tated to point out those of its features to which he cannot award approval. Besides giving liberal extracts from the first number, duly credited, he devotes nearly a column and a half to a review of its merits and demerits, which is hearty in its commendation and frank in its criticism. Barring the use in one sentence of the word "hypocritical," his article is free from those abusive epithets of which he has heretofore made me a target. With this preface of thanks for both his praise and his censure, I propose to briefly examine the latter in the same spirit in which it is offered.
Herr Host's opinion of Libertas may be thus summed up,—that it is thoroughly sound in its antagonism to the State and utterly unsound in its championship of private property. Whether Libertas champions private property depends entirely on the definition given to that term. Defining it with Proudhon as the sum total of legal privileges bestowed upon the holders of wealth, Libertas agrees with Proudhon that property is robbery. But using the word in the commoner acceptation, as denoting the laborer's individual possession of his product or of his proportional share of the joint product of himself and others, Libertas holds that property is liberty. And whenever Proudhon, for the time being, uses the word in the latter sense, he too upholds property. But it is precisely in this sense of individual as opposed to communistic possession that Herr Most opposes property. Hence, when he prints as a motto (as he often does) Proudhon's phrase "Property is robbery," he virtually misrepresents that author by using his words as if they were intended to mean diametrically the opposite of what the author himself declared them to mean. If property, in the sense of individual possession, is liberty, then he who opposes property necessarily upholds authority—that is, the State—in some form or other, and he who would deny both the State and property at once becomes thereby inconsistent and guilty of attempting the impossible.
The principal argument used by Herr Most against Libertas is that it ignores the necessity of production on the large scale now and hereafter,—a necessity which, in Herr Host's view, involves the exploitation of labor by capital wherever private property prevails. There is no foundation for this statement. Libertas does not for a moment deny or ignore the necessity of production on the large scale. It does, however, seriously question the claim that such production must always involve large concentration of capital, and emphatically denies that it necessarily involves labor's exploitation unless private property is abolished. As I have already said in these columns, "the
