ies. If, instead of building prisons where human life is
entombed, libraries where literature moulds, museums where art becomes
archaic, why not establish centers of education, where spontaneous
expression is encouraged, and where the soul, mind, and hand are
simultaneously developed.

Think of a state where each individual working out from its own
standpoint, truly without hypocrisy, would contribute his quota of
individual life to the life of the whole. Pleasing himself in his work
without fear. Then would come the true democracy, possible only under
just economic conditions, where each has equal opportunity for
self-expression. Then can the higher emotional life develop necessary to
all human growth.

[Illustration]

KRISTOFER HANSTEEN.

By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE.

"OF the earth, unearthly--"

The sentence remained unfinished as I had written it two years and a
half ago when Disease laid its hand on me, and all my MSS. ended in a
dash. It was a description of Kristofer Hansteen, an explanation of his
work in Norway. And now that I am ready to pick up the thread of life
again, I read that he is dead--of the earth no more, he who hardly ever
belonged to it. At this moment the most insistent memory I have of that
delicate, half-aerial personality are the words: "When the doctors told
me that I might perhaps not live longer than spring, I thought: 'If I
die, what will become of Anarchism in Norway?'" He had no other idea of
his meaning in life than this.

Somewhere fluctuant in my memory runs broken music--you have heard
it?--"an ineffectual angel, beating his luminous wings within the
void,"--something like that,--words descriptive of Shelley--they haunt
me whenever I would recall Kristofer Hansteen. Perhaps to those who had
known him in his youth, before his body was consumed like a half-spent
taper, he might have seemed less spirit-like; but when I met him, three
years ago this coming August, his eyes were already burning with
ethereal fires, the pallor of waste was on the high, fine forehead, the
cough racked him constantly, and there was upon the whole being the
unnameable evanescence of the autumn leaf; only--his autumn came in
summer.

The utter incapacity of the man before the common, practical
requirements of life would have been irritating to ordinary individuals.
The getting of a meal or the clothing of the body with reference to the
weather, were things that he thought of vaguely, uncomfortab