Page:Anarchism- Its Aims and Methods (Yarros, 1887).pdf/12

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

11

police becomes necessary. Should the State be wiped out, with all its inequalities and inequities, very little motive for crime would be left. Our industrial civilization, with its two concomitants,—unconscious, automatic coöperation and conscious, voluntary association for various purposes, is powerfully conducive to mutual respect and defence. And no penalty for wrong-doing would be more dreaded or more effective than a temporary or permanent exclusion of the offender from the social benefits. The principles of the State are the principles, and its methods and tactics are the methods and tactics, of war. Just as peaceful industrial pursuits and the application of autonomous principles are incompatible with continuous warfare, or rigorous vigilance and preparation for war, so the existence of the State and its pernicious activities cripple the body social and extinguish the spontaneous spirit animating it.

Perhaps the distinction between the indirect influence of the principles of Society and the direct compulsion of the brutal State will be more firmly grasped when the effects of the application of both methods of regulation on a particular instance are studied and contrasted. Stephen Pearl Andrews uses this luminous illustration:

The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the cultured classes there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed according to attraction. They are continually broken up, and re-formed, through the operation of the same subtle and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades all classes, and the most perfect harmony ever yet attained in complex human relations prevails… If there are