Agree with him or not, like him or not, one has to feel him human.

As for numerical propaganda, I doubt if the actual number of avowed Anarchists has very greatly increased. They are not standing up to be counted, but the increase of Anarchistic thought which does not bear the title is enormous. It is in this that the strength of the movement consists, in this undercurrent that is sweeping inevitably toward freedom. Insensibly, even while holding to the letter of outworn tenets and outgrown usages, men and women are inclining more and more toward liberty, and this inner transformation, this change in the feelings of the people, is the Social Revolution.

A liberty-loving people cannot be enslaved. A despotically-minded people cannot be freed. The instinctive feelings, the habits of thought of the peoples do not change catastrophically, are not to be changed by political overturnings. Spasmodic upheavals change nothing but temporary local situations. Haste, repenting itself, too often sinks into deeper lethargy. Violence provokes violence, begetting a train of petty hatreds, stultifying love from which alone springs growth. Dynamite proves nothing, creates nothing but fear which is never constructive. The dynamiter, whatever his ideals, his motives, becomes temporarily but an instrument of destruction, checking development, his own and all within his influence. Dynamite is but the stiletto thrust of Impatience, never the ocean sweep of Power. A libertyloving people needs no dynamite, nor can dynamite profit a people who love not liberty. From the futilities of dynamite may you be freed, Ŏ MOTHER Earth!

Likewise from that other petty obstruction, the personal animosity. Often, when receiving your monthly visits, have I longed to gather up all princes and potentates and tyrants, all money-kings and capitalists and exploiters whatsoever, and presenting them to you, announce in tones that must be heard "These, too, are men!" Intelligent, courageous, large-hearted men, many of them; as are peasants, laborers, agitators, many of them. Calloused and distorted and rotten altogether? Yes, many of them. So are the proletariat, many of them; likewise their advocates, some of them. And from the

And

same cause. From the same cause! Your struggle, O MOTHER EARTH, is with the cause of misery, not with its victims; your battle is against institutions, against superstitions, not against their deluded victims. these anti-social institutions, these baleful superstitions, that must be up-rooted and annihilated lest they throttle human progress-where are they? In the instinctive feelings and the habits of thought of their victims, the people, all the people. Be not deceived, O MOTHER EARTH, when you are awakening the love of liberty you are not merely "preparing the way for the Social Revolution," you are conducting the Social Revolution. When these inimical institutions are fully undermined in the minds of the people, they will fall of their own rottenness. Until that time, though you could dynamite kings, capitols, bourses, monopolies, corporations, out of existence, yet would tyrannies, exploitations, miseries rise again, since their roots would remain. More than this, the Social Revolution is not catastrophic but cumulative. It is a movement which gathers speed and momentum as it goes, unless checked and thwarted by premature upheavals.

Here is where we part company, MOTHER EARTH! Your Anarchism is stressed in its political value, mine in its psychological necessity. This value you also discern, but you clothe it with a material structure. Seeing the soul, you dream of a body incorporating it. You would institutionalize Anarchism, but an ideal cannot be institutionalized. Once imprisoned in form, it dies, and decay sets in.

Your dream is not my dream. Anarchism to me is a dynamic social factor, not a political expedient. I do not foresee the State overthrown and Anarchism established. Any violent overthrow of the State is but temporary. The State is an historic economic development which bears within itself the elements of its own metamorphosis. I foresee the State becoming a Fellowship approximating a pure democracy. I doubt if government can ever utterly be abolished. Purely Anarchistic groups there will doubtless be, and some of them will be successful; but the span of human life on the planet is limited. I doubt it can endure long enough to make Anarchists

of the entire human race, certainly not Anarchists capable of living harmoniously together. Nations will persist, but woe betide the nation which has no Anarchist movement! Such a nation would dry rot and be cast out from the World-Fellowship; or it would petrify and be fit only for a Museum of Horrors. A pure democracy vitalized by an Anarchistic ideal-this is my vision of the future. This is why I love you, MOTHER EARTH. Though your dream is not as my dream, you are doing my work. You are awakening the soul of humanity. You are spurring it on to that future which neither you nor I can see. And though we vision it otherwise, here are my congratulations for the work you are doing, and my heartfelt thanks.

And among the good wishes I would shower upon your birthday, I am "wishing on you" two things: more literary support from freedom lovers everywhere; and a better perspective, a broader view of existing conditions and a less doctrinaire interpretation of them; especially a keener appreciation of the trend of things in this country, and of the services to progress of some whose work is great, even though they may not see its full import.

I

Last, and heartiest of all, Roadway and Good Speed! * * *

THE TWO EXTREMES

BY THEODORE SCHROEDER

AM always glad to receive and read MOTHER EARTH, not because it is more judicious, more wise, or more true than other partisan journals, but because it is essential to the correction of my own perspective. In its pages I get glimpses of life and activity, of an intense urge for unusual ideals, founded upon unusual observation. One can not have even an approximation to a decent understanding of our social evolution who ignores the forces which find expression in MOTHER EARTH.

Here I see portrayed one extreme in the differentiation of individuals from the mass. In Mr. Rockefeller I see the embodiment of the other extreme. In all nature the extreme of "differentiation leads up, as its

inevitable conclusion, to death." So here in the extremes of differentiation, as exemplified by the Rockefellers and the Goldmans, I see the death struggle of ideals, with the great commonplace crowd evolving to the place of lawmaker, judge, jury and executioner.

Now the blind emotions of the crowd are oftenest turned against the Goldmans, but at other times, as in the French Revolution, it turns upon its Rockefellers.

In these extremes of differentiation I also see an exemplification of that other natural law, which appears to evolve the meeting and unity of extreme opposites. The partisans of Mr. Rockefeller and of Miss Goldman tend to unite in living above the law-in acting on the more or less conscious assumption that might is and ought to be the only arbiter of the ethical right. The godhood omnipotence of pharisaical opulence always involves, at least unconscientiously, the Anarchist philosophy and produces its more conscious manifestations among the victims.

No person can adequately understand our civilization or its products who has not first acquired a sympathetic understanding of the genesis and objects of the movement which finds a voice throughout MoTHER EARTH. The Rockefellers and the Goldmans are alike the symptoms of our social disorders. The Rockefeller symptom secures more sympathetic study than it deserves, and the Goldman symptom deserves more sympathetic understanding than it gets. Both should be equally studied and understood.

I welcome MOTHER EARTH as an important, and I might say indispensible, material for those who have outgrown the infantile aversion to shock and really desire to understand the social forces which some day may join in a "finish fight" in the process of reshaping our slow but ever changing institutions.

I

MY DEBT TO ANARCHISM

BY SARA BARD FIELD

owe a singular and supreme debt to Anarchism. It was the active agent in introducing me to my Friend, my own Soul. We had been strangers up to that time. There had been periods when I was not aware I

had a soul, or, having one, I believed it had been given to me to shatter into bits and to deal out the pieces in continuous self sacrifice.

This idea was the result of Christian teaching. "Ye are not your own," Christianity had said to me. Back to this black lie Anarchism shouted "You are first and foremost and forever your own."

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me" the manmade God of the Christian Religion had said. Anarchism answered: "Thou shalt have no other god before Self."

To the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," Anarchism replied, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor by loving thyself."

In attempting to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's" there had been nothing left of Life's gift for self-development. Anarchism tore the veil of this sanctified hypocrisy and said: "Render unto Self that which is its own-your soul."

He who calls such deification of individuality ugly and destructive selfishness, denies that Nature's method of differentiation has been of benefit to growth. Society has need of differentiation of human beings, as Nature has of differentiation of species. The greatest gift a man or woman gives to the world is his peculiar selfhood in all its variation from his neighbor's.

We should be ill-pleased with the rose in our garden if it so spent its color, fragrance and form upon a bed of violets that it lost the very semblance of its own being and became itself a violet. We would raise an angry protest if it were suggested that the bandit Villon, the conjugally unfaithful Shakespeare, and the love-roaming Burns had foregone the expression of their natures in those experiences which to-day are enriching the world. of poetry, and had remained at home respectable, orthodox citizens and irreproachable family men.

We should breathe anathema on the memory of Ibsen had he refused to leave his country and family because of their claims of obligation, and never have unfolded his soul in the dramas which have "moved man's search to vaster issues."

Is the world poorer for the "selfishness" of the rose?