all its domains (social, moral, intellectual, economic, etc.). One must expect that the first crisis will leave them bewildered and ready to give up.

The free man says to himself: "No duty binds me to my fellowman or to my world that oppresses and exploits me, or maintains or contributes to that which oppresses and exploits me. Nothing more will I give to the man or the world that I despise. I do not give him or them any right to my person, my life or my production. Neither do I recognize that I have any right over the person, the life or the production of another. I reject all imposed solidarity, all forced fraternity, all coerced equality. I do not accept any association, except that which I freely choose and freely consent to, and reserve the right to break it off whenever I feel it may injure me." On the above must rest the existence of all enemies of authority. It is the raison d'etre of their existence. It would be on this basis that theory and practice would really be efficacious, and this is how we must carry our anti-authoritarian propaganda to those who are interested.

Life is never a conserved phenomenon. It comprises, on the contrary, many phenomena essentially destructive. It is negation itself of fixity, it is a continuous selection, an incessant wear and tear. Everything annihilates and consumes itself. That is why a rebellion accomplished by individuals, without much idea of social reconstruction, comes much nearer being a vital action, it seems to me, than a revolution made by allied conspirators, of an organization with a well defined theory of communal happiness. The latter is altogether conservative; a governmental conception that must impose itself even on those who have no desire for communal happiness. This conception has nothing anti-authoritarian in it.

I am convinced that that only logical attitude that the enemy of authority and exploitation can adopt-practiced by one like the other-is an attitude of resistance, of objection and of opposition to all that threatens him— environment, institutions, individuals-that limit his development, and crush his personality. I think it is because the communist, revolutionist, or individualist propaganda neglected to insist on this essential attitude that we are the witnesses of the great debacle which is saddening all of us.

I

AN INSPIRATION

BY MARGARET C. ANDERSON.

have known MOTHER EARTH only for a year; therefore I can't write of its struggle and achievements with authority. But I can imagine them profoundly. And I have known Emma Goldman for about half that time, and I can imagine the struggle and the achievement and the genius of her life profoundly. And since Emma Goldman is MOTHER EARTH I want to pay all my tribute, on this anniversary occasion, to her.

Sometimes it seems incredible to me, not that we fail to recognize greatness of spirit, but that it is ever recognized among us. We have gone so far from the age of great feeling that it really would be amazing to find a soul like Emma Goldman understood by even half the people among whom she lives. If anything Hellenic still lingered upon us we should probably have festivals in honor of these rare mighty people, their lives would be attended by some special worship in the fine Greek manner-festivals to the Earth Spirit, the Mother Spirit! The peculiar appropriateness of that name MOTHER EARTH for Emma Goldman's magazine is a thing to rejoice over. Because you feel in her what people must have felt in Goethe-that sense of being included in the cosmic secrets of nature. There are spirits who can be described in exquisite images of stars, trees, rivers, hills. There are others for whom you need bigger conceptionsearth, sky, sea. But for Emma Goldman you must reduce to the largest concepts-you can only say land, water, air. In this way MOTHER EARTH, as a name, has a significance, an appropriateness, quite beyond what its founder imagined when she chose it.

I have an instinct that Miss Goldman and I will sometime have a long and heated argument about this matter of form. She believes that it is of second importance; I think it is first. And I shall be able to refute her very cleverly by applying my theory to her life.

The great thing about her life is that it has been lived in "the great style." I mean this in the way John Cowper Powys uses the phrase in his incomparable lectures on literature; and I shall have to quote him as he applies the spirit of "the grand style" to living. He says:

"When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can speak, if they will, in 'the great style.' When a man or woman argues' or 'explains' or 'moralizes' or 'preaches,' they are the victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and return to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defiance of 'the something rotten in Denmark,' move us more, and assume a grander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly more practical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature! The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and pleads. It utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and strike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in them, and our heart listens and is silent. To 'do good scientific thinking' in the cause of humanity has its well-earned reward; but the gods 'throw incense' on a different temper. The 'fine issues' that reach them, in their remoteness and disdain, are the 'fine issues' of an antagonist worthy of their own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift love."

This is the quality of Emma Goldman's life and work This is the temper of Alexander Berkman's spirit. This is the essence of MOTHER EARTH. This is why Anarchism remains the only philosophy possible to the artist or the man. This is why we cannot use little words like "magnificent" or "tremendous" or "marvelous" or "glorious" to describe the work of these great people; we can only use big words like "grand." If MOTHER EARTH had done nothing but publish Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist it would have done more for the cause of humanity than any other magazine published in this country has ever done. And think of its ten years of activity in the greatest of all work: the re-creation of human beings, the awakening of sleeping souls, the introduction of transvaluations in human ideals. May all the gods bless MOTHER EARTH, its wonderful creator, and its whole brave company!

C

GOVERNMENTALISM

MOTHER EARTH Stands for a Good Hope
BY BOLTON HALL.

ONTRARY to the general impression there is less interference with personal liberty by government than ever before.

We hear a great deal about the increasing State regulation of industry. This supposed tendency was a trouble to Mr. Herbert Spencer. Investigation shows, however, that no such drift exists: the current seems rather to be setting the other way. What looks like such a tendency in legislation is simply an attempt to meet new conditions by a partial application of old specfics. It is not necessary to examine our American legislation in detail, as a few words on Spencer's essays on The New Toryism and The Coming Slavery will illustrate the point. Spencer refers with grief to fifteen English acts passed from 1860 to 1864. These were two extensions of the Factories Act to include certain trades, acts regulating prices of gas, truancy, two for vaccination, hire of public conveyances, drainage, employment of women in coal mines, authorized pharmacopoeia, two for local improvement in bake-houses, and inspection of food. These are fair types of "socialistic" legislation here and everywhere else.

All these, except those for the hire of conveyances, employment of women, for coal mines, bake-houses, and inspection of food, are applicable to conditions that were not dreamed of a hundred years ago; and even these five appear to have become serious only on account of the nineteenth-century crowding of cities and growth of factory life.

From 1880 to 1883 Spencer finds eleven "socialist" acts of Parliament. They are for regulating advance notes on sailors' wages, for the safety of ships, compulsory education, excise, trade reports, electricity, public baths, lodgings, cheap trains, payment of wages, and further inspection of bake-houses. We have all of these here.

Now compare these, one by one (to take our samples from incidental references in the same essays), with the press gang law, which, up to the middle of last century, enslaved the sailor; with the fifteenth century law which

prohibited captains from setting out in the winter; with the law of "benefit of clergy," which exempted from hanging those who could read; laws fixing the price and quality of beer; penalizing the export of gold; with the laws that, up to 1824, forbade building factories more than ten miles from the Royal Exchange; regulated the minimum time for which a journeyman might be retained and the number of sheep a tenant might keep; and, finally, those fixing the maximum wages of laborers and the size and price of the loaf. All these laws, of which the type is the fourteenth-century regime restricting diet as well as dress, aimed, like present laws, to correct what seemed to be abuses. They all passed away, having failed to correct the "abuses."

How unreasonable, then, to pick out a few from thousands of laws to which the State subjects its citizens; and to say that we are advancing in the path of restriction: because, under conditions a hundred times more complicated than those of our ancestors, they restrain personal liberty in various respects or provide for State management.

The fact is that the growing pressure of misery, the growing perception that monopolies are infringements of the rights of the people and that wealth is unnaturally distributed, lead those who see no better remedy, hesitatingly, to apply ancient expedients for the cure of evils either new in themselves or newly perceived.

Experience shows that the more complicated the legal machine becomes, the worse it works.

MOTHER EARTH is the only magazine in this country that steadily maintains that the people, in as far as they are free, automatically regulate things for themselves. Under the stimulus of enlightened self interest and kindliness they get far better results than can be had from regulation by others. It persistently shows that, not the methods of Government, but the thing itself is wrong.