asserts its authority in any manner or form, that is government.

If every institution, including government, were abolished
to-morrow, the percentage of births that would turn out blind,
crippled, and feeble both mentally and physically, wayward,
eccentric, and insane would continue practically the same, and the
community would be obliged to provide institutions for these
unfortunates, the community would be obliged to patrol the streets
for them, the community would be obliged to pass upon their
condition and support or restrain them; in short, the abolished
institutions--including tribunals of some kind, police, prisons,
asylums--would be promptly restored.

The anarchist would argue that all this may be done by voluntary
association and without compulsion; but the man arrested, or
confined in the insane asylum against his will, would be of a
contrary opinion. The debate might involve his friends and
sympathizers until in every close case--as now--the community
would be divided in hostile camps, one side urging release of the
accused, the other urging his detention. Who is to hold the scale
and decide?

The fundamental error of anarchists, and of most theorists who
discuss "government" and "the state," lies in the tacit assumption
that "government" and "the state" are entities to be dealt with
quite apart from the individual; that both may be modified or
abolished by laws or resolutions to that effect.

If anything is clearly demonstrated as true, it is that both
"government" and "the state" have been evolved out of our own
necessities; neither was imposed from without, but both have been
evolved from within; both are forms of co-operation. For the time
being the "state" and "government," as well as the "church" and
all human institutions, may be modified or seemingly abolished,
but they come back to serve essentially the same purpose. The
French Revolution was an organized attempt to overturn the
foundations of society and hasten progress by moving the hands of
the clock forward a few centuries,--the net result was a despotism
the like of which the world has not known since the days of Rome.

Anarchy as a system is a bubble, the iridescent hues of which
attract, but which vanish into thin air on the slightest contact
with reality; it is the perpetual motion of sociology; the fourth
dimension of economies; the squaring of the political circle.

The apostles of anarchy are a queer lot,--Godwin in England,
Pro