against the feelings of equality of most of us; and how it brings the would-be "Individualists" dangerously near to those who imagine themselves to represent a "superior breed"—those to whom we owe the State, the Church, modern legislation, the police, militarism, Imperialism, and all other forms of oppression.
The other branch of Individualist Anarchists comprises the Mutualists, in the sense of Proudhon, of whom we spoke in a previous chapter, and whose ideas, we have seen, have had a certain success in the United States, so that there are still organisations of farmers who exchange their produce on the principle of the hour-for-an-hour cheques. However, there will always be against this system the objection that it could hardly be compatible with a system of common ownership of land and the necessaries for production. Communism in the possession of land, factories, etc., and Individualism in production are too contradictory to co-exist in the same society—to say nothing of the difficulty of estimating the market value, or the selling value, of a product by the average time that is necessary, or the time that was actually used, in producing it. To bring men to agree upon such an estimation of their work would already require a deep penetration of the Communist principle into their ideas—at least, for all produce of first necessity. And if a community introduced, as a further concession to Individualism, a higher payment for skilled work, or chances of promotion in a hierarchy of functionaries, this would reintroduce all those inconveniences of the present Wage System which are combatted now by the workers.
To some extent the same remark applies to the American Anarchist Individualists who were represented in the "fifties" by S. P. Andrews and W. Greene, later on by Lysander Spooner, and now are represented by Benjamin Tucker, the well-known editor of the New York Liberty. Their ideas are partly those of Proudhon, but partly also those of Herbert Spencer. They start from the principle that the only law which is obligatory for the Anarchist is to mind his own business, and not to meddle with that of others; that each individual and each group have the right, to oppress all mankind—if they have the force to do so; and that if this only law, of minding one’s own business, had received a general and complete application, it would offer no danger, because the rights of each individual would have been limited by the equal rights of all others.
But, to reason in this way is to pay, in our opinion, too large a tribute to metaphysical dialectics, and to ignore the
