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Of Villon and Shakespeare and Burns and Ibsen? Has their self expression been ugly and destructive to the ideals of Right and Beauty? No, the world is only poorer when men deny to it the infinite variety which individuality can give. Anarchism has found this out. It can introduce you to yourself. Then you can introduce yourself to the world. For not until you find your right relation to yourself can you find your right relation to Society.

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ANARCHISM-LIMITED

BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

LMOST I could be an Anarchist but

A society woman of St. Louis, one of the advanced kind, met a young man of reactionary tendencies at a meeting of the Artists' Guild.

"What do you think of free love?" she inquired archly. "I've never had any yet," he replied.

We have never had any free anything yet. Whatever we get we have to pay for. We must work for it, fight for it, or steal it.

So I don't see much chance for the operation of the law of equal freedom in this rough old world. That, however, doesn't prevent our striving for it.

I think that theoretically Anarchism is an unassailable ideal-so long as it is left in the realm of the ideal. At heart most of us are Anarchists-for ourselves. But not for other people. It is they we want to keep bound, while we would be free. This is a manifestation of individualism more universal than any other in society.

Most of us want to break over the conventions when it suits our mood or passion. But we don't want to pay the price. We are not ready to tolerate those who break over the conventions to which we still hold. There would be no trouble at all in bringing in the Anarchist règime, if only we were willing to accept the consequences of our conduct. But we are not so willing. We break the social contract in one part and when we suffer from the action we appeal to another part of the social contract for protection. And we won't let the other fellow kick over the traces when he will-we clamor for his punish

ment, even while we protest against our own. We people who think we are unconventional simply want to have our cake and eat it too; and that can't be.

So that we find those who say there are no rights not created by the community, protesting that they won't accept any communal rule when that rule puts any limitation upon rights. Yet the mere fact of the community creating rights implies that rights have necessary limitations, while the mere fact that an individual aspires to be free implies that he must resent those limitations. The assertion that my rights are bounded by the rights of others means nothing, if I don't think the boundaries wide and broad enough. It seems to me that voluntary association can never master or surmount this difficulty; that without coercion the individual can not be kept in voluntary association for any length of time.

I confess to experiencing a thrill when I sit under the spell of Emma Goldman's eloquence, every time she comes to my town. She quite wafts me away to her delectable Arcadia or Utopia, while she's present, but after she's gone, I find myself, as the saying goes, "bumping the bumps." This, though, I always hold of her, after she has gone, that if all those who are tentatively Anarchists, would pay the price as Emma pays it, or Berkman, or Reitman, or as Voltarine de Cleyre paid it, the ideal of Anarchism would come very close to realization in this world.

There isn't any law for the person who will not appeal to law, for the person who will live his or her life resolutely according to the spirit within them, and ask no odds of those who want to enforce their ideas upon others. And the world loves those who do this. The world loves a rebel even while it persecutes or executes that rebel. But the world has no use for a rebel who whines and whimpers when the world's laws inflict pain upon him. What would not Anarchism be if all socalled Anarchists had the consistency of John Brown or Wendell Phillips? The individual a l'outrance is invincible.

The individualist who seizes the machinery of law and uses it to his aggrandizment has honor-as we see in Napoleon or in Kaiser Wilhelm. The individual who

recognizes no law but that of his own being but refrains from applying the law of his being to other beings may come in time unto his own, but of course that law of his being must be a law of love and not of hate. Can such a thing be? Why not? All true lovers of their kind have been Anarchists, law smashers, overturners of conventions, shatterers of institutions-so far as they went. You can not name a man or woman who has done anything liberative for the race who has not been, to the extent of his agitation and achievement, dignified with the title Anarchist. And though Bakunin condemns sacrifice, none of these Anarchists I have in mind have achieved anything save by self-sacrifice.

Institutions are but experiments. They may be founded on high hope and faith in good, but they finally fail. And they fail because they are institutions, because they stand still while man goes on, because they harden while life is fluid, because they are halts at apparent finality, while there is no finality in the life of the race. Man outgrows every institution to the extent that man grows. The path of progress is strewn with the wrecks and ruins of institutions. And how many men and women have been slain in the work of wrecking them when their ineffectiveness became known!

I do not doubt that the State idol will in time be overthrown as the church idol has been. Civilization is nothing if it is not the devolpment of the individual, his emancipation from repression and oppression. As man knows more, and forgets more of his knowledge of things that are not so, he must come to be a law unto himself. "My mind to me a kingdom is." I have no doubt that even the institution of marriage will be progressively modified until there shall be no reproach in the phrase "free love." I can conceive of love being free of the thousand and one coercions that make it anything but love. A love utterly free would be a love that would be tolerant, that would not be jealous or suspicious, that would not subordinate the woman to the man, that would require nor oaths nor pledges nor pains nor penalties, that would keep faith and maintain mutual confidence. If to-day a woman might honorably seek the man she cared for, instead of waiting to be sought and

often waiting in vain, we should have, in my opinion, a saner social organism. That the world is ready for free love would be undeniable but for the fact that there are not enough people who conceive of love in terms other than those of possession, involving potential tyranny, but I am convinced that there are many marriages in which the ideal of free love is realized, except in the minor particular of the existence of mutual pledges. I know of unions in which the individuals thereto retain all their individuality and with no failure of love. For, theoretically, society itself asserts that the marriage is in the love and not in the ritual solemnization of the wedding pact. Society said not always so; but society says so to-day, because individuals know it is so.

The State is still a mighty idol with many, but the State totters. With us some are clamoring for more State, but what they want is more responsiveness of the State to the individual conviction or will. The tendency to communalize property is unmistakable, but while in the proposed communalization there is a strong tendency to a synchronous institutionalization of property, this tendency is not overlooked by the discerning and it grows ever clearer that State regulation and control carries an implication of tyranny. Now the great corporations complain of this tyranny and now organized labor feels its heavy hand.

Meanwhile education is developing the individualism that is not selfishness, but considers the other fellow, and the solidification of society under the influence of the cunning and the strong is offset by a growing fissiparative tendency which so far as concerns property is distinctly distributive in its logic.

I can see tendencies to Anarchism all about me. Of course, I don't mean Anarchism of the dime-novel sort, a revel of murder and lust and destructiveness. What I mean is the pushing to a further application of the Jeffersonian doctrine "That people governed least is governed best." About as far as I go for Anarchy is in recognition that as to property there may still be your property, but that there is a widening class of property that is recognized as our property. And our property we will increasingly take because we as a society make it,

while your property and my property is that each of us produces for himself and is his to do with as he will without interference by the State. If each can get what he produces, and all have the benefit of all they produce, there must be decreasing need for the State. There must be freer play, more opportunity for the individual and in that larger liberty there must be an enlargement of men from the thralldom of that everlasting concern to get a living by tooth and claw, by hook or crook that is the cause and excuse for the "reign of law." The freer man can be made from the dread of property the less need there be for laws of all kinds.

Now, of course, this isn't as far as Honest Little Emma would have us go with her. She is very far ahead of this, but we can not all have her vision of and her faith in the perfectability of the race in a short time. But she follows the gleam; she keeps the faith. And in MOTHER EARTH she proclaims a gospel beautiful, even if, to some, it be an impossible beauty. Her's is "consecration and the poet's dream." "What!" says some one, "a poet's dream of violence?" But think! Look abroad! See the State in "sublime action" by Aisne, Rhine and Vistula; is that not violence in excelsis, and do we not call it "glory"? Has it not been written that "violent delights hath ever violent ends"?-and besides I have read much and heard much of Honest Little Emma and have yet to find her counseling violence, but always damning the violence of the State.

A great part of the intelligence of the world is with her just now. A greater part of the greater intelligence of the world will be with her in her further propaganda for the ultimate of individual liberty before MOTHER Earth shall celebrate its silver jubilee, the which Emma may be here to see.

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IMPRESSIONS OF MOTHER EARTH

BY BERTHA FISKE.

distinctly remember reading my first number of MOTHER EARTH. It was a warm spring day in Los Angeles, just two years ago this month. I came into

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