This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
METHODS.
419

axiomatic for demonstration. In the absence of such disbelief the existing State might be destroyed by the blindly rebellious or might fall through its own rottenness, but another would at once arise in its stead. Why should it not, how could it be otherwise, when all believe in the necessity of the State? Now, it is to create this measure and weight of disbelief that the "Theoretical Anarchist" is working. He is not trying, like the religionist, to convert the whole world to his way of thinking by a never-ending series of individual conversions, or, like the politician, Prohibitionist, and Socialist, to get a majority upon his side, or yet, like the Co-operator (whom I am surprised to see cited as "theoretical"), to retire from the busy world to build a play-house in the wilderness; he is simply addressing himself to such persons as are amenable to reason to the end that these may unite and here and now enter upon the work of laying the foundations of Liberty, knowing that, these foundations once laid, the structure must rise upon them, the work of all men's hands, as a matter of economic necessity. This is a work that must be done sooner or later, and the sooner the better. If, as Mr. Lum conceives, the destruction of the existing State by force is inevitable, no fact more than this should incite the "Theoretical Anarchist" to immediately concentrate all his energies upon the work which he has laid out. If ruin is to confront us so soon and surely, all the greater need of seeing to it that Liberty, and not Authority, shall be the architect of the succeeding social structure. If Mr. Lum and his friends, the Communists of Chicago (whose characterization as "brutal" Mr. Lum in the past, when less anxious to score a point against me, has carefully and correctly attributed to "X" instead of to Liberty), had devoted one half the energy to this "theoretical" work that they have expended in preaching the gospel of dynamite and proclaiming "the logic of events," not only would none of them "now be lying under the shadow of the gallows" (the desirability of which position I do not perceive as clearly as Mr. Lum), but very likely there would now be enough "Theoretical Anarchists" to begin some work similar to that which C. T. Fowler is outlining in his luminous Sun. If Mr. Lum can demonstrate the impossibility of creating such a force as this, he will not only knock the bottom out of "Theoretical Anarchism," but he will reduce every species of Socialism to a Utopian dream. But until he can, it will be futile for him to fight "Theoretical Anarchism" with analogies based on such impossibilities as the recruiting of men eighteen feet high. The two methods must be proved equally impossible before