North American Phalanx, but expresses himself strongly in favor of Modem Times (letter of July, 1853, the "Leader:' September 10): "The intelligent portion of social reformers are nearly all looking in the direction of Modem Times. . . . Social reforms, then, which limit themselves to industrial organization, and studiously ignore the existence of the deepest and most widespread social disease, end the social want thereby indicated, may well be failures. . . . The Modern Times reform alone attempts to grapple with this master difficulty, and it does It in the way at once manly and philosophical—of boldly guaranteeing to woman her natural right and highest duty: that of supreme sovereignty in her own legitimate domain— that of the affections. This is the central idea of Fourier's speculations, the identity of which with the Modern Times movement is again very remarkable. A movement which starts by eliminating altogether the idea of association, or any combination of interests whatever, is coming to effectuate the very reforms which have in this country gone generally by the name of Associationism, while the associations themselves arc sinking into inanition."

In this year Edger, who prepared to go to live at Modern Times, got hold of Positivism) which from that time onward he zealously propagated. Letters of January and February 5, 1854 (the "Leader," July 8, 1854), and of March, 1854' (dated Modern Times, ii'. July 22), show how It was possible for men of different social ideas to live together at Modern Times. "Beyond our one principle [that of the sovereignty of the in- [48] dividual]," he says, "we are in no wise responsible for each other's doctrines any more than for each other's acts, here, In our village of Modern Times. But our principle does this one thing, and here I distinctly take my stand: it unites all of us here in a firm, final protest against the competency of political authorities to decide questions of morals."

I have not found further letters by Edger in the "Leader," but the little French volume, "Letters d'Auguste Comte . . . à Henry Edger et à M. John Metcalf" (Paris, Apostolat Positiviste, 1889) contains Comte's letters to H. Edger at Modern Times, 1854-57, published by Jorge Lagarrigue. Early in 1854 Edger sent his "full adhesion" to Comte, who was delighted over another example "of aptitude towards noble submission with souls who had been most led astray by anarchical utopias" (March 10, 1854). They agreed, It seems, on the "affinity of Catholicism and Positivism," and Comte recommends "the particular importance of a dignified contact with the Jesuits, to whom, I presume, the supreme direction of the Catholic movement in America belongs. You will feel in this way that their success prepares our success." These are not jokes, as can be seen from the article, "Auguste Comte et les Jésuites," by G. Dumas ("Revue do Paris," October, 1898). Edger entertained Comte with a project of a sort of Positivist colony, which Comte at first rejected ("I cannot accept your proposal of a sort of Positivist monastery"); but Edger maintained his idea of an agricultural colony (1836), and tells Comte of the influence his ideas begin to exercise round him. Comte thinks that Modern Times may, some years hence, "really become a Positivist village," and after fifteen or twenty years the "spiritualist centre of a Positivist island [Long Island] which would soon form a separate State in the [United States] Federation."

If Comte addressed himself to the Jesuits, Robert Owen tried to convert the kings of the Holy Affiance, Fourier looked to Napoleon and later on to the never arriving millionaire, and the St. Simonians endeavored to win over a prince to their ideas. It was Blanqui who first struck the note of uncompromising revolutionary Socialism.

As to Henry Edger, we learn more about him and Modern Times from his pamphlet "Modern Times, the Labor Question, and the Family (Modern Times, October 8, 1858), which contains a fair general statement and an exposition of Positivism. I ignore his second tract: "Brief Exposition of Religious Positivism" (1856). His third "Modern Times [49] Tract" is: "The Positive Community: Glimpse of the Regenerated Future of the Human Race. A Sermon Preached at Modern Times . . . 6th September, 1863" (Modern Times, 1804), which is curious, as it shows his endeavor to put forward something real and tangible about Positivist aims.

Modern Times is best known now by Moncure D. Conway's description, "Fortnightly Review," 1865; he visited it in 1800, and found all the Anarchist arrangements working very well. Of its end he reports there, as well as in his "Autobiography," 1904, that "soon after the [American Civil] war broke out, most of those 1 had seen there sailed from Montauk Point on a small ship, and fixed their tents on some peaceful shore in South America" (" Autobiography"). I hope that fuller accounts are in existence, but have not seen them.

To return to England, Modern Times was described In "Chambers's Journal," December 18, 1852—which I have not seen—and in a lecture by William Parr before the British Association at Glasgow, 1855, printed in the "Journal of the Statistical Society of London: June, 1856, pp. 197-143 (" Equitable Villages in America"). Here is mentioned "The Periodical Letter on the Principles and Progress of the Equity Movement," a monthly paper by Josiah Warren, since July, 1854, which, like the "Social Revolutionist" and similar papers of early Anarchist experiments in America, seems to be quite inaccessible in Europe.

These remarks led me a long way from the consideration of the pamphlet of October, 1853, mentioned above. I saw it noticed only in a paragraph of the "Leader," October 15, 1853, headed "New Society of Reformers," mentioning that this London Confederation of Rational Reformers—perhaps the first English Anarchist group—was "composed, we believe, of seceders from" J. Bronterre O'Brien's organization, the National Reform League. This was their "initiatory tract." Perhaps a paper that stands nearer to Bronterre O'Brien's party may contain further details; Ernest Jones's "People's Paper" contains none.

Meanwhile I can only add that the only other Anarchist publication of the fifties which I know is: "The Inherent Evil of all State Government Demonstrated"; being a reprint of Edmund Burke's celebrated essay, entitled, "A Vindication of Natural Society" [1750], with notes and an appendix, briefly enunciating the principles through which "Natural Society" may be realized. (London, Holyoake & Co., 1858, vi,, 66 pp., 8vo). The notes and appendix are written by an unknown author [50] entirely in sympathy with Josiah Warren's ideas, and who bad been in Modern Times himself. They contain no reference to any existing propaganda In England. Perhaps Mr. 0. J. Holyoake (who knew so well Ebenezer Edger) will be able to supply the name of the author.

I need hardly add that any further indications on this subject—e. g., where this first English propagandist pamphlet may be found, etc.—are more than welcome.

P. S.—Two days after writing the above, when looking over a truly remarkable collection of early literature, my eye caught a four-page leaflet, bound up among currency tracts, which the owner, an old member of the Socialist League, with great kindness let me have, though he had only this copy of it. This is:

An Outline of the Principles, Objects, and Regulation

of the London Confederation of Rational Reformers,

founded August, 1853,

by a few private individuals of the middle and working classes.

This programme, published after the above-mentioned twelve-page tract No. 1, is an amalgamation of the Anarchist ideas of Warren and Andrews with the general demands of advanced reformers of the time. The ideas which the Americans tried to realize in small communities these Englishmen wanted applied to the whole country; hence some practical compromising, but also the idea of a broad and large propaganda.

The secretaries of the new organization were A. McN. Dickey and A. C. Cuddon. With the second name we re-enter known territory, for this is Ambrose Custon Cuddon, whose articles with strong Anarchist leanings in the "Cosmopolitan Review" (London, 1861—Feb. 1, '62)—also in the "Working M" (1861-62)—I have long since noticed.

As chairman of the "Working Man's" Committee be headed the deputation which greeted Bakounine on his escape from Siberia and arrival in London, January 10, 1869; he also spoke at the famous gathering in Freemason's Hall, August 5, 1862, when the same committee welcomed the French delegates to the International Exhibition and the Idea of the International Working Men's Association was first alluded to in public. He had been in America early in 1858, and as early as 1841 he was honorary secretary of the "Home Colonization Society," an organization with somewhat more practical, more immediate intentions than the main Owenite body—as he explained in the [51] "New Moral World," Leeds, February 13, March 20, 1841. The "Dictionary of National Biography" records Ambrose Cuddon, a Catholic publisher and journalist in the twenties. A. C. Cuddon may have been his son; neither his articles in the sixties nor the above—mentioned programme, 1853, lack some useless religious phraseology. From such a comparison of ideas and style I conclude that A. C. Cuddon wrote the "Programme of the Rational Reformers" of 1853, and it is at least probable to me that be was also the author of the pamphlet In question, and very likely 'o of the notes to Burke's Vindication, 1858.

THE CLAIMS OF ANARCHISM

In an essay on "William Morris as an Exponent of Socialism," read by Samuel W. Cooper before the Browning Society, of Philadelphia, on December 14, 1905, the essayist made the following sympathetic statement of the claims of Anarchism:

The Anarchists say that all the ills of humanity come from monopolies or government,—that there has not been an effort made by society for its betterment which has not been met by an appeal to authority. Reformers have been burned at the stake, slavery upheld as a divine institution, countless millions slaughtered in wars of conquest and aggression, and, in general, the mass of humanity made the slaves of a few rulers. Class legislation, the prevention of competition, the monopolizing of the means of existence, have resulted in political knavery, civic unrighteousness, and commercial Iniquity, and have indoctrinated mankind with a lust for criminal gain which has destroyed most of that which was good within him. The reflex action on humanity has poisoned the pure streams of morality which spring from the free earth. They claim that, under State Socialism, we would have a policeman to thump into us health, wealth, and wisdom, and to tell us what to eat, drink, or wear. There would be State doctors, State bar-tenders, State pie-inspectors, State nurseries, and State families.

They say there is no magic whatever in the name "State." The State, they say, is merely a corporation organized by authority, the powers of which have now been taken possession of by the wealthy and privileged classes. Its purpose are not the prevention of aggression, but committing aggression, the enforcing of codes of bad morals, and holding the people in slavery.

They say this corporation is supported largely by criminals, [52] who are the managers of the same, and that it commits more crimes of violence and more robbery than all the rest of society; that it manufactures criminals by means of its criminal laws; that, by permitting the organization of sub-State bodies,

—private corporations,—it allows industrial buccaneers and privateers with roving letters of marque to embark on the high seas of commerce, ready to destroy all honest merchantmen; that its patent and copyright Jaws, its laws for restriction of free trade, and all the mass of class legislation which it has built up, are only the means whereby the poor are exploited and the monopolists made rich beyond the dreams of romance.

They say that all attempts to make people good by having corporate legislators pass certain enactments, and then filing them away in pigeon holes, is futile, and they claim that humanity cannot be raised, like hothouse flowers, but should be allowed natural growth.

They claim that, under a natural condition, in which society was not interfered with by the police, morality would develop, and that, by unions, associations, societies, and clubs, organized for the purpose of carrying on any necessary operation of society, people would be far better off morally, mentally, physically, and financially, and that there would not be the enormous economic waste which is incident to governmental control.

They claim that by voluntary organization for the prevention of aggression mankind would be much safer than it can possibly be under present conditions.

These and many more things they Claim, which it might be worth while to look into, for many of them seem to bear critical examination.

MR. SHAW'S POSITION

[Max Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review."]

It must amuse him, whenever he surveys it; and I hope lie will some day write a comedy around it. It bristles with sidelights on so many things—on human character in general, and on the English character in particular, and on the particular difficulties that genius encounters In England, and on the right manner of surmounting them.

For years Mr. Shaw was writing plays, some of which, by book or crook, in holes and corners, were produced. They were witnessed, and loudly applauded by such ladies and gentlemen as were in or around the Fabian Society. Not that these people [53] took their Socialist seriously as a playwright They applauded his work in just the spirit in which, had he started a racing— stable, they would have backed his horses. He was taken with some measure of seriousness by such of the professional critics as were his personal friends and were not hide-bound by theatrical tradition. Here, they perceived, was something new in the theatre; and, liking to be in advance of the time, they blew their trumpets in their friend's honor. 'The rest of the professional critics merely sniffed or cursed, according to their manners. The public took no notice at all. Time passed. In Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and elsewhere, Mr. Shaw was now a popular success. Perhaps in the hope that England had caught an echo of this exotic enthusiasm, Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker ventured to produce "John Bull's Other Island." England had not caught that echo. There was only the usual little succès d'estime. But, not long after its production, the play was witnessed by a great lady, who advised an august person to witness it; and this august person persuaded a person yet more august to witness it. It had been withdrawn, meanwhile; so there was "a command performance." All the great ladies, and all the great gentlemen, were present; also, several paragraphists. That evening Mr. Shaw became a fashionable craze; and within a few days all London knew it The Savoy restaurant is much frequented by fashion and by paragraphy; and its revenues are drawn mainly from the many unfashionable people who go to feast their eyes on the people who are fashionable beyond dispute. No large restaurant can live by the aristocracy alone. Nor can even a small theatre. Mr. Shaw "pays" now, because now the English middle class pays to see that which is seen and approved by the English upper class, and (more especially) to see the English upper class. Whether either of these classes really rejoices in Mr. Shaw, as yet, is a point on which 1 am doubtful. I went to see "Man and Superman" a few nights ago. The whole audience was frequently rocking with laughter, but mostly at the wrong moments. (I admit That Mr. Shaw's thoughts are often so profound, and his wit is always so swift, that to appreciate his plays rightly and fully at a first hearing is rather an achievement) But it was obvious that the whole audience was very happy indeed. It was obvious That Mr. Shaw is an enormous success. And in the round-about way by which success has come to him is cast a delicious light on that quality for which England is specially notable among The nations.

His success is not gratifying to the critics. To those critics [54] who are incapable of exercising their brains, and who have always resented Mr. Shaw vehemently, it is, of course, galling to find themselves suddenly at odds with public opinion—the opinion which they are accustomed to "voice." Having slated "John Bull:' and slated "Man and Superman," they must have been in a fearful dilemma about the play produced at the Court Theatre last week, "Major Barbara." Perhaps this, too, was going to "catch on." Would it not be safer to climb down, and write moderate eulogies? I suspect it was stupidity as much as pride that diverted them from this ignominious course. They really could not make head or tail of the play. They were sure that this time Shaw really had come a cropper—had really delivered himself into their hands. "A success, are you? Pet of the public, are you? We'll see about that. We'll pet-of-the-public you. We'll" etc., etc. The old cries—"no dramatist:" "laughing at his audience:' and the like—were not sufficient, this time. "Brute" and "blasphemer" were added. In the second act of the play, Mr. Shaw has tried to show some of the difficulties with which the Salvation Army has to cope. A ruffian comes to one of the shelters in quest of a woman who has been rescued from living with him. A Salvation "lass" bars his way, and refuses to yield. He strikes her in the face. The incident is not dragged in. It is necessary to the purpose of the whole scene. Nor has anyone ventured to suggest that it is an exaggeration of real life. Nor is the incident enacted realistically on the stage of the Court Theatre. At the first performance, anyhow, the actor impersonating the ruffian aimed a noticeably gentle blow in the air, at a noticeably great distance from the face of the actress impersonating the lass. I happen to be particularly squeamish in the matter of physical violence on the stage. I have winced at the smothering of Desdemona, for example, when it has been done with anything like realism. The mere symbolism at the Court Theatre gave me not the faintest qualm—not, I mean, the faintest physical qualm: æsthetically, of course, I was touched, as Mr. Shaw had a right to touch me. And it seems to me that the critics who profess to have been disgusted and outraged must have been very hard up for a fair means of attack. Equally unfair—for that it may carry conviction to the minds of people who have not seen the play—is the imputation of blasphemy. Mr. Shaw is held up to execration because he has put into the mouth of Major Barbara certain poignant words of Our Lord. To many people, doubtless, it is a screamingly funny joke that a female should have a military prefix. Also, there is no doubt that Mr. Shaw's play [55] abounds in verbal wit, and In humorous situations. But the purport of the play is serious; and the character of Major Barbara is one of the two great factors in it. With keenest insight end sense of spiritual beauty, Mr. Shaw reveals to us in her the typical religious fanatic of her kind. Sense of spiritual beauty is not one of the qualities hitherto suspected in Mr. Shãw but here it certainly is; end I defy even the coarsest mind not to perceive it. ._To respect it is another matter.) When Major Barbara comes to the great spiritual crisis of her life, and when she believes that all the things she had trusted in have fallen away from her, what were more natural than that she should utter the words of agony that era most familiar to her? That any sane creature in the audience could have been offended by that utterance I refuse to believe. It was as inoffensive as It was dramatically right And the critics who have turned up the whites of their eyes, and have doubtless prejudiced against the play many worthy people who have not, like them, had the opportunity of seeing It, must submit to one of two verdicts,—insanity or hypocrisy. I have no doubt that of these two qualities they will prefer to confess the latter. It is the more typically British.

In that delicate comedy, "Mr. Shaw's Position," the parts played by these critics seem rather crude. There is a subtler fun in the parts played by some of the superior critics,—the critics who were eager to lend helping hands to Mr. Shaw in the time of his obscurity. So long as he was "only so high," and could be comfortably patted on the head, they made a pet of him. Now that he strides gigantic, they are less friendly. They seem even anxious to trip him up. Perhaps they do not believe in the genuineness of his growth, and suspect some trick of stilts. That would be a quite natural scepticism. A great man cannot be appreciated fully by his intimate contemporaries. Nor can his great success be ever quite palatable to them, however actively they may have striven to win it for him. To fight for a prince who has to be hiding in an oak-tree is a gallant end pleasant adventure; but, when one sees the poor creature enthroned, with a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand, one's sentiments are apt to cool. And thus the whilom champions of Mr. Shaw's virtues are now pre-occupied mainly with Mr. Shaw's defects. The old torches ere still waved, but perfunctorily; and the main energy is devoted to throwing cold water. Whereas the virtues of Mr. Shaw used to be extolled with reservations for the defects, now the defects are condemned with reservations for the virtues. Mr. Shaw, it is in- [56] sisted, cannot draw life; he can only distort it. He has no knowledge of human nature; he is but a theorist. AU his characters are but so many incarnations of himself. Above all, he cannot write plays. He has no dramatic instinct, no theatrical technique. And these objections are emphatically reiterated (often with much brilliancy and ingenuity) by the superior critics, while all the time the fact is staring them in the face that Mr. Shaw bus created in "Major Barbara" two characters—Barbara and her father—who live with an intense vitality; a crowd of minor characters that arc accurately observed (though some are purposely exaggerated) from life; and one act—the second—which is as cunning and closely-knit a piece of craftsmanship as any conventional playwright could achieve, and a cumulative appeal to emotions which no other living playwright has touched. With all these facts staring them in the face, they still maintain that Mr. Shaw is not a playwright.

That theory might have held water in the days before Mr. Shaw's plays were acted. Indeed, I was in the habit of propounding it myself. I well remember that, when the two volumes of "Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant" were published, and the ordinary dramatic criticisms in this Review were all signed G. B. S. I wrote here a special article in which I pointed out that the plays, delightful to be read, would be quite impossible on the stage. This simply proved that I had not enough theatrical imagination to see the potentialities of a play through reading it in print When, later, I saw performances of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," "The Devil's Disciple," and "You Never Can Tell," I found, to my great surprise, that they gained much more than they lost by being seen and not read. Still, the old superstition fingered in my brain. I had not learnt my lesson. When "Man and Superman" was published, I called it "Mr. Shaw's Dialogue," and said that (even without the philosophic scene In hell) it would be quite unsuited to any stage. When I saw it performed, I determined that I would not be caught tripping again. I found that as a piece of theatrical construction it was perfect. As in "John Bull's Other Island," so in "Major Barbara" (excepting the aforesaid second act), there is none bf that tight construction which was in the previous plays. There is little story, little action. Everything depends on the inter-play of various types of character and of thought. But to order this process in such a way that it shall not be tedious requires a very great amount of technical skill. During the third act of "Major Barbara," I admit, I found my attention wandering. But this aberration [57] was not due to any loosening of Mr. Shaw's grip on his materiel. It was due simply to the fact that my emotions had been stirred so much in the previous act that my cerebral machine was not in proper working order. Mr. Shaw ought to have foreseen that effect. In not having done so, he is guilty of a technical error. But to deny that he is a dramatist merely because he chooses, for the most part, to get drama out of contrasted types of character and thought, without action, and without appeal to the emotions, seems to me both unjust and absurd. His technique is peculiar because his purpose is peculiar. But it is not the less technique.

There! I have climbed down. Gracefully enough to escape being ridiculous? I should like mine to be a "sympathetic" part in "Mr. Shaw's Position."

MUST WE LEARN THE WORST FROM ADLER?

[New York Truth Seeker.]

Dr. Felix Adler twenty-five years ago was reputed to be something of a radical, but he has net kept up with the procession. He has recently delivered a lecture before the Ethical Society on the Bernard Shaw plays, and has placed himself squarely beside Anthony Comstock and the New York police for the suppression not only of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," but "Man and Superman" as well. He made the rather curious argument that the desire to be acquainted with life as it is not a wholesome one, and that there is much going on which we can afford not to know. This is the same Dr. Adler who once went into the slums to see life as it was, end came back to report to his society that he had met little girls of ten and eleven years who had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Apparently, if the public is to know the worst, the president of the Ethical Society would prefer it should be learned from him rather than from Mr. Shaw end the other "literary Anarchists."

THE MOTHERHOOD FETICH

I had intended to write the following paragraph for "Liberty:" but the New York "Evening Post" was too quick for me:

President Roosevelt must be startled to find that a mere representative in congress can beat him at his own game of in-[58] venting thundering platitudes about motherhood. Morris Sheppard, of Texas, has done the trick:

When the president of the United States with all the glamour of his great office, steps into the presence of an American mother, be Is In the presence of his superior.

There is a motto to frame and hang on the walls of every nursery. If Mr. Sheppard is not invited to address each mothers' dub in this broad land, the ladies are ungrateful wretches. For our part, however, we arc unable to understand why the forcible expulsion of Mrs. Minor Morris from the executive offices is rendered more heinous because she is a mother. Had she been the most austere of spinsters, the indiscretion of Assistant Secretary Barnes and the stupidity and superfluous violence of the police would have been exactly the same in intention and effect. These officious men—perhaps some of them are fathers— never stopped to inquire whether Mrs. Morris had children; and even she herself might have regarded the question as irrelevant.

A NEW YEAR'S WISH

[New York Times]

On a mountain top that almost touched the stars,

I stood one day and saw the earth throughout.

All living things and all their wants I knew.

No care nor fear that mankind had

Was screened from me, and I the power owned

To do for all as I had wished to do.

I did for each whatever I deemed best,

And then came back to earth

To live with the content.

But soon I saw that each one bad

A wish to live as he found best,

And far off from the way I meant.

And so I wish

That those who ever seek

To make me live as they,

Will stop to think,

And learn from honest truth

Whose is the better way.

Abraham Gruber.

* Mr. Howe is talking of cities, and so am I. In a State legislature the large area covered, and the presence of the rural vote, tend to weaken the power of the hose as a men and make it easier for money to dwarf him. Hence we often bear of a State being owned by a railroad company, while a city is always said to be owned by a man or a ring. The members of the ring may be the leading stockholders of a corporation, but it is as men, not as money-bags, that they boss the city. Their money is a tool of their political power, and is their motive far holding the power; but the power does not consist in the money.

Cohn and Wilbur, What's Wrong with Postanarchism

2007-07-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

What's Wrong With Postanarchism?

http://www.anarchist-studies.org/article/articleview/26/1/1/

by Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur

What is now being called “postanarchism” by some
thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many
forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to
marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy
and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word,
thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and
anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the
post- prefix applies to its new object as
well—implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore
thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete. Together,
these two senses of the word form a narrative: an
aging, spent force (anarchism) is to be saved from
obsolescence and irrelevance by being fused with a
fresh, vital force (poststructuralism). We would like
to question this narrative's assumptions and
teleology, but not without some appreciation of what
it has to offer.


Anarchists can indeed usefully take several things
from poststructuralism:
 

1. Howard Richards has said that "what is sometimes
called 'post-modern consciousness'... could more
modestly be called an improved understanding of
symbolic processes" (Letters From Quebec 2.38.8).
Rather than seeing human beings as autonomous
individuals who perceive the world objectively—a naïve
realist position which would imply that the choices we
make to participate in hierarchical and exploitative
systems are made with open eyes —poststructuralists
point to the many ways in which our consciousness of
the world is filtered through social “texts” which
script our lives.


2. In so doing, poststructuralism opens up a new
terrain of struggle for political analysis: the
struggle over signs, symbols, representations, and
meaning in the media environment and everyday life.
This has been particularly important for feminist
theory over the last forty years, and it ought to be
so for anarchism as well.


3. As long as we think of language as a tool distinct
from its users, we can't adequately criticize the
notion of “the individual” as an isolatable,
self-contained unit, and that means we will still have
trouble thinking beyond (or convincing others to try
to think beyond) the sacred categories of capitalism.
By undermining naïvely individualistic conceptions of
subjectivity, poststructuralism furnishes a powerful
confirmation of the importance anarchists have always
accorded to community and sociality.


4. All of this provides us with some splendid tools
for ideological critique.  Poststructuralism trains us
to think critically in ways that allow us to see
through the seeming political/ethical "neutrality" of
certain discourses. We can use poststructuralist
analytical approaches to read texts for the way they
use language to construct identities and divisions, to
frame issues and distort them, to lie by omission, to
center certain perspectives while marginalizing
others, and so on.


5. To understand that some things which seem “natural”
are culturally constructed is to be aware that they
might have been constructed otherwise.
Poststructuralists challenge the notion that people
have “natures” or “essences” that limit and determine
what they can be—a point that should remind us of
Kropotkin's riposte to the Social Darwinism of
scientists like Huxley, who proposed that capitalism
and war are merely social expressions of the natural
struggle for “survival of the fittest.”


6. Anarchists should also take to heart some of the
ethical implications of poststructuralism.  A
poststructuralist emphasis on “otherness,” on
historical and cultural locatedness, on the
multiplicity of perspectives and “subject positions,”
on the inescapable plurality of representations—all
should confirm and deepen our awareness of our own
limitations, our sense of respect for others.  When
Derrida's mentor, Emmanuel Levinas, says that ethics
is the true “first philosophy,” he delivers the best
possible rebuke to Marx and other critics of
anarchism, with their contempt for a theory which was
too “simple” to be adequate (based as it was on an
ethical position—the rejection of domination and
hierarchy, the embrace of social freedom—rather than
on some speculation about the laws of economics or the
ultimate goal of history).


7. Poststructuralism can strengthen anarchist
commitments to a social conception of freedom, as
opposed to a simpleminded “liberationism” for which
every social relationship is merely a constraint to be
rejected. Despite the tendency of some to read
poststructuralist accounts of the constructedness of
things as an endorsement of a “deconstructive”
liberationism, it does offer at least some resources
for thinking about the necessity and possibility of
social reconstruction.  Foucault, for instance,
ridicules liberationism in its left-Freudian forms
(centered on the concepts of a naturally good desire
which must be “expressed” rather than “repressed” by a
bad society), and ultimately proposes a kind of
“ethics” premised on our ability to construct
ourselves.  It's not an entirely successful effort
(Foucault is still somewhat captive to a liberationist
discourse in much of his writing), but it's
suggestive. Derrida appears to be developing gradually
a politics of “friendship,” “memory,”
“responsibility,” “hospitality,” etc. Jean-Luc Nancy,
Giorgio Agamben and others have given us a wealth of
engagements with “community.”

At the same time, we see a number of serious problems
with postanarchism's manner of wedding
poststructuralism to anarchism:

1. Postanarchism has, as one of its core narratives, a
drastically reduced notion of what “anarchism” is and
has been. The “classical anarchist” tradition treated
by Andrew M. Koch, Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis
Call, usually restricted to a limited number of “great
thinkers” (Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin),
is reductive at best. As the late John Moore noted in
his reviewof The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism, postanarchists omit any
mention of “second wave” or “contemporary” anarchism,
reducing a living tradition to a dead “historical
phenomenon” called “classical anarchism.” Reiner
Schürmann is content to dismiss “Proudhon, Bakunin,
and their disciples,” in a single paragraph, as
“rationalist” thinkers, plain and simple. There is
almost complete inattention to the margins of the
“classical” texts, not to mention the margins of the
tradition. Such “minor” theorists as Gustav Landauer,
Voltairine de Cleyre, Josiah Warren, Emma Goldman, and
Paul Goodman, to name just a few of those excluded,
would seem to merit some consideration, particularly
if the project is a rethinking of “normal anarchism.”


2. Conflict, as well as diversity, is smoothed over in
the historical accounts of anarchism given by
postanarchists. Anarchist history is a terrain
occupied by materialists and mystics, communists and
mutualists, nihilists and scientists, progressivists
and primitivists alike. Terms taken for granted in
much postanarchist critique—“science,” for
example—were the explicit subject of complex struggles
within anarchism and socialism broadly. To fail to
look at this history of internal difference can also
blind us to the related history of organizational
conflict and strife—the other set of forces at work in
shaping anarchism and socialism as we have had them
passed down to us. Marc Angenot notes that “the point
of departure for Proudhon” is not “an axiom,” but a
sense of “scandal”—a provocation into thought by
“something unthinkable.” Just as we have to read
Kropotkin's theory of “mutual aid” as a response (or,
as Kingsley Widmer calls it, a “countering”) to
Huxley, we ought to analyze other key developments in
anarchist theory in the context of an anarchist milieu
traversed by a continuing series of disputes,
controversies, and epistemological “scandals.”


3. Where Koch, May, Newman, and Call examine specific
“classical anarchist” texts, the passages they cite
often seem far from representative of the actual
arguments made by those writers. Particularly when
using texts like G. P. Maximoff's Political Philosophy
of Mikhail Bakunin—a patchwork of translated
quotations from some twenty-nine source texts in three
languages—close attention to the overall use of
concepts is necessary to compensate for the
unsystematic nature of the original sources. Lack of
such attention, together with preconceptions about
anarchist “rationalism,” can lead to curious
misreadings. In Newman's “Anarchism and the Politics
of Ressentiment,” for example, the argument proceeds
by reading “classical anarchism,” represented by
Bakunin and Kropotkin, as follows: at certain points,
these anarchists depict the human subject as naturally
opposed to power, while at other points they seem to
say that power naturally emanates from human subjects.
From this premise, Newman goes on to conclude that
classical anarchism is riven by a fundamental
inconsistency, a damaging “contradiction.” The
unstated assumption which warrants this move from
premise to conclusion is that these two
characterizations of the human subject are mutually
exclusive—that Bakunin and Kropotkin cannot intend
both. This assumption begs the question: why not? In
fact, a close reading of texts by these theorists
would support a different conclusion—that for both of
them, it is the human subject itself which is the
site, as Kropotkin writes in his Ethics, of a
“fundamental contradiction.” What Newman misses is the
possibility that, in Dave Morland's words, “anarchists
are proprietors of a double-barrelled conception of
human nature” as composed of “both sociability and
egoism.” Of course, for Anglophone writers and
readers, the difficulties of understanding are
compounded by a linguistic barrier: for instance, of
the thirty-nine texts collected in fifteen volumes of
Proudhon's complete works, only four have ever been
translated into English, so the only glimpses of his
more ambitious “theoretical” work available to
us—including his paradoxically “absolute” refusal of
“the Absolute”—are in Selected Writings of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a collection of scattered
quotations.


4. Poststructuralist critiques of “classical
anarchism” tend to place it in intellectual
contexts—“humanism,” “rationalism,”
“Enlightenment”—which are likewise treated in the most
reductive terms. For instance, Cartesian rationalism
is conflated with movements directly opposed to it—and
is applied to texts from the late 19th century, as if
there was no significant developments in ideas about
subjectivity, truth, or rationality after the 17th
century. Rather than artificially tying the ideas of
anarchist theorists to those of philosophers they
directly oppose (such as Rousseau), we might be better
off looking at Kropotkin's use of Wundt's psychology
and Guyau's ethics, Goldman's reading of Nietzsche,
Godwin's engagement with the epistemology of Hume and
Hartley, Malatesta's flirtation with pragmatism, or
what Bakunin might have learned from Schelling's call
for a “philosophy of existence” in opposition to
Hegel's “philosophy of essence.” Contemporary French
sociologist Daniel Colson's recent essay on
“AnarchistReadings of Spinoza” in the journal
Réfractions is suggestive of what can be done along
these lines.


5. Having constructed, on such an impoverished basis,
an ideological ghost called “classical anarchism,”
postanarchists then subject this phantom entity to a
critique based on some drastically undertheorized
concepts, tending to proceed as if the meaning of key
terms like “nature,” “power,” and even
“poststructuralism” were both self-evident and
unchanging. They act, as Foucault hears Nietzsche
complain of Paul Rée, as if “words had kept their
meaning... ignor[ing] the fact that the world of
speech... has known invasions, struggles, plundering,
disguises, ploys.” Moore, again, fingered this
difficulty: “'One would not call all exercises of
power oppressive,' May states. But surely that depends
upon who one is.” Why assume that what Bakunin meant
by the word “power,” in one particular essay, is the
same concept designated by Foucault's use of the word,
or Moore's, or May's—or even that named by the same
word in a different Bakunin essay? Indeed, even Newman
seems to allow the meaning of the term to slide in a
strategically convenient manner: on the first page of
>From Bakunin to Lacan, he uses “power” as synonymous
with “domination,” “hierarchies,” and “repression,”
but soon shifts over to a Foucauldian usage which
defines “power” as “something to be accepted as
unavoidable,” while defining “domination” and
“authority” as things which are “to be resisted.” The
problem is that, depending on which definition is in
play, Newman could be contradicting Bakunin or simply
reiterating him. In his “Reflections on Anarchism,”
Brian Morris makes a distinction (similar to the
Spinozan opposition between “potestas” and “potentia”
to which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt apeal)
between “power over” and “the power to do something.”
It is only “power” in the first sense that anarchists
categorically oppose, while “power” in the second
sense, as what Hannah Arendt calls “the human ability
not just to act but to act in concert,” is central to
anarchist theorizations of the social. Bakunin
considers what he and Proudhon call “social power,”
conceived as the non-coercive influence of individuals
and groups on one another, to be absolutely real and
ineradicable, condemning as “idealist” the “wish to
escape” the play of “physical, intellectual, and moral
influences” which is continuous with society itself:
“To do away with this reciprocal influence is death.”


6. The intended sense of the prefix “post-” in
“postanarchism” often seems to be uncritically
progressive, as if “anarchism” per se is something
that belongs to the past; this is reinforced by the
frequent suggestions that anarchism is merely a
continuation of a clapped-out “Enlightenment” thought.
This is far too simplistic. First of all, you don't
have to be Noam Chomsky to think that the
Enlightenment produced some ideas of lasting value: as
Donna Haraway suggests, “Enlightenment modes of
knowledge have been radically liberating” because
“they give accounts of the world that can check
arbitrary power.” Secondly, it is by no means clear
that poststructuralism places itself categorically
outside, after, or beyond the thought of
“Enlightenment,” nor that it can or ought to. Lyotard
defines the “postmodern” as that within the “modern”
which keeps it lively and resists reification, and
these days, even Newman acknowledges that for Foucault
there are not one but two “Enlightenments”—“the
Enlightenment of continual questioning and
uncertainty” as well as that of “rational certainty,
absolute identity, and destiny.” We can also recall
here Derrida's guarded defense of “the projects of the
Enlightenment” and Haraway's “insider strategy” where
science and development are concerned,
characteristically preferring “blasphemy” to
“apostacy,” emphasizing choice within a conflicted,
dangerous field instead of simple opposition to what
is ultimately a “naturalized” structure rather than a
natural one. “Non-innocent” resistance and the
business of dealing with complicity seem to be common
to many poststructuralist positions. Having shifted
away from simple opposition, poststructuralism has to
abandon some simple forms of moralizing as well. This
is why, finally, Haraway rejects the “postmodern”
label, preferring Latour's formulation that “we have
never been modern.” And it's why folks from
Baudrillard to Derrida have such a dismissive attitude
toward “good souls” who think they can attack
something like “the Enlightenment” from the outside,
without complicity. In any case, poststructuralists
have provided us with many, many reasons to be
“incredulous” towards “grand narratives” of linear
historical progress and to remain open to what is
open, living, and potentially radical in tradition.


7. The way in various critical missteps can compound
one another is perhaps clearest in the discussions of
“essentialism.” Much postanarchist critique echoes
Nietzsche's charge that anarchism is “poisoned at the
root” (a rather essentialist claim); for
postanarchists, ironically the “poison” is
“essentialism.” This notion however, is compromised to
begin with: for some time now, theorists from Diana
Fuss to Hubert Dreyfus have been complaining that the
term “essentialism” has become a mere pejorative
epithet, so flexible in its usages (Nick Haslam counts
no less than six distinct concepts lumped together
under the one word) that it can be applied to almost
any statement qua statement, and feminists like
Gayatri Spivak have argued that some uses of
“strategic essentialism” are endemic to any politics
whatsoever. Nonetheless, for Koch, May, and Newman
alike, Godwin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin are
representative of a hopelessly “essentialist” or
“ontological” anarchism: as Koch writes, “eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century anarchists' attacks on the
state were based on a 'rational' representation of
human nature” in which a basically static human
subject is innately possessed of “reason, compassion,
and gregariousness”; on this view, “corruption takes
place within social institutions and is not an
essential part of human nature,” since “the human
being is seen as a rational, cognitive, and
compassionate creature.” Certainly, if these theorists
believed in this sort of innate goodness, they would
have a hard time explaining the prevalence of
violence, inequality, and domination; however, they
affirm no such thing. For instance, in his Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice, far from assuming a
spontaneously good, rational, or gregarious human
subject, Godwin depicts the subject as the result of
social construction: “the actions and dispositions of
men are not the off-spring of any original bias that
they bring into the world in favour of one sentiment
or character rather than another, but flow entirely
from the operation of circumstances and events acting
upon a faculty of receiving sensible impressions.”
Thus, he ridicules the idea that complex behavioral
patterns such as a favorable disposition towards
“virtue” are “something that we bring into the world
with us, a mystical magazine, shut up in the human
embryo, whose treasures are to be gradually unfolded
as circumstances shall require,” and denies equally
that “self-love” (egoism) or “pity” (compassion) are
“instincts”; both, to him, are learned behaviors. The
“representation” of the human subject that emerges
from Political Justice is far from “fixed” or
“closed”—it is dynamic, endlessly mutable: “Ideas are
to the mind nearly what atoms are to the body. The
whole mass is in a perpetual flux; nothing is stable
and permanent; after the lapse of a given period not a
single particle probably remains the same.” This, in
fact, is why Godwin thinks we are capable of doing
better, and it is why he wrote so extensively on
questions of pedagogy and culture: just as government
is ultimately founded not on physical coercion but on
popular obedience springing from culturally learned
“opinions” and “prejudices,” a non-authoritarian
society would have to be the product of cultural
change—not “human nature.” His real argument against
“the state, as a coercive institution” (and against
every other coercive institution) is simply that it is
coercive, when cooperation is possible. Human
beings—whatever else we are—are capable of negotiating
conflicts and coordinating efforts without resorting
to force or manipulation. In Godwin's words: “The
evils existing in political society... are not the
inseparable condition of our existence, but admit of
removal and remedy.” This is all that ever need be
argued ontologically, and all that Proudhon, Bakunin,
and Kropotkin really require: the possibility of free
cooperation, which is the possibility of a life in
which no one is treated merely as an instrument.


8. The “epistemologically based” or
“poststructuralist” anarchism that Koch traces back
through Nietzsche to Stirner, on the other hand, is
precisely the conception of the world in which all
relations are held to be instrumental—and here is
another major problem with postanarchist projects. In
criticizing the supposed “essentialism” of “classical
anarchism,” rather too many postanarchists throw the
baby out with the bathwater, rejecting the broadly
communitarian, populist, and working-class character
of that tradition, and preserving only Stirner's
radical individualism. Indeed, for Newman, Stirner's
value is precisely that he “perpetuates” Hobbes's “war
model” of society, while Koch finds in his
thoroughgoing nominalism a weapon to use against “the
tyranny of globalizing discourse,” ultimately against
all “universals.” The problem is that Stirner's notion
of “uniqueness” denies legitimacy to any universal and
every collectivity: if, as Koch says, any “concepts
under which action is coordinated” can be dismissed as
mere “fictions,” while only the “individual” is
“real,” then it must follow that any coordinated
action or “consensual politics” is simply a form of
domination, the “impos[ition]” of “one set of
metaphors” on the infinite plurality of society.
Newman insists that “Stirner is not opposed to all
forms of mutuality,” citing his concept of a “Union of
Egoists,” but this, too, is an inadequate and
implausible conception—a kind of laissez-faire utopia
in which the social is replaced by the utilitarian,
equality produced by the equal exertion of force, and
the common good is reducible to an infinity of private
whims. Ultimately, for Stirner, “community... is
impossible.” Nor is it clear that Stirner manages to
avoid his own form of essentialism in positing a
“fixed” concept of the subject as an self-identical
“nothingness.” Where anarchists have articulated sharp
critiques of Stirner—Landauer's objection was
precisely that Stirner's “ego” is something that never
develops or grows, since anything it takes in, it has
to spit out, lest it become a “fixed idea”—some
poststructuralists have been prone to overlook
problems: thus, Koch uncritically endorses Stirner's
claim that “socal liberalism robs people of their
property in the name of community,” as if this did not
appeal to a rather flagrantly essentialist notion of
the “person” and what is “proper” to it. While
Stirner's attack on the bloodless abstractions of
liberal political philosophy is still relevant, they
can be and have been articulated by others (such as
Bakunin) without the accompanying endorsement of an
all-too-ideologically-suspect individualism.


9. Seeing how postanarchism constitutes itself via a
rhetoric which dismisses the categories of the natural
and the universal tout court, we should not be
surprised to find that it takes on board a substantial
quantity of subjectivism and relativism. It is
instructive to trace Mike Michael's arguments
demonstrating what he takes to be the relevance for
anarchism of Bruno Latour's sociological critique of
science, for which agreements are only ever a matter
of “power,” produced through a process of
“interessement” or “recruitment” in which “one aims to
convince actors that, rather than maintain a
particular set of self-understandings... they should
really be conceptualizing themselves through the
categories that you provide.” From this kind of
poststructuralist perspective, there is no way to
distinguish between free agreements and
instrumentalist manipulation: cooperation is always a
con game. As May has noted recently, in a review of
Newman's From Bakunin to Lacan, these varieties of
poststructuralism take such a “deconstructive approach
to language and politics” that they seem to preclude
“the kind of collective action that seems necessary
for political success”: “Indeterminacy is, to my mind,
a weak basis for political thought and organizing. It
tends to drive people apart rather than bringing them
together.” Koch likewise declares that “the relativity
of both ontology and epistemology, the plurality of
language systems, and the impossibility of
communicating intended meaning” imply that “the
potential to reach consensus without deception or
force becomes impossible.” It is not to his credit
that Koch terms this miserable result “anarchy.”

The anarchist tradition is not a complete, perfect
whole which is beyond question or criticism; it stands
in need of rigorous and permanent critique, and
certain elements of poststructuralist theory might be
valuable in this reconstructive work. In this respect,
Colson's recently published Petit lexique
philosophique de l'anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze,
while it has recourse to some dubious
poststructuralist rhetoric (in phrases such as
“rejecting all mediation”), seems to illustrate some
of the more interesting intersections between
19th-century anarchist ideas and practices, on the one
hand, and Deleuze's “strange unity... which never
speaks but of the multiple” on the other. Here,
Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Stirner are
revisited, but so are Makhno, Bookchin, Grave, Michel,
Pelloutier, Reclus, and Landauer, as well as Agamben,
Serres, Latour, de Certeau, Balibar, and Negri. Rather
than unidirectionally projecting poststructuralism
back onto anarchism (“correcting” its supposed
humanist, foundationalist, rationalist, and
essentialist “errors”), Colson places the two
discourses in dialogue, allowing each to illuminate
the other in its turn.

We are excited to find social philosophers attempting
to rethink anarchism in connection with
poststructuralism—and impatient with what we see as
the shortcomings of these attempts. We value the
poststructuralist work in large part because it
strikes us as concerned with going to the limits,
finding its own breaking points. Poststructuralism
acknowledges the dual responsibilities of radicals to
engage in potentially “interminable” analyses while
not letting us forget how immediately urgent the
problems that face us are. But it has very little
specific analysis of its own, and is hesitant in its
engagements with the traditional forms of the struggle
for freedom. It is our hope that by putting its
insights into play with the older insights of the
libertarian socialist tradition, we can overcome some
potential misconceptions about the road towards a free
society and put back into play some otherwise “lost”
strategies and insights.

***

Jesse Cohn lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is a
Green activist and an Assistant Professor of English
at Purdue University North Central. Recent
publications include “What is Postanarchism 'Post'?”
in Postmodern Culture (September 2002) and “Anarchism,
Representation, and Culture” (in proceedings of the
Culture and the Modern State conference, forthcoming).
He is currently completing a book on anarchist
literary theory, focusing on the question of
“representation” as it affects the three realms of
interpretation, aesthetics, and politics, with the
working title of Anarchism and the Crisis of
Representation.

Shawn P. Wilbur is a bookseller, electronic musician,
live sound engineer and independent scholar. He holds
an MA in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green
State University. He is a member of the Spoon
Collective, which provides online forums for the
discussion of various political and philosophical
subjects, including postanarchism. He is currently
working on a history of anarchism in the United
States, with an emphasis on the individualist and
mutualist currents within the movement. His work in
various areas can be found at www.libertarian-labyrinth.org

Eliphalet Kimball, Suggestions

2007-06-29T16:18:00.001-07:00

Eliphalet Kimball, "Suggestions," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, 8, 3 (June 20, 1874), 4.

SUGGESTIONS.

The reasons are many and powerful why husband and wife should not sleep in the same bed or even the same room. It is a familiarity that in time extinguishes love. Even by day, absence a good share of the time is necessary to the life of love. What is the cause that brother and sister have no love for each other? It is not because they are brother and sister; it is because they have lived from earliest childhood in the same family. Sleeping in the same bed is too much temptation to intemperance in sexual intercourse, the most ruinous to the constitution of all kinds of intemperance. That kind of intemperance is very common with men and their wives. It is an arrangement of Nature that the night should be devoted entirely to sleep and rest. At night, after the fatigues of the day, the body and mind are in an unsuitable condition for sexual intercourse, and especially for begetting children. If the parents are fatigued at the time of conception, their child is born fatigued. Never should a child be begotten in darkness; the light of the sun at the time and a full view of each other by the parents are necessary to the perfection of the child. Men should go to the beasts and learn wisdom.

Sexual cohabitation without love has the ruinous effects of masturbation, although in a less degree. It exhausts the system without satisfying the mind. When people are obliged to live on food they don’t like, they never feel satisfied and don’t know when to leave off in eating. They are more apt to eat too much than when they have food that suits them. Intemperance is more likely without love than with it. If promiscuity is cohabitation with or without love indifferently it is condemned by free love, because free love is love always. No wonder that the people are old at seventy years, and so many die in childhood. It is according to Nature that people shall live four or five times as long as it takes them to grow, which would extend human life to about the age of one hundred and twenty-five years. If they were born right and always lived right, they would undoubtedly reach that age in health. In that case nobody would die in childhood and there would be no orphans.

The fools that make the laws have made one to punish for indecent exposure of the person. If nature produces anything indecent, then of course she is guilty of obscenity; if she does not then the authors of that law are guilty of libel upon her. The custom of exposing the whole person, each sex to the other, is not only modest and decent, but is necessary to morality. It s the intention of nature and a proof of her wisdom, that men and women shall see each other naked. Concealment causes morbid contemplation and curiosity which stimulates passion. People have a propensity to find what is hidden. Freedom of bodily exposure causes indifference; undoubtedly if it was the custom to go naked, there would be less of lust and less of sexual cohabitation than there is now. If Nature produces anything that ought to be consealed she is not much of a workman.

ELIPHALET KIMBALL.

OXFORD, New Hampshire.

Josiah Warren and the I. W. A. - Documents

2007-06-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

"The International," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly," 6, 5 (July 5, 1873), 3.

THE INTERNATIONAL.

The meeting of the American Federal Council on Sunday was well attended, and a vacancy was filled by the election of Thomas Lalor.

The following communication was received from Section 23 (American) in Philadelphia, Pa.:

At a meeting of Section No. 26, I. W. A., of Philadelphia, held June 16, 183, was passed the following, by a unanimous vote, as declaratory of the views of the members of the Section touching the question of the fundamental basis of the body, and recommending their consideration to the Internationals everywhere; and in answer to the request of the American Federation, that we consider and act upon certain propositions submitted by the Corresponding Secretary of said body.

Declaration.—lst. That no movement can be permanently successful among progressive minds which stops short of a full and complete recognition of the entire liberty of the individual, so long as the action coming from such liberty trespasses upon neither the person or property of another.

2d. That the voluntary union and co-operation of the units of working bodies is the only sure and unobjectionable mode of attaining practical success, in the effort to establish the rightful position of the labor interest in the world, and thereby to secure the supremacy of production over capital.

3d. That the delegation of individual rights to men to perform other than assigned duties as agents is the fatal error from which has arisen all the tyranny of government, class-rule, and the subjugation of man the world over.

4th. That the practical observance of these principles is a sure guarantee against any and all internal dissentions, which more than all else have embarrassed the progressive movement of the age, and especially the organized bodies of workers in their efforts at emancipation.

5th. Earnestly hoping that for the future the industrial armies of the earth may move on the basis of inalienable right, and that we may practice that justice to each other we seek to establish everywhere, to the end that despotism under every name and in every climate may be extinguished, and that Liberty, Order, Justice and Truth may be enthroned in every heart, and gain a practical expression in all human relations, Section No. 26 most fraternally recommends the above as a basis of unity, which, while preserving the liberty of the individual, must tend to an efficient consolidation of the working bodies, and make us an irresistible power against all who seek the continuation of the enslavement.

Jesse B. Beune, President.

John Mills, Recording Secretary.

Isaac Rehn, Corres. Secretary.

By and with the advice of the members.

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Josiah Warren, [letter], Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly," 6, 7 (July 19, 1873), 13.

To Jesse B. Beune, John Mills, Isaac Rehn and other Members of Section 26, I. W. A. opf Philadelphia:

Ladies and Gentlemen—After having seen the decided defeat of every kind of organization which subordinates some persons to other persons through the interpretation of verbal formulas, I have for forty-five years persistently refrained from joining any organization whatever; but having just read your wise, simple and deep-reaching programme, I see that it is exempt from this fatal defect, and I wish to express my hearty sympathy with you and my readiness and desire to work with you according to my best judgment.

I should rather prefer to see the words after the word "world" (in your 2d article or section) omitted, as I don’t think that, you wish, any more than I do, to have it understood that we aim at subordinating capital to labor any more than we do the enslaving of labor by capital.

I should also be glad to see the word reputation inserted after the word “property” in the first section of our Declaration.

One other little item. Your programme, in my view, is entirely superior to that which has heretofore borne the same name, I should think a change of name almost a necessity.

With much sympathy and respect, yours,

Josiah Warren,

Princeton. Mass.

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Josiah Warren, [letter], Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly," 6, 10 (August 9, 1873), 3.

To Section No. 26 (American) of I. W. A. of Philadelphia:

Gentlemen—When I expressed my hearty concurrence in your views, I had in contemplation only what I had just read in the Weekly of July 5, particularly the 1st and 3d sections of your programme there announced; but by documents since received, I perceive that you propose measures and modes which, I regret to say, I cannot approve, and feel impelled to withdraw from connection with them.

Respectfully,

Josiah Warren.

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J. T., "Josiah Warren's Mistake," Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly," 6, 11 (August 16, 1873), 15. [probably by Joseph Treat]

JOSIAH WARREN’S MISTAKE.

Many of as have thought, for over twenty years, that friend Warren was running Individualism into the ground. We were only surprised that he lately gave in his adhesion to the International of Philadelphia, and now we are not surprised that he recants that act. He makes the mistake of supposing that it is against individualism to work with others. But I doubt that he is as individual as I, for I differ from all the Doctors, all the Scientists, supersede Universal Gravitation, have no Religion, no Conscience, believe in no Duty, but only in nature and pleasure, know there is no God nor Immortality, am satisfied and glad to go out, and can not love any one (much) who is not, thus all my life departing from, departed from,

Lone and lonely, all alone,

even till I have to pray, Let me go to the Future, Oh! let me go home: they will greet me there as their own, and I shall then be with the many and the strong!—and yet I am a Communist, an Absolute Communist, and know that Josiah Warren can never begin to be so Individual, standing alone, as be could and would be if he were member of a Community, for then, what every other one owned would be his, to enjoy, to use, to be greatened and Individualized by— the same piano which no man could purchase alone, would serve and satisfy twenty, as if each owned it exclusively. But even if friend Warren could own all things, standing apart, yet being himself in solitude, with nobody to act upon him, would be no Individualism at all, compared with being himself in Community, with everybody to act upon him— which is like a flash of lightning! I am a Communist to achieve that intense individualism.

J. T.